Music Discovery Story #1: The Reject Box

[This is the first post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself.  That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.  Even in these modern times most people know what vinyl is, though I’m not sure how many know about the different types.  So this may be review for many, but perhaps some folks will learn something.

The first vinyl records to gain popularity were thick discs roughly the size of a Frisbee,¹ and they were designed to be played while spinning at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute: thus, they were 78rpm records, or, colloquially, just plain 78s.  Of course, they were (probably—I admit I’m not really a scholar on this topic or anything) only called that in retrospect, once someone invented a record that was designed to be played at a different speed.  Which eventually happened, in the form of 33rpm records.  33s were a bit thinner, but, most importantly, they held more songs.  An average 78 could only hold a song or two on each side (vinyl is double-sided, remember), but a 33 can comfortably fit 4 or 5 songs per side.  And thus was born the “album,” a record containing 8 to 10 songs, usually by the same artist, which (in the best cases) all had some connecting thread.

Of course, sometimes you don’t want a whole album.  Somtimes you just want one song.  You know, the hit song off of the album.  So we invented 45s: a much smaller disc which only held one song—well, technically, one song per side.  Typically that would be a hit song from the album on one side, with a lesser known track from the album (what today we might call a “deep cut”) on the other side.  In the jargon of the day, they would be known as the “hit side” and the “flip side,” respectively, and the 45 itself would be referred to as a “single” (despite having two songs on it).

Now, if you’re very young, you might think this is all ancient history.  But I’m old enough to remember owning a record player that played at all 3 speeds: 45, 33, and 78 (and that was, strangely, the order they were usually listed in), although I also remember that the cheaper ones only came in 45 and 33 because the 78s were already considered old tech by that point.  And, in case you think that that just makes me a very old man, I’ll remind you that my father is still alive, and not even in a nursing home or anything.  He’s an older gentelman, sure, well past retirement age, but he’s still young enough to hang around all day enjoying his hobbies.  And one of those hobbies—the main one, really—is collecting records.  Specifically singles.  Of which he currently has not just thousands but tens of thousands.  It would not at all surprise me if he were closing in on 100,000 by this point.

And here’s where the history of vinyl intersects with my own personal history.  Since I was around 10 years old, my family lived in a house that they built: it was originally an empty frame on a piece of land that my grandfather owned ... someone had started to build a house there and never finished.  My dad had a friend who was a contractor, and they made a few minimal changes to the plans and finished the house.  One of those minimal changes was the garage.  It was originally designed to be a two-car garage, although it was awkwardly positioned in relation to the driveway: in order to park your car, you’d have to drive to the end of the drive, then make a hard right turn into the garage and pray you didn’t hit the side of the garage door opening.  My dad said, screw that: just turn the garage door into a wall and we’ll use it as an extra room.  Of course, the concrete garage floor was already poured, and there was no plan for ducts in there, so it was always going to be a room that was a bit too cold in the winter and a bit too hot in the summer, but that was fine.  For the first few years of my life, my dad I shared the space, but eventually all my games and toys got displaced as the record collection grew.  Nowadays there are not only shelves of records covering 3 of the 4 walls, but also some rows of shelves like you see in an old movie, set in a library, where someone pushes one over and they all go down like dominoes.  Plus several turntables, a reel-to-reel recorder or two, a whole bunch of speakers, and a jukebox from the 50s.  At least that’s what it looked like the last time I saw it.

Of course, you may well wonder how someone manages to accumulate that many records.  Well, there are many different ways, but there’s one in particular I want to talk to you about.

When I was a baby, we lived in Franklin, which is a small town just north of the Virginia–North Carolina border and about halfway between the Atlantic and the place where the Tidewater region (the coastal plain) gives way to the Piedmont region (the Appalachian foothills).  And my father worked part-time as a DJ for a small local station.²  Makes sense for a record guy, right?  He knew a lot about music, and about how to spin records, and it was a little extra cash in his pockets.  Now, this station³ was, at the time, a top-40 station (this would be the late 60s, early 70s, I’d say).  When I was a bit older, it decided to transition to being an oldies station, and, at that point, they went back to my father: you used to work here part-time, they said, so we know you, and you’re a record collector, so you know a lot about this oldies stuff: be our program director, make us up some playlists, you can do it in your spare time (we can’t afford to pay you much anyway) and it’ll be a little extra cash in your pocket just like the old days ... whaddaya say?  And my father, shrewd man that he is, says: actually, I don’t need any cash in my pockets just now, because I’ve just started a great new job at the local paper mill.  But you know what I do need?  Records.

Perhaps a brief diversion on how the symbiotic relationship between the record industry and the radio stations used to work is in order.  See, the record companies needed the radio stations to play the songs they wanted to push.  And the radio stations needed not to have pay for a shitload of records: just running the station is expensive enough.  So the record companies would send records to the radio stations—not whole albums, of course: just the singles.  Sometimes the regular singles, and sometimes “promos,” which is what they used to call a single that had the hit side on both sides.  That way, when the radio station wore out the grooves on one side, they could just flip it over and keep right on spinnin’.  Sometimes the promos came in sleeves with clever slogans on them like “when you play it, say it!”—by which the record companies meant, when you play the song on the radio, make sure you tell people who it is so they can go out and buy it and make us rich(er).  Now, this particular radio station in Franklin that we’re talking about was no longer going to be playing top 40 songs ... but the records companies didn’t know that.  Some of them would figure it out pretty quickly, of course, and all of them would figure it out eventually, but in the meantime, they’d still be sending all these records to the station, and the station was never going to use any of them.  Nothing to do but throw ’em away ... or give them to their new program director in lieu of cash.

So now you may be wondering what my dad wanted with all these records.  After all, he was a child of the 50s, and early rock-and-roll was his primary jam.  All this “modern” stuff coming out (at this point in the story, we’ve advanced to the early 80s), he had no clue what it was and no real taste for it.  Well, the thing is, my dad was one of those serial collectors: he had tried collecting coins, and he’d tried collecting stamps, and he’d finally settled on records.  And, in every case, he liked to set himself a goal: one of every stamp the post office released since year X, say, or one of every year of penny (from each different mint) since the invention of the modern penny.  With records, he had settled on a 45 of every song that ever charted on the Billboard Hot 100, since it was first published (which I believe was approximately 1948).  Now, since that chart is published every week, you may be thinking to yourself that this is an impossible number of records.  But of course from one week to another it’s mostly the same songs, so it’s not really 100 every week, 5200 every year ... but it’s still a lot.⁴

Perhaps you can finally see where this story is going.  A pipeline has been established: the record companies press singles for songs that may or may not become hits, they send them to a radio station that has no use for them, who passes them on to my record collector father who has no way whatsoever to know which of them are going to make the charts and which won’t, and so he separates out the few names he recognizes from the ones he has no clue about, and the latter batch ... well, they go into a box that was known around my house (and I can’t remember if this was his name or mine) as the reject box.

I cannot begin to describe how much music I discovered for the first time in the reject box.  That’s where I first found “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads and “Abacab” by Genesis, “The One Thing” by INXS and “She’s a Beauty” by the Tubes.  And that’s just the stuff that you will have heard of ... remember in 80s My Way I when I told you about “Welcome to the Universe” and you probably replied “WTF??” or in Smooth as Whispercats II when I mentioned “One Simple Thing” and you were like “where did that come from?” The reject box: that’s where they came from.  I used to spend hours flipping idly through the reject box, just playing shit for no other reason than the name of the band caught my eye, or the name of the song sounded cool.  Since it was impossible to tell which side was the hit side (unless it was a promo), I might try both sides, just to hear what was going on.  They weren’t all great, of course ... although I of course don’t remember the duds.  Just the successes.  And not just mine: my best friend Mackey is the one who pulled “She’s a Beauty” out of the reject box and turned me on to the Tubes.  Although I can’t necessarily list more titles off the top of my head, I will still, to this day, occasionally play a song from my collection and have the sudden recognition that I first discovered it in the reject box.  So it’s had a profound impact on my musical development, through a somewhat bizarre set of happenstances that might, just maybe, be unique in the history of music lovers.

And that’s why I wanted to share it with you, faithful reader.  The vagaries of memory being what they are, I probably got a bunch of stuff wrong, and I deliberately decided not to look up the history of vinyl records, so I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff wrong there too.  But this is my story, so I get to tell it like I want to ... like I remember it.  And I remember it fondly.

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1 Although I suppose if you don’t know what a 78 is, the chances that you know what an actual Frisbee is are not so great either.

2 I’ve heard that my mother did a few shifts too, but I don’t know if that was an official job for her or if maybe she just filled in for my dad on occasion.

3 I’ve valiantly attempted to figure out what station it actually was, but I’m pretty sure it’s not there any more, and the Internet doesn’t seem too useful for investigating the history of radio stations that had disappeared before it even existed.

4 These days, he’s given up keeping up with the modern stuff and I believe he’s set a cutoff of 1979 or so.