music express

k-tel records and music discovery

[it is the third anniversary of this newsletter and to celebrate i am going to republish some essays that were written back when i had fifty followers as opposed to the 800+ of you who subscribe now. thanks for being here, i appreciate everyone who reads]

There’s a picture of me somewhere, taken on Christmas morning. I’m about eleven years old and I’m holding two K-Tel records, beaming like I just received the greatest gifts ever. And in a way, I did. Those records were the gift of music. They gave me the ability to pour through a collection of songs to find something I liked without having to splurge all my saved allowance on a ten or twenty 45s.

Today when I’m looking for new music to listen to I go to Spotify, do a search for one of my favorite artists, then click on “related artists” to find something similar. Soon I’m down the rabbit hole, clicking and listening, clicking and listening, opening my notes app to write down names of band and artists I want to check out further. I eventually end up buying a few albums.

How did we do this before the internet? How did I discover new bands and different genres when I was young? Sure, there was radio, but most radio stations stuck to one or two genres. We had something else. We had K-Tel.

K-Tel — which released its first compilation in 1966 — was the original “As Seen on TV Companies,” hawking record compilations featuring the ever famous “Various Artists.” Sold with taglines like “20 Original Hits, 20 Original Artists” the K-Tel albums were treasure troves of music, vinyl discs filled with hidden gems, radio standards, and some duds. It didn’t even matter if there were 19 duds on an album. If you found that one hit, that one song that really spoke to you or made you discover a new band or new sound, the album was a winner.

20 British Hits. 20 Electrifying Hits. 20 Out of Sight Hits. 20 Happening Hits.

I’d sit in my room, record player on the floor, listening to these albums. I’d give them the once-over, writing down what songs I liked and what I didn’t. Then I’d play the album again, skipping over the songs I didn’t like. There was one album when the only thing on my “like” list was something by the Kinks and the next day I begged my mother to drive me to the record store — really a record department within a bigger store — so I could buy one of their albums.

K-Tel records are where I found dance music. Disco. Rock and roll. Soul. Novelty songs. A little of everything. Each album brought something new, a chance to listen to something they weren’t playing on the radio or even better, songs my mother didn’t want me to hear. When you saw these albums on tv with their breathless commercials — “Wait, there’s more!” — you never knew the whole of what you were getting. Songs about sex, drugs and rock and roll! Songs about love and loss and more songs about drugs and sex! Most of the time, the references went over my head but it didn’t matter; it was the music, not the words so much that I was interested in. I wanted to be the gold prospector of my time, the one who would shout “Eureka!” then invite the neighborhood kids over to hear the awesome British tune I just unearthed on a K-Tel collection. But mostly I listened by myself. because no one wanted to discover the disco songs with me. No one wanted to discover the great romance songs. They wanted what they wanted. They wanted their 45s, they wanted to play the same songs over and over again (How many times can you listen to “Kiss And Say Goodbye” anyway?) and they did not understand the awesome gift that each K-Tel album was.

K-Tel records became my friends in much the same way books were for me at the time; spending long hours in my bedroom together where they shared their secrets with me. Just like the stories I read in the collected works my mother bought me, the K-Tel albums gave me a varied companionship. All the disparate voices together on one record provided a singular journey. In the end, I’d make friends with a couple of new songs which would take me away to places both familiar (“Midnight Train to Georgia,” a song my parents played often) and strange (Focus’s “Hocus Pocus”).

There were albums put together by theme instead of genre or place on the Billboard chart. They were the ultimate in playlists and collections. Tearjerkers. Goofy Greats. Heartbreakers. And who could forget the great “Hooked on Classics” which supposedly introduced a generation of boys and girls to classical music? I often wondered how they could cram so many hits onto one album. When all my other records had maybe six songs on each side, it seemed like the K-Tel records were able to fit so much more onto their vinyl. Little did I know at the time that some of the songs were chopped up; it wasn’t until I bought the band’s albums and played them that I realized I’d been hearing shortened versions of songs. But that didn’t stop me from collecting K-Tel records. It was still the best way to discover new music.

1973′s “22 Fantastic Hits” got so much time on my little record player. That album is how I became obsessed with Elton John. It’s how I found about the lights going out in Georgia, which led me to develop a lifelong love for the story songs of the 70s. It’s how I found the weird sounding rock of The Sweet and how I discovered Jimmy Cliff long before we’d sing along to his songs on a cassette tape in my first car in 1980.

In 1975 there was “Disco Rock” with Hot Chocolate, Van McCoy and the Bee Gees and who knows how Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” made it on there but that stayed on my “like” list for a long, long time, one of those songs where I’d pick the needle up and move it back to the start before the song barely ended.

Perhaps my favorite K-Tel record was 1975′s “Music Express,” an almost unimaginable mix of hits and unknowns, from “Love Will Keep us Together,” to a song about Muhammad Ali. There was a little of everything. “Chevy Van.” “Get Down Tonight.” And the most bizarre song of my childhood: “Run, Joey, Run,” a tale of teenage pregnancy and murder. But it was 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” that left me reeling, filled with a melancholy I had no precedence nor background for to have it all make sense. I just knew that this was a love song unlike any I’d ever heard and I needed to hear more like that. That’s probably when I started moving away from K-Tel collections — I’d already discovered Led Zeppelin at this point — and took my pages of “likes” to the record section at Modell’s department store where I dumped my entire jar of saved allowance money on the counter and bought as many albums as the pile of dollar bills allowed me.

K-Tel’s compilations allowed me to do all things I do now; search for new music, discover new bands and even singular songs I like while listening to songs I may not love, but listened to with curiosity anyway. I did it because I saw something on tv and my mother ordered it for me, often as birthday or Christmas gifts. There was no better gift than the gift not only of music, but of discovery. There were other labels that put out similar similar collections but for some reason none resonated with me nor held my attention like K-Tel collections did.

When I make Spotify playlists now, I’m sort of making my own K-Tel compilations to pass around. Maybe I’ll start titling those playlists something like “20 Electrifying Hits of the 2000s!”