While I’ve already confessed to my near-obsessive tendency towards collecting, and while the household CD shelves are plentifully stocked, it’s grown increasingly rare that I buy new music. That’s in part because new music has become so very accessible online, the Interweb effectively filling the void of discovery created when powerhouse record labels and corporate broadcasters conspired the leech all the creativity and originality out of radio. And–while we’re on the subject of record labels and their conspiracies–it’s also because I remain disgruntled over the way prices were kept artificially high at the dawn of the CD era. I’m now very choosy about what I’ll purchase shiny and new, calling in long distance orders to my favorite record store in all the land only occasionally.

When it comes to used CDs, on the other hand, I am helpless. This is especially true when the album staring back at me from the used rack is some nearly-forgotten quasi-treasure from my college radio days. This past week, while biding my time in a mediocre used book store (it’s sort of like the dimwitted cousin of the terrific Half Price Books chain), I circumnavigated the the huge collections of Britney and the Simpson sisters residing in their used bins to find a pair of releases that were once staples of my many radio shows. I don’t need these albums. I will rarely listen to them. And yet I felt compelled to buy them. They were only five dollars apiece, after all.

They are not phenomenal records. They have few people, if anyone, championing their inclusion into the canon of college rock. But they are now there on my shelf, largely as a memento, a tie to my youth. And just by seeing them there, I can briefly slide back some twenty years into the lonely late night studio that felt like home, coming upon that familiar spine with Chance written on it and deciding it had been long enough since I’d played that one catchy song that I like in ways undefinable.

The Rave-Ups, “She Says (Come Around)”

(Disclaimer: I operate under the belief that the album this song resides upon is out of print and therefore unavailable through any means that would resemble the sort of commerce preferred by the R.I.A.A. If anyone with the due authority to do so contacts me and says “hey, take this down,” then, hey, I’ll take it down. I don’t anticipate anyone from Columbia Records will have an issue with, however, since they seem to be too busy cutting deals designed to destroy small, independent record stores.)