pink floyd

Part 71/ REVIEW: Pink Floyd – Shine On (9 disc box set)

Shine On came out in ’92, I got my copy 11 years later.  First, the story of how I acquired this exceptional copy, and then the review!

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RECORD STORE TALES Part 71:  Shine On

I still have the receipt:  I paid $199.99 on February 12 2003.  New, it’s going for about $440 on Amazon.com these days.  I paid a lot, that is true; we did not get staff discounts on big ticket things such as this.  However, when I encountered Shine On that day, I’d never seen one in better shape.

The hardcover book, containing 110 large pages of text, photos, artwork and credits, was still sealed in plastic.  Nobody had even bothered to open it.  The eight artwork post cards were intact in the black envelope.  The little black fold-out display box was still folded, and remains so to this day.  It’s a very nice touch but I prefer to keep mine as I found it.

The discs, each housed in its own shiny black plastic case, are all mint.  Maybe some were never played before I got hold of it.  The cases are also nearly spotless.  Most of the time, the biggest defect with used copies of this set were broken cases.  Each case was unique:  The front of the case had a small image of the album, and the spine of the case had a piece of a rainbow embossed.  Put all 8 CD cases together in the correct order and you get an image of the Dark Side prism effect.  That’s why the set comes with that little cardboard display – in case you felt like showing them off this way.

Lastly, the bonus CD, The Early Singles, is intact.  A set in this condition was a rarity and I’d never seen better.  Over the years, every set I encountered had a defect of some kind, major or minor:

  • The bonus CD would be missing
  • One or more discs badly scratched
  • One or more cases badly broken
  • One or more postcards or pieces missing
  • The box itself would sometimes be missing and all you’d get is the discs with the little display case
  • Or, just the book would be missing
  • Once, the book was warped and damaged from excessive moisture

You can see why I jumped at the chance.  A box of this condition, used, well that could not be passed up. Likely I’d never see one again that wasn’t sealed brand new — but as a deleted catalogue item, new copies were upwards of $300 at the time.

So, no staff discount?  No problem.  VISA to the rescue.

A $200 sale was a good chunk of my daily quota.  Head office was in the habit of calling at 5 and checking the sales for the day so far.  I read mine off, which was high obviously, but didn’t say why it was high.

“Wow!  Good for you Mikey!  You’ve been busy, keep it up.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been a good day y’know,” I responded.  May as well take the credit for it too, right, hell it was my money.

I was dating Radio Statio Girl at the time.  However I was already starting to get cynical about our prospects, having been dumped once already by this time.  Our second go-round was pleasant but a bit tense.  I was supposed to drive down to her place that night, but I decided to spend the evening with Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason instead.

I called.  “Yeah, hey.  I’m not feeling well at all.  I think I’m going to puke.”

Considering the much bigger lies she tossed my way before and after, I thought my little white lie was pretty innocuous.  Especially when I was immersed in Meddle for the first time ever!

PINK FLOYD – Shine On (9 disc box set) (1992)

At the time of release, this was probably the coolest way to get some of the best Floyd discs.  Now with Immersion Editions, Why Pink Floyd…?, fresh remasters, and 5.1 mixes all available, this seems pretty basic.  Indeed, all albums are simple 1992-ish remasterings, no bonus material aside from the afforementioned The Early Singles disc.  And just FYI, you can often find that disc on its own.  Somehow it got separated from a lot of Shine On box sets.

As I described in my story above, the box’s contents are elaborate and fragile, and difficult to find complete.  This is a heavy, heavy box too — not exactly portable.  I find the remastering to be fine, it was 1992 and it’s probably not as loud as more current editions.  Picky audiophiles, I have no idea which you will prefer.

The albums included are as follows:

Disc 1: A Saucerful of Secrets

Disc 2: Meddle

Disc 3: The Dark Side of the Moon

Disc 4: Wish You Were Here

Disc 5: Animals

Disc 6: The Wall part one

Disc 7: The Wall part two

Disc 8: A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Disc 9: The Early Singles

So you’ll notice right away that there are some important albums missing.  Sure, you can understand why albums like Atom Heart Mother or Obscurred by Clouds were not included in a (merely) 9 disc Floyd box set, if the purpose was to boil it down to essentials.  I think it’s a shame that The Final Cut, one of my favourites, is not inside.  I would have preferred that or Piper at the Gates of Dawn to A Momentary Lapse I think.

The real bonuses to this set are twofold:  The book and The Early Singles.

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I don’t know what the current status of these single A and B sides are, in regards to current CD releases.  I know the Piper three disc set has some of these tracks.  But here’s the contents of The Early Singles:

  1. Arnold Layne
  2. Candy and a Currant Bun
  3. See Emily Play
  4. The Scarecrow
  5. Apples and Oranges
  6. Paintbox
  7. It Would Be So Nice
  8. Julia Dream
  9. Point Me At the Sky
  10. Careful With That Axe, Eugene

There are no liner notes with this disc.  I believe all tracks are stereo mixes.

The book is absolutely stunning and will take days to read.  There are extensive interviews from magazine sources, lyrics, liner notes, a nice discography, and loads of old reviews both gushing and nasty.  There’s plenty of artwork and photos to look at, too.

I won’t go too deeply into the music.  Reviewing these albums each on their own would be a monumental task.  Suffice to say that there is much brilliance within.  I think both Dark Side and The Wall are complete triumphs while Meddle and Animals come very very close to that level.  There is much to love here, and much that will take many listens to penetrate.

As a set, this is not perfect and I think the biggest flaw is the selection of albums.  Having said that, for a collector who wants a beautiful deluxe collector’s item, this is easily a:

4/5 stars.

For people who would rather have something with more music on it, you’re better off going with some of the more recent reissues.

Part 34: SPECIAL! “Bands That I Think Suck” FROM THE ARCHIVES!

I was cleaning out the closet two weeks ago.  I found a folder, full of old writing.  I found stuff that I had written with chums Danesh and Andy back in highschool.  But most interestingly, I found this.  This is not my first published work (that would be an article about turtles from grade 2 in the local newspaper).  This may be, however, my first published work along the lines of what I’m doing now.

Dating back to 1995, my second year at the store, I was already getting jaded!  This is my very first music article:  “Bands That I Think Suck”.  It was published in the University of Waterloo paper Scientific Notation as a comedy piece.  Thanks to Abbas Rizvi for doing so, wherever you are.

I still stand by most of this, but I have since grown to like Pink Floyd.  (See:  Part 28: The Boy Who Killed Pink Floyd). 

OK…ON WITH THE EMBARASSMENT!

Part 28: The Boy Who Killed Pink Floyd

Hiring a regular customer almost never worked out.  The first time we did it, we hired this kid…we’ll call him Todd.  Yeah.  Todd was just getting into Pink Floyd at the time we hired him.  He was also getting into a couple other things that may have influenced that, but we won’t talk about that.

Todd lasted a few months.  During those months, he played Floyd on every single shift.  Every.  Fucking.  Shift.

I didn’t own any Floyd back then, but before Todd, I was enjoying their tunes such as “Learning To Fly” and “Keep Talking”.  I could have become a Floyd fan officially, at any time, if not for Todd.

I burned out on Floyd in a matter of  days.  We worked together every weekday and a couple weekends for a month setting up that store.  The first two weeks were manageable, but after that, I could have strangled lil’ Todd.  I asked him to cut down the Floyd, it didn’t have much effect.  I guess I could have given him a direct order to cut the Floyd, since I was his boss.  However I was a much nicer person back then, and I had been subjecting Todd to Deep Purple something fierce.

The Floyd though, it reached such levels that I could not bear.  I fucking hated Pink Floyd!  I couldn’t listen to Floyd again for seven years!   Girls would come over to the house.  “Don’t you have any Floyd?”  No!  I don’t have any fucking Floyd!

I have quite a bit of Floyd now, the scars from those days have completely healed.  But I will let you in on a little secret.

Todd reinvented himself as a Game of Thrones fan — no Floyd in sight anywhere — and I find that hilarious.

Part 25: Applicants

Everybody wants to work in a record store.  Kids, adults, seniors, I had applications from everybody.  I had one retiree apply who had this really impressive resume.  He was an engineer at one point.  He taught at a university.  He designed airplane tires, for passenger jets.  His resume was designed for an engineering  job.

At the top of the resume, for the job he was looking for, he had scratched out (in pen) “Engineer” and written in, “CD Store Clerk”.

Back then, we had the internet, but we didn’t even have it in the store yet.  We relied on pure musical knowledge.  That’s the way a music shopping experience should be.  For example, I walked into an HMV one time in a mischievous mood, and asked for a Led Zeppelin bootleg called Sweet Jelly Roll.  That HMV guy typed and typed and typed trying to find a CD that for all intents and purposes did not exist.  If the same question was asked of our people, we’d know without having to look that wasn’t the name of anything Zeppelin ever officially released.

To work in a record store in the 90’s, you had to know your shit.  People would come in and ask the most obscure questions.  “There was a Black Sabbath album I used to have, it had a red baby on the cover.  What was it?”  BAM!  Born Again.  Real question, real answer.

We were buying, and selling.  We were like the Pawn Stars, before we had the internet, we had to know our shit.  If we didn’t, somebody at one of the downtown stores, would.

So, people applying for jobs really had to know music, all kinds.  We had a written test.  It had different types of questions, matching names to bands, etc.  Who’s this band, who’s that band, name five jazz artists, etc.  It would have been hard for anybody to get 100% on it, but we weren’t looking for that.  We were just looking for broad musical knowledge.

Some of the more entertaining things that were said and/or written during tests:

“This test is whack, man, I only know about rap.”

“Pink Floyd:  He is a singer from the 60’s”

“Can I take this test home and bring it back tomorrow?”

“The Cranberries:  crap”

“The Beatles:  really, really old music”

“Classical music:  Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Who, Buddy Holly”

A few kids…more than a few…ducked out of the store mid-test because they knew they were in way over their heads.  Some looked it and didn’t even try, they just left.  It got so bad that we actually had to make sure we spoke to everyone who applied not to worry and not to get freaked out by the test, it wasn’t the be all and end all.   We had so many applicants one year, I ran out of pens in the afternoon while everyone was writing!

It’s pretty funky walking into a record store and seeing a bunch of kids writing tests on any horizontal surface available.

There was a guy who had a resume that included “super powers”.  I’ll never forget that one super power he had was “the power to heat soup by looking at it.”  That’s a pretty neat super power.  I could use that one.  I don’t know if it would help against Magneto, or the Green Goblin, but it would mean I don’t have to use the microwave when I’m hungry for some soup.

There was a guy in another store who applied, wrote the test, got an interview, got hired, and never showed up.

There was a guy who came in with his resume, tucked in his pants pocket, because he had no shirt.

There were guys that dropped off a resume, wrote the test, shopping around, and acted like total dicks the whole time.  Swearing up and down, treating me like shit.  Why the hell would we hire you? 

But, it takes all types, I guess.  A record store was a unique place in the universe.  The customers are unique, so the staff had to be unique.  I think, for a while in the mid 90’s, we had that.  We had the girl who knew about Motown, we had Trev, who knew about Brit-pop and all the new shit coming out, we had me, specializing in metal and classic rock.  And of course we had Tom, who seemed to know everything about everything that had any sort of…integrity to it.  Tom wouldn’t have been bothered with Oasis, or Bon Jovi, or Puff Daddy. But ask him about Captain Beefheart.  (He’d still be professional enough to know the names  of every album by everybody…we all were.  We had to be.)

Authentic record store folks are among the most odd, interesting, and eccentric people you’d ever meet, and I’m proud to say, for 12 years, I was one of ’em.  And I’d like to think I’m still pretty eccentric.