There was a TV show with a bouncing ball that jumped along with the lyrics of whatever song Mitch Miller’s band was playing. The viewer was supposed to sing along.
I watched this as a little one with my grandmother.
Nope, I was born in the 1980s, in Ireland.
Go to any thrift store, library book sale, second hand book store, etc. and I guarantee you will find Mary Higgings Clark and Stuart Woods. I don’t understand it either.
I don’t know it but it sounds strangely like some of the background music I hear on CHIPS and Wonder Woman reruns. I kind of like it though in the 70’s kind of way. I wish I was older in that decade.
No thread like this can get away without mentioning Ray Coniff. My mother has all the LPs and I even copied them with my USB truntable to make CDs and some songs are even on my I-pod. I am 46 and this was the music of my parents so I grew up with it and still have fond memories of the tunes.
It’s always been a complete mystery to me why anyone wants to listen to her. :eek: And I know her from stiffs.com
The Simpsons also poked fun at the number of Herb Alpert records that Homer owned; I think Bart was flipping through them. It is the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.
Just got back from an official research trip* to a local thrift store. It’s a small one so just two boxes of vinyl LPs.
And people’s recollections are fairly accurate. Lots of Andy Williams and such. (Including one right next to a Claudine Longet album!) No mainstream or hard rock. No classical. Given record sales, I think my earlier supposition holds. The good stuff that “younger” people would be interested in either never made to the thrift store or has already been bought.
But I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 2 or so copies of WC&OD in thrift stores over the years.
- Who do I send my expense report to?
I’d hit it, despite (because of?) her murderous ways.
Any thrift shop/used merchandise store collection will be picked over, first by the staff, then by the commercial resellers who look for undervalued items, then by the casual shoppers who only go there once or twice a week, and then by the browsers, who shop less frequently. In the Days of eBay, the commercial resellers have become more numerous. The commercial resellers will quickly snatch up anything that will turn over quickly at a good price.
Now, look at eBay, particularly the specific artists. Notice how much the albums sell for. An album by the Beatles will sell for a much higher price than one by Streisand, even though the albums were probably the same price if they came out in the same year. And the thrift shop price is usually based on a formula, so that again, the Beatles album was priced the same as any other LP in similar condition.
Plus, of course, if my parents decided to downsize (and it looks like it’s gonna happen soon), none of us kids are really going to want Mama’s Neil Diamond LPs, except out of sentimental value. Diamond is a good pop singer and songwriter, but none of us kids really are into that sort of music, though we’ll certainly listen to it when we’re visiting. On the other hand, all three of us might want some of the opera records. So I think that’s part of the reason that you’re gonna see what you see in the used records bins.
I see a hell of a lot of Dan Fogelberg, Boz Skaggs and Seals and Crofts and a lot of other soft rock that I guess was popular in the 70s but nobody ever listens to now. These records always abound in thrift stores and the vinyl section of record stores.
I had the misfortune of growing up with a mother who thought Barry Manilow was God. She fell in love with him when his first album came out, and the next ten years or so were torture for me.
The most unfortunate thing about this is that many Manilow songs are permanently etched into my brain, and try as I might, I cannot remove them. It’s such a waste of perfectly good brain cells.
When will the hipsters mine all this audio gold?
Were those records available through those mail-order record clubs. “Oh hell, I really want these Beatles albums but they don’t have anything else I like and they’re giving me ten for a penny. Hey! I’ll get mom some Manilow for her birthday!”
When I hear Spanish Flea, I associate it with a Honda commercial from the early 1970s.
It’s Honda’s great little car
It’s Honda’s great little car
It gets you forty-five M-P-G, 35 M-P-G, waaaaaa!
It’s a great little car!
Consider that I must have been six or seven years old when these commercials aired; that’s the kind of staying power this ditty has.
Herb Alpert was also standard supermarket music in the 1970s. It’s a trope in many television shows and movies to this day; someone is shopping in a retro supermarket (checkered floor tile, narrow aisles, white being the dominant color) while Spanish Flea plays in the background.
I see a lot of no-name Christmas music albums, a lot of “Hawaiian” music albums from the 50’s, and a lot of no-name country artists, judging by the cowboy clothing. I never find anything ‘good’ from when I was younger, not even any good classical music.
I think half bookshelf space in any thrift store is taken up with books by Andy Rooney. Can you believe he was so wildly popular years ago that his mutterings were transcribed into several collections and they sold like hotcakes?
I don’t go through the albums at thrift stores here, but would I also expect to find a lot of albums by Bread, The Carpenters, and other “how the hell did they get so popular?” soft adult-contemporary groups?
Is it strange that I have a Pandora station that features mostly Herb Alpert, listen online to a Catholic station in Texas that plays “beautiful music”, currently listen to mostly CDs with Seals and Crofts, Kenny Loggins and Little River Band, and that my favorite song at this time is 'Brandy" by Looking Glass?
Maybe I should buy a turntable…but I’m only 32, and haven’t really used one before. 
That and Larry King books.
As others have said, it’s simply their demographic dying off and their stuff ending up in these places for sale.
In 30 years or so, the glut in these places will be 90’s grunge artists. Stacks and stacks of Nirvana CDs, with kids wondering why they should buy them when they can just think about the song hard enough and their brain implants will download it and play it, and run a banner ad across their visual cortex.