Attention Kmart Shoppers

"OK, I have to admit this is a strange collection. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.



Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. 

The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. 

The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month. 

Finally, one tape in the collection was from the Kmart 30th anniversary celebration on 3/1/92. This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume. The tape contains oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962. This may have been one of the last days where Kmart was in their heyday - really! 

One last thing for you techies, the stores built in the early 1970's (such as Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart #3066, Harwood Heights, IL #3503 and Bridgeview, IL #4381) orignally had Altec-Lansing amplifiers with high quality speakers throughout the store. When you applied a higher quality sounding source, the audio was extremely good. Later stores had cheaper speakers and eventually the amps were switched out with different ones usually lacking bass and treble controls." - Mark Davis

Listen Here

Also see S.S. Kresge for information and links to recordings of background music from Kmart predecessor, Kresge. And The Seeburg 1000, an earlier store background music system. More on Kmart: Vintage Kmart Memories and Kmart Brand Products. 

"Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away/With Every Beat of My Heart" Shawn (1971)

It's like this; You remember an old record and you finally drop everything and go on a mission.

The record in question came to our family in a box of 45s my uncle gave my mom. He worked for an amusement company which serviced jukeboxes. Every now and then, he'd bring us a box of random 45s. There were a few well worn hits ("Ode To Billie Joe" Bobbie Gentry, "I Love You" by People) and a few lesser Jeannie C. Riley and Otis Redding songs. But one 45 in particular stuck out.

It was a single released on Kapp Records in September of 1971 at the peak of the Donny Osmond craze shortly after he struck teenybopper gold with his cover version of Steve Lawrence's "Go Away Little Girl".

The artist was someone (or some group) named Shawn. Who this monosyllabic Shawn was is completely unknown as far as verifiability goes. I simply hit dead ends everywhere I go trying to track down any deeper session information.

The A-Side was an answer song to "Go Away Little Girl", titled "Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away"

The B-Side was also a cover version. "With Every Beat of My Heart", which was probably better known as a 1970 song from Josie & The Pussycats.

Both of the Shawn songs had some popularity, the novelty A-side of course. But Shawn's B-side cover of "With Every Beat of My Heart" appeared on the 1995 Varese Sarabande compilation CD Bubblegum Classics Volume Two.

The A-Side, "Please Don't Ask Me To Go Away", remains available only on the original Kapp 45.

From the number of these Shawn singles with holes drilled in the label area, which is nearly every copy I have ever seen, it didn't do very well in sales as most "answer songs" tend not to. Drilling holes in the 45 RPM label area or cutting a corner of an album was a practice amongst record labels with returned stock of records that didn't sell initially to prevent retailers from reselling them at full price. These records were what occupied the "cut-out" or "budget bins" for $2.98 or lower in record shops.

But a look at the credits on the single reveals two important clues; Producer Danny Janssen and arranger Jimmie Haskell. Janssen had produced the original Josie & The Pussycats album and was the producer of several early '70s TV based pop acts including The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch LPs. Jimmie Haskell was a pop arranger, best known for his TV work as well as with '60s pop band The Grass Roots. He also arranged horns and strings on Blondie's Autoamerican album.


It was pretty much a one-off novelty single to cash in a pop fad as "Go Away Little Girl" was one of the biggest hits of 1971.

Shawn never had a follow-up single or released a full album. And was never heard from again.

Six Star Factory Outlet Stores

Hello Dumpster Divers,

My kitty, Mr. Smokey Gato

Sorry for the lack of action, I'm caring for a terminally ill kitty right now. Mr. Smokey Gato has feline cancer and it's advanced. He is getting weaker and thinner. And this kitty has been my buddy, always there for me. So I'm paying a lot more attention to him. Because I don't know how long I will have him. 

I recently made a list of vanished retail chains, mostly in Puget Sound, I had a few requests to post about some chains. But it's not easy to find information on most of them. There are a few chains that have simply no hard information I could research on them and others I have memories of shopping at, but little else overall to go on. 

One of those is Six Star Factory Retail Outlets (best known as Six Star) Six Star was a discount store from 1987 to 2009 that also specialized in craft supply merchandise. Six Star was once a rising chain in the Western America, mostly in suburban areas as far east as Colorado. My local Six Star was in Lynnwood, WA

Six Star was mostly a dollar store, with some items going as high as $6. But no higher for most merchandise. Some products, such as an aluminium cookware set were available for $6, plus the balance in "Bonus Bucks" coupons, which for each $5 of things you buy, you got one Bonus Buck coupon. 

Six Star also expanded full tilt into craft merchandise in the early '90s by opening Super Star locations (there was one in Lynnwood across the parking lot from the Six Star), which offered craft supplies only. These were meant to offer all craft supplies and an employee there once told me they were planning to transition the craft supplies out of the Six Star stores and into the nearby Super Star locations, freeing up shelves for even more general merchandise in Six Star locations.

But there was one thing I looked for specifically at Six Star and it were these.

On the cashier counter, there sat a rack of compilation cassettes, mostly of the cornball country/religious crud that Gusto Records specializes in as well as warmed over mini-compilation cassettes from any given major label's special products division. But amongst them were Canadian compilations from Quality Records. They sold for $4.00 each

They were K-Tel like and offered a pretty good mix of pop tunes. Including at least 3 Canadian tracks. OK, so Zappacosta, Frozen Ghost and The Parachute Club aren't exactly the first names that jump off American tongues when you bring up '80s pop music. But they were a pretty good deal for the money. And I could only find them at Six Star.

The last store closed in 2009 in Poulsbo, WA.

Wing Over America

Her name is Wing. Wing Han Tsang, to be exact. She's from Hong Kong by way of New Zealand and she's gonna rock your world.....



You might have heard of Wing from an episode of South Park (they dedicated a whole episode to her)


She has recorded 20 CDs of cover versions of songs ranging from Elvis to AC/DC (in fact, she recorded TWO albums of AC/DC covers!)

Here's her rendition of AC/DC's "Hells Bells"


She actually has a huge worldwide fan base, proving that talent and singing on key and coherently are simply overrated.

But sadly in June of 2015, Wing announced her retirement from music.

http://wingmusic.co.nz/

Before They Were Stars: Billy Joel

In 1970, just three years before his solo commercial breakthrough with Piano Man, Billy Joel released a psychedelic hard rock album on Epic Records with partner Jon Smalls under the name Attila.

With Joel on Hammond organ and Smalls on drums (there were no guitarists or bassists on this album) and everything cranked to 12, nothing could possibly go wrong.

Besides everything.

 

Attila was not only a massive flop, going nowhere on the charts. Billy Joel himself hated the record, calling it "psychedelic bullshit". AllMusic even called it the "worst record ever made".

Accolades like that make this an automatic classic here at History's Dumpster.

Alas, we would never see a follow up to Attila, Billy Joel ran off with Jon Smalls' wife, whom he later married (which usually puts a wrinkle in things, creatively.) But the two later made up and Smalls produced two of Joel's later concert albums.