History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
"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
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.
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.
