A funny thing happened in the middle of the 1990s: Record labels looked into their vaults and found that most of their best selling titles had been in circulation for awhile on CD and, as one would expect, weren’t as exciting to the buying public anymore. Remember that in the initial run of the compact disc labels were suddenly flush with cash, old assets were getting new sales life and all was right with the world. Once they had reached the tipping point where most consumers had CDs of Rumours, Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt. Pepper’s, etc., they had a crucial decision to make. Shall we now go out into the great, wide world of new music acts and fill our rosters with exciting, up and coming talent?

Nah, too much work. Let’s reissue those old CDs again, only this time, we’ll stuff the back nine with B-sides, unreleased tracks and live cuts. It sounds crass, but don’t knock it. It works. The labels did get a kick-up of interest through this process of “double-dipping,” and sometimes it was for the best. Labels like Rykodisc and Rhino took a lot of care in representing classic albums, often bringing them back with better, remastered sound to make the package more palatable to those who had tinny, digitally fraught originals. Other labels took notice and, as you’d expect, the business of the deluxe reissue started booming. CDs wound up with extra tracks best left on the cutting room floor, songs pared with awful guide vocals, blooper reels, inclusions of little to no interest to the average music fan. The Elvis Costello fan has felt the impact the hardest, as Mr. MacManus’ output has rotated from the original Sony Music auspices to the Ryko reissues, then to the Rhino reissues, then to his current home at Universal Music. You could own four separate versions of My Aim Is True, each with its own plusses and minuses, none rising above the rest to definitive status.

Look, I’m a fan and a collector. I’ve been skunked more than once by the “special edition” label. I know what it’s like to buy something only to have it supplanted only a year later by the bigger, better, badder version. To prove my point, I have dedicated this week’s post to some of my favorite special edition extras. These are things the labels would rather we left alone. After all, some of these tracks are the only reason why you ought to repurchase these things, and I’m going all renegade by just plopping them here for your perusal. I’m a rebel and I’ll never, ever be any good. Ready to receive your bonuses? Oh la Saleema! (more…)

For me, the waning days of summer always bring to mind the city homecoming fair that took place at the end of every August in my hometown of North Olmsted, Ohio. The fair, a celebration of the city’s past and present, was held at the North Olmsted Park, located right around from my childhood house, and was a weekend-long affair that always began on the last Friday night in August and ran through late Sunday afternoon.

I can recall the mystery, allure and romanticism of that city fair from the eyes of a child. At night, when the traffic noises had quieted, you could hear the excitement of the fair through the open windows of my bedroom. The cranking of the carnival rides, kids screaming, cotton candy machines swirling, grills sizzling, and rock and roll bands playing from the gazebo. Man, I wanted to be there; I wanted to be grown up enough to wander through the crowd and absorb those noises and smells and to feel like a part of the community.

By sixth grade, I was deemed old enough to venture up to the park during homecoming, as long as I was with a group of friends. If we were a pack we couldn’t get into trouble, right? Actually, I hung out with a good bunch of kids, and the heightened feelings and butterflies we felt around girls were more exciting than any mischief we might get into. Even as an awkward kid who didn’t attract many girls, it was still a great feeling to have.

Something happened during the transition between ninth and 10^th grade, though, and the fair was no longer exciting; rather, it had become a quaint symbol of complacency. In my arrogant teenage mind, I looked at the hundreds of folks who had grown up in North Olmsted (and still lived there), and thought, “I’m not going to be like them. I’m going to get out of here.” Instead of looking forward to the fair’s wondrous foods and prizes, I looked forward to pointless nights of cruising the Metropark valley in the back of some guy’s Escort while the radio blared acts like the Who, Lou Reed and Joe Jackson. (more…)

Dunphy: It is, on its face, your standard Petty and Heartbreakers tune. Could’ve been “Refugee.” Could’ve been “You Got Lucky.” But you know what? From 1980 to 1985 that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Was this off Southern Accents or Hard Promises? Does it matter? I miss those good ol’ Petty days.

Zack: Is Tom Petty from Denver? Because I’m convinced he must go to the same dentist as John Elway. Does anyone else share my suspicion that Petty’s video director used the leftover set from the Cube Squared video in Tapeheads? Like everything else of Petty’s, this is good stuff, though aside from the chorus, the lyrics are pretty much incomprehensible.

Jason: I wish I could think of something other than the episode of The Simpsons where Homer has to wait five days to purchase a gun (”Five days? But I’m mad now!“) and “The Waiting” plays in a montage over the five-day period. Petty is a big Simpsons fan.

Ken: I’ve always liked this one. Petty’s one of those writers who knows how to put the things a lot of us feel into words.

Matthew: I remember a really lovely (and abbreviated) acoustic version of this song played by Petty on an episode of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. It was the episode where Garry has planned the whole show around his neighbor giving birth, and when she can’t do it on cue Shandling ends up looking for ways to stall. Luckily, his neighbor Tom Petty decides to stop by and drop off Garry’s hedge clippers, which he’d borrowed, and he gets recruited to entertain the audience. Tom ended up appearing a number of times on the show playing a version of himself (this was the first time), but he never sang on the show again.

Darren: Back when a simple video, done with class, could hold your attention. No need to spend 500K and have MTV turn their nose up at it. Of course, this was made before there was an MTV, and the only place you saw it was when Showtime or Cinemax had ten minutes to kill until the next showing of Motel Hell or whatever. I remember not digging “The Waiting” much when it came out. It’s still not one of my absolute favorites.

David: This song seems so quaint now. Love the slide guitar, but … I don’t know. I don’t hate it, not at all. I just … don’t care.

Jeff: One of my favorite Petty tracks. I’m surprised by the number of lukewarm reactions to it — I just assumed this was a universally accepted stone-cold classic of the Petty canon. Every time I listen, disappointed, to a new Petty record, this is what I wish I was hearing instead.

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Instincts run hot and cold, depending on who is relying on them. Some artists go against the grain and it works out fantastically for them. Some make last-minute choices that, while not haunting them forever, certainly don’t help them a hell of a lot. Ben Folds runs somewhere in the middle.

His biggest successes came early on as the namesake of the Ben Folds Five trio. That first eponymous disc was eminently buzz-worthy, whipping indie kids into a frenzy much as we’ve seen with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arctic Monkeys and, more recently, Vampire Weekend. The second disc, Whatever And Ever Amen, made a strong case for the resurgence of piano pop, and indeed we hadn’t heard something so pretty (and at the same time vitriolic) since Joe Jackson’s punk period. It didn’t hurt that “Brick” suddenly became an unexpected hit. After one more studio disc and a b-sides/live cuts compilation, though, the three in the Five were reduced to one. (more…)