House of Many Tunes

The Mrs. and I went to an estate sale last weekend. We don't do this a lot, but she wanted to go, so we did. The estate owner apparently spent the last few years of her life sitting at home buying things off the TV. There was a table full of jewelry from QVC, much of it in the original boxes, and, most interesting to me, a motherlode of as-seen-on-TV Time-Life CD sets. I snagged nine volumes of Singers and Songwriters and The Folk Years, four volumes of something called Lifetime of Romance, featuring MOR from the late 50s through the early 80s, and an astounding eight volumes of Classic Love Songs of Rock 'n' Roll, with which I could run a completely respectable oldies radio station. All of these are double disc sets, all still sealed, and I got them--17 sets--for $8.50. That's not a misprint: That's eight dollars and fifty cents, and criminal negligence on the part of the company running the estate sale. The list price for the sets combined is around $400.

So anyway, my ongoing CD storage problem has multiplied itself by a lot. I've got most of the stuff on Singers and Songwriters (The Mrs. will take 'em to her office), but the other series fill out my library beyond its already ridiculous level of comprehensiveness. It's not just trophy hunting, either--these discs will find their way into my CD player plenty in years to come because I actually like this stuff. I listened to a lot of 50s and 60s oldies during my early radio days, pushing buttons for a prerecorded weekend oldies show. I learned to dig 60s MOR during my days as a big-band jock, and as program director of a station running a satellite MOR format. So come to my house, and you're likely to hear damn near anything, really. Harry Belafonte's "Jamaica Farewell" is playing at the moment.