The Mind Boggleth: The Pleasures of the Compilation Album
SexCab takes you into the wild, wild world of compilation albums, and how to know which ones are a gem. The poor man's Caspian, SexCab throws a block of awesome at your solar plexus with a mighty pelvic thrust. It's like a trip to the Goodwill of music!
Let's go back now to, oh, going on 10 years now, to when I was just wrapping up my high school career. I know, that really dates me, but recall that I graduated a full year early (witness my mental anguish from knowing I was the last one in the locker room to have my testicles drop, a dismal fact that haunts me still). Back in the days before McGraw-Hill purchased the privilege to brutalize students with bullshit "No Child Left Behind" standardized testing (think I'm hyperbolizing? Yeah, I'm looking at you, McGraw-Hill, burn in hell and may the heads of your lobbyists be posted on stakes and your bodies run through the streets behind flatulant horses as a reminder to the world, especially now that Halliburton has fled the country to avoid prosecution), the Senior year in high school was essentially completely and utterly ignored by the vast majority of students.
I looked quite a lot like this in high school. In fact, they based "Rushmore" on my life.
I was no different, of course. I skipped more than my fair share of classes, but I think I had a pretty good excuse, having essentially discovered how to bluff my way through any homework and test given to me, to a steady C-average and the privilege of leaving the misery behind to work in the college radio at the local community college, Centralia College. I took television and radio classes, and I loved every single one.
The teacher, Wade Fisher (may the Buddha rub his tummy forever), was pretty awesome. He let me run roughshod all over the place, into the far deep of the night on Fridays and Saturdays for an entire year. I was allowed to pretty much do and say anything I wanted. I hear he learned his lesson with me. (The 26 year old in me gives a stout belly laugh at the very number of policies I've personally caused to change. I, for instance, am the sole reason why Wal-Mart has chicken wire around their garden area fence. It was just too damn easy...)
Of course, I was unsatisfied with the quality of the music the station regularly played. It was largely "alternative rock", although this was about 1998, and that entire scene had entirely played out, and besides, I was interested in the freak music. The weird stuff that never left the Bargain Bin. I wanted more than Red Hot Chili Peppers. Unfortunately, I didn't have much money.
It was then that I discovered the magic of the compilation album.
This is the first thing that came up when I googled "Bargain Bin". What kind of man would conceivably call himself the "Incense Man"?! ONLY HALF A MAN, THAT'S WHO.
If you're not aware, or just blitheringly stupid and have somehow managed to log on to The Weekly Geek due to somebody from National Geographic leaving a laptop unattended while spelunking your cave, a compilation album is a grab bag of music, usually put out on minor/unimportant labels as sort of an after thought. The theory is relatively simple, being the concept that some people like to buy a preview of a bunch of albums before they commit to buying the albums separately. This is how it's supposed to work, but then there's freaks like me that buy them alone for their own sake.
There are three classes of compilation:
1) - The "Best Of" Album: Usually compiled of one or two songs from a bunch of crappy albums that have one or two gems on them a piece, the concept here is to fill K-Mart shelves up with colorful cover work to hide the fact that they don't really have a very good variety. Don't worry. It sounds worse than it is. By looking for obscure or strange artists with an established record (think Frank Yankovic and his Yanks, or Chet Atkins, or similar), you can generally find some honest-to-Ricardo Montalban finds. Music nerds like Caspian may look down their usually quite large noses at this practice, but it's a key trick when you're on the cheap, like me.
2) - The "Educational Sampler" Album: These are the preferred vehicle of choice when compilation hounding. These themselves come in two flavors: The Professor Sez, and As You Like It. "The Professor Sez" is usually a collection of tunes compiled by a known name, like a washed up musician or conceivably a committee of magazine editors. "As You Like It" is usually created by picking out a bunch of songs fitting either a theme or a genre. These come in as many flavo(u)rs as are possible, everything from "Argentinian Progrock" to "Zydeco Gospel Novelty Tunes Featuring Vincent Price". We love both forms of the Educational Sampler, and these are the ones I always go for.
3) - The "Gramercy Horror" Album: Just a little bit of backstory here. Gramercy was the house label of the now late late night show host, Steve Allen. It was his life's dream to create a music label that would hold all the true crap in the musical universe, and make it available on low, low bargain prices to anybody needing music in their movie or interpretive dance project. Besides literally hundreds of scratchy classical music discs, Allen also filled the racks with bad synthesizer covers of pop tunes, novelty music, soundtracks to movies best left to USA All Night, and whatever the hell else Allen could get cheaply and pump out inexpensively. Yeah, the majority of it is swill, but for every disc that is crap, there's at least one tune with something undeniably alien lurking, which makes spending the $2.99 worth it. You'll usually find these at K-Mart, Rite Aid and other dismal discount hells. Wal-Mart, amusingly, doesn't have Gramercy discs. They're still trying to sell all those "Garth Brooks is Chris Gaines" turds. They have a huge bin of them. Of course, I'm the only member of the Weekly Geek to have boldly stepped foot inside of a Wal-Mart, so they'll have to take my word for it. They also have robots there. They are there to kill the pterodactyls.
Using the three basic compilation album types, I was able to craft a pretty good little radio show, with a unique sound all it's own and I was capable of staying on top of music trends, as in 1998 or so, mp3 technology was in it's infancy, and I was still kind of fuzzy as to how it all worked.
Of course, you want to know some good ones I've picked up lately. Don't worry, I'm still on the trail, although I'm not really using them to any good use anymore. Just hoarding.
GET OFFA MY LAWN.
Las Vegas Grind: Just found this gem this last week. With a cover by Dan Clowes, and nearly six volumes, this is some of what the French call "Le Hardcore". Herein you'll find 30 tunes per volume. Do the math. That's like a million songs. I know. I'm good at math.
Las Vegas Grind is ostensibly about the seedier sort of music that was produced during the 50s and 60s. This is the really raunchy sounding rockabilly and sleazedrag that came out of the same era as Betty Page. This stuff wasn't played on the radio then, because it was largely relegated to the "race records", despite being played by mostly white guys. There's some killer guitar jams on here, and there are literally far too many tunes here to go over them all, unless you'd like me to make this already long article and push it into the Icelandic Edda zone.
The Lavender Jungle is a new album, put out by the staff of the Wall of Sound record shop in Seattle. Bizarrely enough, just as I was putting this article together, an interview appeared on NPR with the owner of the shop, Jeffrey Taylor.
Lavender Jungle is a Best Of album featuring a very obscure "Best Of": a defunct, incredibly obscure label from the 60s called "Senor Charro Records". Senor Charro seems to have specialized in offbeat novelty tunes for the cocktail set, which is fine by me (my first complete compilation set was Ultra Lounge, which features a similar concept, but with far more mainstream artists). 30 tracks on this disc, which seems to be the de rigeur standard for discs of this type.
Found on this album is an oddball tune by the Invaders called "Shock Treatment", a band I have never in all my life heard of. Not to be confused for the sequel to Rocky Horror (I bet you didn't know there was a sequel to Rocky Horror...), this tune is full of rich theremin and organ, and a howling group of she-harpies who shriek an incomprehensible chorus. This is exactly the kind of tune I look for when I go compilation sniffing*. Other nuggets of joy include somebody named "Luchese Leibhaber" singing a song about sneezing called "Gesundheit", which sounds pretty much exactly like you'd imagine a tune called "Gesundheit" would sound like.
The Trip Series is a series of albums where known artists play Professor Sez and list a bunch of tunes from their personal collection. Being a known Jarvis Cocker fan, I was delighted to hear that The Jarv has a disc of his own in the series, featuring wads like Carl Orff, Arlo Guthrie and Human League.
Monster Party 2000 hits me where I live with a series of tunes based on, you guessed it, monsters. Having nearly nothing to do with the cult NES game of the same name, Monster Party 2000 starts with a late night B-Movie vampire host welcoming you to the party, and ends with a killer steel guitar rendition of "Transylvanian Lullaby", the theme song to Young Frankenstein. No Gramercy Horror Halloween synth compilation, this one will have you rocking your coffin to the cock's first crow.
Robert Crumb Presents is a new series from aging hipster cartoonist, Robert Crumb, a personal hero of mine and a demonized supervillain to the Women's Rights movement. Crumb, seedy bastard that he is, digs through his amazing 78 record collection for what he thinks is the best the 20th century had to offer. So far, the series has three discs, and barring Crumb dying very shortly (it came down to a contest between him and Hunter S. Thompson to see which Baby Boomer counterculture icon would blow his brains out first, and looks like Dr. Gonzo won that one), there promises to be many more. To make it even tastier, Crumb writes and illustrates each disc booklet himself. That alone is wonderful.
This is where I keep my record collection. And my ex-wives.
This bizarre hobby only gets weirder, folks. I could keep listing them on and on, but these are (at present) my favorites. Let me know if you find any other virgins, I'm all about the musical treasure hunt.
Onward Christian Soldiers!
*Exactly like crotch sniffing, btw.
What say you?!