RECORD STORE TALES #1111: Every Copy I Have Ever Seen of This CD Was Flawed
KISS: “Forever” CD single

Some stories, people just don’t believe!  In my years at the Record Store, I encountered a number of anomalies.   A Four Horsemen CD with Dwight Yoakam music on it?  I witnessed it with my own eyes and ears.  This actually isn’t an uncommon phenomenon.  Mis-printed CDs happened occasionally.  The wrong artwork would be printed on a CD, and it would get sent out in the wrong packaging and sold to an unsuspecting customer.

Far more common are CDs with audio flaws.  Sometimes it’s noise, sometimes the audio drops out.  Even the glorious Judas Priest 50 Heavy Metal Years of Music box set sadly has audio flaws, on a very very expensive item.  Frustratingly, it’s on one of the songs exclusive to the set.  There is a jump the in audio during “Diamonds & Rust” on the 2nd CD of Beyond Live & Rare.  Priest have never corrected this or sent out new discs to people who bought it.

However, there is one more common flaw in a CD single that nobody seems to know about.  Whaddaya mean, every single copy of Kiss’ smash hit “Forever” single has a skip?

I worked 12 years at that used Record Store.  In 12 years, I played every single copy of the “Forever” single to check, including the one I own.  It happens, unfortunately, on the only non-album song:  the remix of the title track!

It happens at roughly 1:40 of the song, right before the solo.  The lyric should be “Until my life is through, girl I’ll be loving you forever…yeah!”  In the CD single version, it goes “Until my…rrrr, yeah!”  The remix clocks in as 3:48 on the single.  In the Kiss box set, it is 3:50.  Two seconds are missing.

It’s not a scratch on the CD (or every other copy of the CD).  There is absolutely no visible flaw.  The music was simply printed incorrectly.  Perhaps the master copy had a skip?  Who knows.  It’s there.  Hear it for yourself below!  Here is the evidence.