dr. disc

#541: When the Packaging Gets Wrecked

GETTING MORE TALE #541: When the Packaging Gets Wrecked

It’s so easy for a store to wreck the very product that you want to buy.  It happens every day.  A CD jewel case helps protect your precious music…if it comes in a CD jewel case.  How did stores wreck the packaging?  Here are some of the most common!

  1. Box cutters

When you open up a fresh shipment of music, it’s very easy to damage the product inside with a box cutter and it happens all the time.  If it’s LPs inside the box, or digipack CDs, it’s very easy to cut open the top-most item inside the box.  Not only do you see this happen with music but toys and games too.  I’ve seen a few toys on shelves with the bubbles accidentally scored by overzealous box cutters.  I’ve accidentally done it to a few CDs because I wasn’t being careful enough.

  1. Price (and other) tags

I have some great examples here.  The first revolves around a rare Led Zeppelin Complete Studio Recordings box set.  This deluxe box set was released in 1993, but by 1996 it was deleted and hard to find.  The boss man apparently knew somebody from Warner who supposedly had a cache of them stashed away.  If so that would have been a potential goldmine.

If there was a cache of them or not, I don’t know, but we did get one to sell.  We sold it as new, but because of the format of stores (all CD cases on display were empty), the boss opened it up.  I believed this to be a mistake and I still do.  I think we could have sold it just as easily had we kept the sealed box on display behind the counter somehow.  But we didn’t, and we had to put stickers all over the now opened box set to proclaim that it was BRAND NEW and OUT OF PRINT.

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One customer came up to the counter to complain.

“Why is this thing so expensive?” he asked, for good reason.

“It’s brand new,” I answered.  “The owner brought this one in sealed, and he opened it himself, so I can vouch for the fact that it’s brand new.”

“Yeah but he put stickers all over it!” complained the customer.  “Can you give me a deal?”

We were only selling the box for a few dollars over cost, so no deals were to be had.

We eventually sold that box set after it had sat there for a few weeks.  The stickers came off no problem, but had they stayed on there a while longer, they might have been an issue.  Sticker residue on paper can leave nasty stains, sticky spots, or even tears.

Our price tags were usually pretty good.  At one point we ordered a cheaper batch, and they were just awful.  You couldn’t peel them off in one piece, and you’d always leave paper on whatever you were peeling them off from.  Whenever we re-priced something, we were supposed to completely remove the old tag, leaving nothing behind.  These tags made that a chore.  It was a relief when that batch was used up.

The worst price tags I have seen in any store in my life came from Dr. Disc.   They are still around, though only in Hamilton now, and I don’t know if they still use the Yellow Tags of Death.  These tags had a magnetic security chip embedded in them, and left a horrible red residue on everything.  It was like taking a red crayon and melting it on your CD cover.  You could never get the red residue off, unless you used a product like Goo Gone, but it left its own oily residue behind that was equally impossible to remove.  I had to replace the case on every used CD I ever bought from Dr. Disc.  Every single case!

  1. Regular wear and tear

This is all but unavoidable.  Stuff gets damaged in shipping.  Customers drop stuff.  In our store, just about every front cover of Metallica’s Load CD was dog-eared.  Its thickness made it hard to put back in the CD case.  When the CD came out new, our display copies took severe beatings.  The front covers were so damaged that we had to sell them as used.

If you see something in a store that’s a little dinged up, but not too badly, ask if you can get a discount.  If you ask nicely, they will usually agree.  Whether it is worth it or not, is up to you!  Remember, most things tend to show up again.  You can usually wait until you find a better condition copy.

Are you picky?  Some of my customers were so picky that I actually told them “I don’t think buying anything used is really for you.”  Do you want everything as mint as possible?  Let us know in the comments.

 

Part 303: Marking Your Discs

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RECORD STORE TALES Part 303:  Marking Your Discs

In the 1990’s, stealing CDs and selling them to a pawn shop or a used CD store was a fairly common way for thieves to make some money.  Today I doubt it happens at the levels I saw in the 1990’s.  You just can’t get as much for a CD today, not even close.

I had seen too many people lose valuable music to theft, and never get the discs back.  I received many visits and phone calls from upset customers, hoping that someone had sold their stolen discs to me.  But a lot of thieves were too smart to sell them in town.  They’d go somewhere else to sell them, assuming that they’d be harder to catch then.   When somebody lost dozens of CDs in a break-in, they would call all the used stores in town.  “If you see a guy bringing in a huge collection of Jazz box sets, including about a dozen Miles Davis remasters, call me.”

It was always best if you could somehow identify your collection.  Jazz box sets and Miles remasters (for example) would be easy to spot.  If somebody else called and said, “Somebody stole all my rock CDs…I had Stone Temple Pilots, Korn, Creed, Days of the New…” well, there wasn’t much hope.  These are titles that we often saw, probably every single day.  If you could somehow mark the discs as your property, however…

Different people used different methods.  In 1995, I got a call from a guy who worked at the downtown Dr. Disc.  His collection had been stolen.  He marked his discs in a unique way.  He placed a strip of tinfoil underneath the CD tray.  If somebody came in to sell a hundred CDs and they all had tinfoil under the tray, there’s your guilty party.

Most people, who didn’t care about the packaging or condition of their discs so much, would just write their name inside.  Either on the booklet, the inner tray, or the front cover.  I could never deface my music like that, and neither could T-Rev.  He came up with his own method.  Rather than mark the CD packaging itself, he wrote his initials on a tiny red sticker, and placed that somewhere unobtrusively on the CD.  If he ever wanted to remove it, he could do so without wrecking anything.

Tom didn’t share our “no permanent marks” philosophy. He embossed the front covers of his discs with a press that imprinted his initials on the front cover.  Tom gave me a couple CDs once – his initials always bothered me.  When I had the chance to swap covers with a copy that was in better condition, I did.  Tom tells me he doesn’t emboss his CDs anymore.  I’m glad he came to his senses.

T-Rev and I both have had CDs stolen, unfortunately.  Both of us had our vehicles broken into.  T-Rev never recovered the handful of discs that were in his Jeep. (I remember that one was the excellent Barstool Prophets albums Last of the Big Game Hunters.)  They never showed up, anywhere in town.  As for me, I only lost one disc – Fish’s 1998 compilation Kettle of Fish, which was inside my Discman (also stolen).  They didn’t take the CD case.  I imagine they probably threw out the CD; chances are these thieves would not enjoy the subtle sounds of Derek William Dick.  At that time, the album was not available in Canada, and I believe I had to order it directly from the official Fish site in the UK to replace it.  That cost me about $30, to replace a CD that I originally paid $7.99 for.  That was not a good day.

 

REVIEW: Def Leppard – “Slang” single (Souvenir Pack)

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DEF LEPPARD – “Slang” (1996 Souvenir Pack, Mercury)

I think Slang is a great album, and I think I’m going to talk about it soon , as I’m on a bit of a Def Lep kick these days.  Yesterday I ripped this CD single, a 1996 “souvenir pack” with two bonus tracks and four post cards commemorating the band’s “Three Continents in One Day” concerts.  Vancouver was the last stop — look how tired Rick Allen must be in the photo.

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Slang, in many respects, was as forward-looking from Hysteria as Hysteria was from Pyromania.  It was a reset, a brand new way of doing things, more organic and modern.  Yet at the same time, even though it sounds nothing like classic Leppard, it still retains the impeccable attention to detail.  Production-wise, it’s not the same beast, but it’s still a beast.

“Slang” itself was a brave choice for a single, and it did alienate many old-school fans, at least where I was working.  Others dug it and got it.  It’s a fun song verging on rap-rock, but really, isn’t that OK?  Didn’t Def Lep kinda-sorta probe those waters with some of the singles from Hysteria?  Bottom line, it’s catchy, fun, has the Def Leppard vibe without sounding like anything they’d done before.  It’s a good song.  The fact that they played it live during Viva! Hysteria in Vegas is proof!

The B-sides on the single include a “strings and piano only” version of “When Love & Hate Collide”, perhaps the most overrated Def Leppard song ever.  I have so many versions of it, I really am not certain if this version is on anything else.  It does have vocals, and even a guitar solo despite the description!  This is just a remix with most of the instrumentation stripped off.

The other B-side is a really cool non-album track called “Can’t Keep Away from the Flame”.  It’s acoustic but upbeat and cool.  Production-wise, this is very basic compared to Slang:  acoustic guitars, vocals, shakers.  But it’s also really good, with a cool guitar part, totally memorable.  Since then, Leppard’s recorded a lot more acoustic music but for 1996 this was definitely a standout.

According to the price tag, I bought this at Dr. Disc in Kitchener Ontario in May 1996, for the princely sum of $13.99.  Money well spent, I have enjoyed these songs a lot over the years.

4/5 stars

Part 123 / NON-REVIEW: Iron Maiden – Missing Maidens! (Live!! +one and more)

Not really part of my series of Iron Maiden reviews.

There are a few Iron Maiden musical items that I’ll probably never own.  I know I won’t own all the singles, but that’s OK — The First Ten Years set, and the first 10 albums with bonus discs takes care of those songs.  There are rarer things to be discussed.  As I pause between Live After Death and Somewhere In Time in my review series, this is a good time to talk about a couple items.

IRON MAIDEN – Live!! +one (EP, 1980 Japan, 1984 Greece reissue)

This four song EP was released in Japan shortly after the “Women In Uniform” single came out.  It contains two songs from that single:  the title track, and the live version of “Phantom of the Opera” from the Marquee.

It also contains two live songs not available anywhere else:  “Sanctuary” and “Drifter” from the same Marquee show.  They’re awesome of course, if you’ve heard the early live Di’Anno stuff that I talked about in my Maiden reviews, then you can imagine these are just as good.  Di’Anno does his “yo, yo yo yo” thing on “Drifter”.

I have seen them go for around $100 on eBay.   This is definitely on my current “Holy Grail” list.

4/5 stars

IRON MAIDEN – Best of the Beast (1996 four-LP box set)

For this, I’m going to take a moment and slide into a Record Store Tale because this is one of those moments that I wish I could change!

RECORD STORE TALES PART 123:  Missing Maidens!

Trevor and I frequented record shows several times a year.  On one such excursion, we were in a Dr. Disc store.  It was in Hamilton, Ontario.  That same visit, the same Dr. Disc store even had Chikara, a rare Japanese Kiss compilation, on CD.  But I passed on that, and I passed on the vinyl edition of Best of the Beast, too….

You know those high shelves where they put the expensive items?  And you have to ask someone to get it down for you?  And they’d go to the back room and get a step ladder?  That’s where Best of the Beast was.

Back then, information about such sets wasn’t readily available.  I didn’t know it existed until I saw it.  If I did, I would have known that the vinyl version had an exclusive live cut of “Revelations”… not the live version from Live After Death!  This wasn’t immediately obvious from the back cover.  It is only today that I know this!

 

The vinyl version had plenty more music as well, including album cuts such as “Where Eagles Dare” and “The Prisoner”.  It also had the only official re-release of The Soundhouse Tapes ever, since the original 5000.   I had that bootleg copy of The Soundhouse Tapes and More so I deemed this to be a less essential purchase.  Especially for the $200 that Dr. Disc was asking.  But it was sealed, mint, brand new.

I recently saw one in questionable shape on eBay for $240.  Some joker on Amazon is asking $900 for sealed copies right now.

So, right now, odds do not seem to be in my favour of lightning striking twice.  I don’t know if I will ever have another chance to own this at a decent price in good condition.  Alas.  I wish I could turn back time!