I did when I was 12. Cost me two weeks of saved up allowance. I’m pretty sure it was at Gibsons Discount dept store. They had this display bin of 8 tracks at a great price. All these great songs! Cheap! I got 3 or 4, 8 tracks and rushed home to play them. I had gotten a AM/FM radio/8 track stereo the prior Christmas.
Imagine my disappointment when I played the first tape. It sounded just a little off. Not quite like the songs I heard on the radio.
Fakes! The fine print on the 8 track label listed group names by the songs. Groups I had never heard of. Cover Bands.
My first grown up experience getting taken by shady merchandising. :o
Anyone else fall for this scam? The same music was released later on cassette and CD’s.
Oh, yeah! Canadian three CD set “Sensational 70s.” By The Original Artists (that’s the name of the cover band, so truth in advertising). Caveat emptor. :rolleyes:
I once bought, from a gas station convenience store, a cassette of Christmas songs titled “Elvis’s Favorites.” I first noticed that they didn’t sound like the original versions, and soon thereafter realized that it wasn’t even Elvis singing, but a mediocre impersonator. Worst $2 I ever spent, and Christmas was ruined.
Oh yes. Not only one time in the 70s with a K-Tel album, but even recently on CD. I bought a compilation of 70s music on CD, mostly to get the one-hit wonders to add to my collection. They WERE the original artists, but they had all been rerecorded. The songs were just…off. Why would all those artists rerecord their own stuff?
I just want to note I bought plenty of K-Tel albums in the 70s and those all had the original artists. Elton John, Hall & Oates, Steve Miller band, etc. None of those songs were covers. I thought those were a pretty good value.
Yeah, but at $5.99 for about 18 hits, it was cheaper than buying singles, even if you only liked half the songs. And I remember one album I bought had the full version of “My Sharona” by the Knack, including the full guitar solo.
Agreed. What’s funny is when you go to your first “garage band” practice and you stop playing because the songs over. IT ISN’T. Other guys look at you like yer nuts, you look at them like THEY’RE nuts, you discuss for a minute, and everyone yells, “K-TEL skunked us, again.”
45s were bad at that, too. 4 minute version of “Roundabout?” :eek:
Not a soundalike album, but the same idea: when I first started buying records, I picked up an album in the bargain bin at Thrifty Drug Store for something like $.49 that included “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” at least one Rolling Stones song, and so on. I didn’t notice that there were no artist names listed. Turned out to be all instrumental cover versions. I’d love to find that album again just out of curiosity, but I’ve never seen another copy, and Google-fu has failed me. (The title was something like *Made in the '60s *or possibly Sounds of the '60s; the cover showed a female model against a background of ivy.)
Hmmm…maybe mine wasn’t K-Tel. I got it off TV, but maybe it was another label. It did not have the original artists, but it may have been by The Original Artists.
As a kid I bought quite a few of the sound-alike “Hit Records” 45’s. The real records cost $1.00 while the “Hit” version was only 39 cents. Seemed like a no-brainer back then.
yeap… in the 80s … 3 cassettes with all the year’s “hits”…
it turned out it wasn’t by the original artists…
the record company must have put up a band, just for this compilation…
they weren’t bad… but they weren’t great either…
I feel sympathy for the musicians trying to make a living this way…
and I can excuse myself as being “young and naive” :rolleyes:…
Nowadays… “thanks” to Internet… they can hardly sell the original stuff, let alone make money this way…
Easy answer: someone offered them a quick buck to do so, and they took it.
When buying albums like this, you really have to look for the fine print. It will say something like “new stereo recordings” and/or “all tracks feature at least one original group member.”
In both cases, big deal…they’re pale imitations of the real thing.
I know I’m way more anal than the average person, but I can’t stand to listen to more than a second of these remakes. Two examples:
A shop in a town a couple of hours from here specializes in nostalgia items (old TV/movie memorabilia, etc.). To set the mood, they play 50s rock ‘n’ roll compilation CDs both inside the store and on a loudspeaker outside of it — all of them featuring horrid remakes. The store proprietor is completely untroubled by this.
I worked at a country music station in the late 1980s. Suddenly, out of the blue, the Program Director decided that we would play several of Roy Orbison’s classic 60s hits. An unusual decision for a country playlist of that era, but what the hell, they’re great songs. Except…the carts we were given to play contained remakes that Roy had done recently. Obviously both Roy and the producers tried to get pretty close to the sound of the originals. But with 80s production values and recording technology, that was never gonna happen. I pointed out to the Program Director that these were inferior remakes instead of the original versions. He looked at me as if I was from another planet and said, in so many words, “Why would anybody on earth care about that?” Clueless moron; to this day, it’s the first thing I think about when someone mentions his name.
