When I started this companion feature to the other music related foolishness I indulge in to help close out the working week, I came up with a couple of guidelines. For one thing, I was only going to post material that was officially out of print, a guideline that’s already expanded to have some wiggle room. The other was that I’d stick exclusively with material that I owned, converting and uploading the audio for the express purpose of using it here. My iTunes library is filled with wonderful obscurities previously uploaded to different pockets on the Web by other souls capable of kind acts of questionable legality. But I didn’t want the musical offering here to be the product of their handiwork. Just mine. And, uh, you know, the original musicians whose work I’m sharing.

But today technical difficulties are causing me to take a different route. I certainly do own the song in question. It sits on my vinyl copy of Comic Book Page, an album by the band The Cost of Living. But I’m not the one who got it into this electronic form. That was done by the proprietor of a now defunct blog called “Feelin’ Kinda Froggy,” which was apparently swept away as part of a general purge of music bloggers. That person posted the entirety of the album, a boon to me since I haven’t been able to listen to it in several years.

The first time I heard it was twenty years ago this upcoming summer. It arrived at the college radio station where I was serving my first stint as Program Director. It arrived in a plain brown wrapper, serviced to us not by a major label or some agency that consolidates multiple independent release into hefty, daunting packages. This album was on Don’t Get All Heavy and Uncool Records, and it arrived all by itself, no supplementary information to tout its contents or provide information on the band. Just ten songs spread across two sides of vinyl, music speaking for its guitar-ringing, charging, hooky self. I was on the air a lot that summer and I played this record as if it might vanish at any moment. Certainly if it had, I likely wouldn’t have seen it again. Despite frequent record shop trips that summer, I never saw it offered for sale anywhere.

At the end of the summer, after Comic Book Page repeatedly charted for us, an identical package showed up with another copy of the Cost of Living album. Again, no note, no explanation. I’m not sure if they did another wide-ranging blind solicit to college radio and just ignored the fact that our charts signaled that we were clearly playing the record. I’ve always sort of thought it was sent as a “thank you” for being one of the few radio stations that played the album. Back then, we were quite insistent that any extra copies of albums were used as on-air giveaways, but I made an exception for this one. It went into my personal collection. It seemed a reasonable trade-off for the sheer number of times I’d played it on-air, or pulled it from the shelf and handed it to a fellow DJ looking for something interesting and unfamiliar.

As noted, I knew nothing about this band, and only recently discovered that it included Matthew Caws, who would go on to help form Nada Surf. This almost made me interested in giving Nada Surf another try. Almost.

The Cost of Living, “So Much Better”

(Disclaimer: This is intended as a celebration of the music and an attempt to share a great song that is very hard-to-come-by through any conventional means. I’m not trying to steal from anyone, nor, I’m betting, was the person who original uploaded this electronic version. Since that didn’t stop the powers that be from unceremoniously stripped his presence from the Web like so much bad wallpaper, I’m certain I have no defense should R.I.A.A. forces come raining down. I will say that any sweeping gesture of eradication is unnecessary. If someone wants it down, I’ll take it down. Just ask. Sheesh. Also, I would have gladly paid American dollars for this album had I ever had the chance, but I didn’t. Hell, I’ll send Matt Caws eight bucks right now if he wants it. He’s got to promise to split it with the other guys, though.)