Johnny Cash, Trains, and why I hate the record industry (sorta)
So, as most of you know, I'm a pretty big fan of vinyl. My love for vinyl has many roots. It is partially fueled by the love for music my father instilled in me at a young age, and his reverence for vinyl. Another factor is how I grew up during the early stages of music piracy (why buy a cd if you can download/burn it?) and as a teenager I would rather spend my money on concert tickets and a t-shirt than a compact disc, but a record felt like purchasing a piece of art, something substantial. There is the factor of audio quality, the true sound of vinyl as compared to an mp3, but that is a rant for a different time. One of my main reasons for loving vinyl is that you are encouraged to listen to an album from start to finish, the way the artist intended, as opposed to skipping/shuffling about. The final big factor for me is pretty damn simple: collecting vinyl is a fun hobby for me and my girlfriend, and we really enjoy spending afternoons digging through crates, finding albums we've loved and ones we hadn't heard of/didn't know existed. for us used vinyl is (mostly) cheap, widely available, and it is just fun hunting for stuff. We are, after all, the nostalgia generation. Now, you know I love vinyl, and you -might- even know that I love Johnny Cash. You probably don't know (unless you are either Julia or our local record shop owner) that I also reeeeeaally love records about trains or truckin. This, too has a long, weird history of nostalgia, inside jokes, my former love of road trips, and the hillbilly life I grew up in. So, even though I usually hate compilation albums, I recently grabbed a $3 record called "The Blue Train" by Johnny Cash. Now, here's where the ranting really starts. One of my main pet peeves of the old model of the record industry is compilations/greatest hit albums. "The Blue Train" is a compilation of songs performed by Johnny Cash about trains. It was released in 1979. Pretty cool, right? Well, sorta. In 1962, Sun records released "All Aboard the Blue Train," which was a compilation of songs (mostly about trains) featuring one new song, "The Blue Train." Cash had already left Sun records for Colombia, where in 1960 he released "Ride this Train," his first "concept album" which I am still looking for. So I get that Sun records was trying to Cash in (ugh, that pun was low, even for me!) on his continuing success on another record label. Totally get that. So, even though they shared a few tracks (like 4) and the fact that the two albums share almost the same exact name, I understand that record companies wanna make money and repressings weren't always the way to make the most money. I get it. But! In 1969, Sun Records released "Story Songs about Trains and Rivers." This album has almost the exact same tracks as the 1979 "The Blue Train." It shares 8 of its 11 tracks with "Story Songs..." Now. These records are only 10 years apart! So let's dig a little deeper. Cash only recorded with Sun from '54 to '58. Sun, at the time, mainly only released singles, and didn't release any LPs by Cash until 1957. According to Wikipedia (which is where all of these dates are coming from) Sun had enough original recordings to release "new material by Cash until 1964. But from 69 thru 82 (!!) Sun released 19 LPs of Johnny Cash!! Maybe there are a few "New tracks or demo takes in there, but they essentially just re-released songs over and over and over and over. And this is just from ONE record label that he recorded with. So, decades later when I'm digging through crates, I have to really wonder how many of the songs that are on any given Cash album do I already own. I'm cool with having a couple nearly identical comps about trains. But I'm cautious with almost every other album by him I purchase. When I whip out my phone and Google an album at the record store, I'm sure I get an eyeroll from some of the other shoppers. But I'm not comparing prices. I'm not seeing if I can get it cheaper on discogs, and, aside from the Beatles, I'm not concerned with if it's an original release or an 80s rerelease,l. I just wanted to make sure it's not a compilation of songs I probably already own! I'm not sure how prevalent this is with other artists. I mean, Johnny Cash is one of the most popular and influential artists of the 50s/60s/70s and beyond. But another of my favorite groups of the 70s (Thanks, Dad!) Is Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Again, a quick wiki search shows Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young) released 8 studio albums, 5 live albums, and 6 compilations. I can almost excuse the live albums, especially (again in my opinion) with one of the greatest vocal groups of the time, but why the heck do you need SIX compilations of only EIGHT studio albums worth of material?! Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe it's hard for someone like myself who was at just the right age at the beginning of the digital music era to understand the "way things worked" in the music industry a generation ago. But because I did experience the death rattle of the cassette stores, I do understand to an extent how spoiled we are with almost every recording ever made available with the click of a finger on a screen. Still, I think I would've been a bitter consumer of albums if every few years my favorite band (at the record labels forcing) released a "new" album that was really just songs I already had in a different order. Typing this on a touch screen makes me too impatient to actually proofread or try to edit. So file this under music rant. In the time I typed this, I listened to two vinyl, and a shuffled playlist on spotify mobile. If you read this, thanks for wasting a few minutes on my vinyl problems!