You probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that this has been the hardest post for me to write since Popdose started. I mean, it’s been a damn month: what’s the holdup? Well, the truth is I discovered it is a lot easier to write about straight-up criminals like the members of Mötley Crüe, or hardcore divas like Diana Ross, than smug, pretentious assholes like today’s subject, Roger Waters. Simply put, it’s rather entertaining to write about individuals in the former categories. To write about Waters, however, is as trying a task as actually listening to his solo work in an attempt to find if any of them are worth talking about in this column. But I was able to find a good one, or a “good” one, depending on one’s ability to stomach conceptual prog joints. First though, a refresher on Herr Waters’ crimes of pomposity.

-Waters became the default main writer in Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett’s descent into mental illness, apparently exacerbated by a horrible LSD experience. And while Waters often spoke about how he wished to find and kill the man who gave Syd bad acid, this level of care did not apply to the addictions of other members of the band. Waters made the unilateral decision to fire founding Floyd member and keyboardist Richard Wright during sessions for The Wall, when he deemed Wright’s addictions too much of a distraction. Then, as an added slap in the face, he hired Wright back as a session musician to complete the album and go on the abbreviated Wall tour. In other words, Wright was not messed up enough that his talents couldn’t be used, but was messed up just enough that Waters wished to symbolically disassociate himself from him. Charming.

-More than just the main lyricist, Waters made himself de facto leader of the Floyd, taking complete creative control of the direction of the group. This culminated in refusing to put any Gilmour’s songs in 1983’s The Final Cut, then leaving the group after its release and declaring them over, with that album as their final, definitive statement, as if the rest of Pink Floyd really wanted to have their last album be a de facto Waters solo album: The record jacket even said “The Final Cut by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.” Waters then sued the other members of Pink Floyd to stop them from carrying on under that name after he left the group. His defense was that Pink Floyd should not be allowed to continue because he was the creative leader of the band, and additionally there remained only one original member (Nick Mason) who wanted to carry on. In other words, though Gilmour had been the musical centerpiece of the group for two decades, he was still nothing more to Waters than a hired hand to replace Syd Barrett, so f-all what he wanted. (more…)

The story of how I completed my collection continues in 2006. I was winding down to the end. I found that collecting the first 4,000-plus songs to hit the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1980s was no big deal, but the last 200 or so were giving me issues. If I had to pinpoint why, I’d say the three biggest obstacles were:

1. “Single-only” songs. The songs released by artists never heard from before or since, and only available on 45, were the most difficult ones to find by a long shot.

2. Crappy records from the tail end of an artist’s career. Contributing to the difficulty of my task were the artists that had had hits for 20 years prior to the ‘80s but just didn’t know when to stop recording, or tried to make a failed comeback attempt. Half the time the artist was crap once the ‘80s rolled around, and his/her/their LP sales were so poor there was never a second pressing or a proper CD release. The other half of the time the artist’s label decided enough was enough, so he/she/they had to release one final album on a new label — naturally, the singles from new-label, final-label albums don’t appear on 99 percent of greatest-hits compilations since they weren’t spawned from the same label as all of the artist’s other songs.

3. Price. I could’ve finished my collection a lot sooner than I did had I been willing to spend anywhere from $12 to $25 on an LP. But I’m not made of money, so aside from some pretty rare albums, a limit of a few dollars was my peak price. In almost every case, what I needed was considered rare mainly because it was crap and no one’s ever had the desire to release it again: go ahead and charge $250 for a rare Beatles 45, but just because you have a tough-to-find Unipop single doesn’t mean it’s worth anything. The end result of it all is that I was eventually able to find everything at the price I wanted.

Here’s the thing, though — I say my collection is “complete,” but technically it’s not. I have 4,229 of the 4,230 songs (approximately) that charted in the Hot 100 from 1980 to ’89. I’m missing just one record: “American Memories” by Shamus M’Cool. Though I do have it on MP3, it’s the hard copy I desire, but I can’t locate it. And I’m never going to locate it, but after a few years of searching I’m finally okay with that.

As far as I’m aware, only ten copies of this 45-only song were ever made. It’s easily the hardest to find of any charting song in the ’80s, and some historians will tell you it’s the hardest song to locate in the history of the Billboard chart. Up until April I’d only seen one copy available, as part of a full collection of music going for $300,000. Then a crazy thing happened — there was a dude on eBay selling this record! The end price was $3,600; if I was going to spend that much money on something I’d have ponied up an extra hundred and bought Oran “Juice” Jones’s $3,700 lynx coat. Trust me, though, it pains me not to have “American Memories.” Instead I’ve filled that hole with the purchase of the original contract that Shamus M’Cool signed to perform the song on The Mike Douglas Show back in 1981. It hurts to collect for so long and then not be able to finish my collection, but such is life.

Of course, I just couldn’t stop there, so next week we’ll end the story with where I’m currently at today with the collection. In the meantime, enjoy some more Bottom Feeders starting with the letter “B.”

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