If I have to buy the Ram set in deluxe only from either, I’ll be really upset: to get the last two archives shipped from his website to Canada, it cost as much as one of the sets (and I had to go to Amazon USA to save $75!). No two songs are worth $50 together and I really want the physical extras, so buying the digital set is out.

The labels – in this case, HearMusic/Concord Music – are trying to push consumers toward digital, and that’s their right, since they’re trying to sort out the business model. But if that’s the case, why bother selling anything on CD? Well, there must be some ROI still there. But if the label is going to the trouble of selling the CD, and wants to appeal to the core base of fans to ring the register, then the label ought to offer all of the songs on a CD. It’s called knowing your customer. To an extent, the knuckleheads at Hear Music/Concord Music are turning their backs on some of their own customers (or at least this customer).

Maybe one day I’ll take my newly purchased CD and the iTunes selections and burn it all onto one CD. Or maybe I won’t. Am I turning my back on a couple of songs? Yes. But how else to make a point to the knuckleheads (I use this term with great pleasure) that they don’t understand some of their core customers? My suggestion – include the iTunes exclusives on the next Carole King demos CD that will be issued, assuming a second volume is planned and will be sold on a CD.

Refuse to buy

As for import-only bonus tracks, I’m two-faced on the matter: as a music consumer, they annoy me, but as a music collector, bonus tracks make it that much more satisfying to score an import version of an album.

If you haven’t, check it out via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLWo0oyDp1A

It’s an amazing video, not just due to the mastery of Van Zandt, but because the song’s tale of hard knocks evokes something so personal in Uncle Seymour that he begins to quietly sob. I have a lot of music, I’ve seen a lot of shows and spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the meaning of music . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed the power of music in quite as intense a way as I have watching this poor fellow reflect on his life so immediately and so intensely upon hearing a single tune.

So you can imagine my surprise one day in Austin a couple of years back, when a guy who was a dead ringer for Uncle Seymour walked into Waterloo Records. I know Uncle Seymour had been gone for a few years, but the fact that he lived near Austin – and the fact that you don’t see many elderly black men who look like farmers in overalls walking into Waterloo – intrigued me. So I watched as he looked around the vast expanse of Waterloo, utterly bewildered. Just then a clerk approached and asked if the gentleman if he needed help. The old fellow hesitatingly explained that he’d just seen the movie “Crazy Heart” . . . that he didn’t get out to the movies much, but that this film and its music had really been excellent, and he’d decided to seek it out. I could tell he probably hadn’t been in a record store for ages (if ever.) He wasn’t used to talking about music much. He looked a little intimidated by the store. (They were playing some low-fi skate punk!) But that something in the music of “Crazy Heart” had driven him to this new experience. As it happened, both the clerk (a swell guy, though I didn’t know him) and I had both seen the movie, and we both mentioned this to the old guy, in a sort of spontaneous gesture of making him feel less out-of-place. “Those songs sure were good!”, he enthused. And we agreed.

As it happens we were pretty close to the soundtrack section, so the clerk leaned over and pulled up the “regular edition” version of the CD, and the “limited deluxe edition” of the CD. The gentleman looked a little astonished at the price, although both were on sale and Waterloo’s prices aren’t extravagant to begin with. “What’s the difference?”, the old guy asked. The clerk very kindly explained the difference – for a couple of extra dollars, the “limited deluxe edition” offered several more songs. You could kind of see the disappointment in the old guy’s face . . . that some odd bit of art which affected him so much was reduced to a bogus, money-grubbing marketing gimmick. He left without buying either one; he said he couldn’t be sure that either copy would have the songs he liked. The clerk was as nice as can be (and Waterloo is a superb store in nearly every regard, so that’s no surprise) and there’s little chance that the old fellow was ever going to become an “important” consumer of music, so the sale the record company lost on him, I guess, didn’t count for much.

But as odd little incidents do, I think of this one every time I head about some bogus repackaging of material for the dozenth time, or “exclusive” bonus tracks or releases that come in two or three or four different editions – each holding something back from the others. I no longer wonder why people download illegally, or copy each others CDs or torrent or whatever. I know record labels are in business to make money, and that’s fine. But in their “greed first, nothing else matters” pursuit, record labels are no longer the co-conspirators in the exposure of magic they once were, they’re more like the worst sort of gutter pimp.