As noted on the homepage, the rules were generally pretty
simple and
always in flux. To the extent I could articulate them they would've
been:
-
Discs must be found used, preferably at scuffed prices. It must
be
something genetic I've inherited from Grandma, but I get a bigger
thrill
the less I pay. I didn't strictly adhere to this, though, and have
resorted
in a couple of guest contribution cases to buying new;
-
No more than two discs per artist. It would've been too easy to load up
on discs by the Beatles, Springsteen, Dylan and a few others, pushing
more
obscure artists out of the picture in the process. I also figured that
rather than push an artist's entire catalog on you, it would be more
satisfying
for you to personally dig further into the catalogs of those artists
you
found interesting. This proved a valuable rule, I think.
-
No greatest hits or 'best of' compilations. The reason behind this was
to avoid the easy route around the previous rule - load up on an
artist's
hits rather than agonize over which albums get excluded. For the most
part,
this was a good rule. Most of the music I've grown up with was produced
in an age where the album was the primary medium, that is, from the
mid-1960's
on artists tended to conceive an album as some sort of cohesive whole
rather
than just a collection of singles. For artists before that, however,
singles,
were the main medium, so it made sense to bend the rule for those
artists.
These rules do more to explain what got excluded than what criteria
I had for inclusion. That's harder to explain, but when I consider what
I told a couple of guest contributors recently, I think I can boil it
down
to a formula that looks something like this:
f(x) = (public_consensus_of_disc X
personal_affection_for_disc)
+ (potential_for_Ben_appreciation)
I figure that would produce a chart that looks something like this:
As you probably figured out, this is all a fancy way of saying
there
isn't a good, objective criteria for including discs. I confess, I kind
of made it up as I went.
But if you're still reading this far, I do have a few other
rules. Let's
call them Dad's Rules for Successful Living:
-
Buy low, sell high;
-
Avoid purchasing used discs that originated with record clubs. The clubs skimp on product quality
and the people who buy 20 discs for a penny don't tend to take good
care
of them;
-
Beware new releases by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Elvis Costello or anyone
who has four or more great albums to their credit. Are you really going
to want to listen to that new one more than a couple of times when it's only 90 percent as good as a classic from the same artist?
-
You can only really be sure it's a farewell tour post mortem;
-
Find time to study Fridays before you head out with your friends;
-
There is no cure for a hangover, and the only sure-fire prevention is
abstinence;
-
All you need is love.
As the saying goes, I wish that
I knew what I know now when I was younger.
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