I was wasting time on Facebook the other day when a funny meme sent me on an all-expense paid trip to Nostalgiatown.
"Don't forget," the meme said. "You still owe Columbia House 1 cent for those 13 tapes." The fact that 30% of our population probably has NO idea what that means fills me with sadness.
Someone asked me the other day where I got my great love of music from. That's a tough question to answer. Well, actually it's an easy one: I owe it all to my parents. Just please don't ever tell them I said that.
I'm not willing to concede that my parents were in any way responsible for my exceptional genius taste in music. In that department, the odds were stacked against me. Actually, my dad listened to some pretty cool stuff when I was growing up. You couldn't pass his workshop without getting blasted by Chicago or Santana at unhealthy decibels. My dad was fairly rad in his day.
Mom, on the other hand, forced me to grow up on a steady diet of easy listening schlock primarily centered around the musical stylings of Barbra Streisand. With varying degrees of success, I spent much of my adolescence trying desperately hard NOT to let her horrible taste in music rub off on me. I think I ended up prevailing -- and I'm sticking to my story that those Barry Manilow and Neil Sedaka CDs in my collection somehow got mixed in by mistake.
She might not have done much for me musically, but my mother DID put me down an advanced path when it came to reading. My folks did everything they could to increase my appetite for reading. Little did they know that appetite would instead turn me into a music geek.
One year for Christmas, my folks let me subscribe to three magazines of my choosing. My first pick was Sports Illustrated (which clearly didn't stick.) The second was a magazine full of crosswords and puzzles called Games. The third subscription -- and the only one I've kept to this day -- was Rolling Stone, the best introduction to counter-culture a 10-year-old could ever ask for.
I read each issue cover-to-cover with reverence. I never understood the political writing, and I distinctly remember thinking Hunter S. Thompson was a loon. But when it came to the articles about musicians, I hung on every word. It was the gateway to a world of rebellion, alternative thinking, and insanely cool music. There was just one problem: the gateway was closed.
I grew up in Galesburg. The only place to get new tunes other than the radio was Musicland in the mall, and their selection was always lacking. Rolling Stone taught me biographies and interesting facts about any number of left-of-center bands. The only thing I couldn't tell you was what any of them SOUNDED like, because Musicland didn't stock left-of-center stuff. This was before Spotify, before the internet, and before we even had MTV.
Cue my parents again. Not only was I lucky enough to receive an allowance I never deserved, my parents never cared when I'd waste said allowance on foolish purchases. And no purchase was more foolish than a subscription to the Columbia House Music Club.
Their gimmick was hard to resist: "Get 13 tapes for a penny!" What pre-teen wouldn't salivate over an offer like that? Columbia House would send you 13 cassettes of your choosing for a mere penny -- provided you joined their club and agreed to buy 4 more tapes at their inflated prices over the next year. Every month, a new Columbia House catalog would arrive in your mailbox like clockwork, featuring their Album of the Month. If you didn't immediately mail back the accompanying reply card, ten days later they'd mail you the Album of the Month (along with a hefty invoice.)
Inevitably, you'd end up forgetting to mail the reply card, and the Tina Turner cassette gathering dust in my basement right now is testament to that. If you weren't diligent with the reply cards, you could get in a lot of trouble quickly. The internet is full of stories from people who were denied bank loans simply because they forgot to pay Columbia House for a tape fifteen years ago. It was a racket, plain and simple.
But that racket changed my life. I remember the day I finally convinced my parents I was responsible enough to join Columbia House. Choosing those 13 tapes was one of the happiest moments of my life. Since I had nothing to lose except a penny, I ordered 13 tapes from 13 bands I'd read about in Rolling Stone but had never heard a lick of music by. It may have been the single most important purchase of my upbringing.
I still remember most of them. The Cure. The Smiths. R.E.M. Elvis Costello. Siouxsie and the Banshees. Husker Du. New Order. Violent Femmes. One Bananarama tape, because even an aspiring mopey counter-culturalist likes to dance in his bedroom behind closed doors. Finally those articles in Rolling Stone had a soundtrack, and it was music that would shape my taste, my passion, and my hobbies for decades to come. And I owe it all to a scammy mail-order music company.
Columbia House closed for good in 2009, leaving behind a legacy of forgotten reply cards, unwanted cassettes, and ridiculous dents in our credit scores. But it also left me a better person with a higher appreciation for a world of music I might have never discovered without Columbia House, Rolling Stone, and my poor parents who suffered through a decade of my blaring stereo.
I wouldn't trade any of those memories for a dollar -- unless you're willing to give me 13 tapes in return, in which case, let's talk.
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