Consumer Serendipity
Borders is shuttering one of the locations nearby. I’ve spent a fair number of lunch hours browsing bookstores, coffee in hand, so I thought it fit to note the one truly and remarkable visit I made to Borders. And the very Borders now emblazoned under a giant “Going Out of Business Sale” sign, at that.
This story begins in 1999. I was way into Alt-Country music. To this day, the Jayhawks, Uncle Tupelo, and the like find find themselves on regular rotation in my car. (See an eventual forthcoming post on the correlation between emotional aging and the inability to embrace new music.) In fact, I was such a fan that I told a friend one beer-soaked evening how I was going to document the histories of all these bands in a book. A book I would call No Depression.
Later that same week, I realized that book already existed. With the same title. What can I say? The Internet wasn’t exactly mature yet.
Anyhow, I came across MP3 files online from The Jayhawks’ first release. Dubbed “The Bunkhouse Album”, only a few thousand vinyl copies were distributed and these were rare. I immediately hatched a plan.
In a complex process involving a copy machine, Microsoft Paint, pilfered Zip disks from work, the U.S. Mail, and a step brother with a CD burner, I created physical CDs of this lost album for all my friends.
They were less than impressed.
The album is not great. It’s rough around the edges and the tone is about as mature as the Internet was in 1999. But you can see where the band was going. The Jayhawks will always have a special place in my musical heart, so I appreciate this album as an artifact more than a record.
And I kind of forgot about it for awhile. Until I found it again at Border’s last fall.
My wife and I rounded the corner and I saw the remastered Bunkhouse album on and end cap. I was shocked at how closely the commercial product resembled my labor-intensive bootleg.
Here is the front:
My homebrew version is on the left and the production CD is on the right.
Here is the back:
Again, my copy is on the left.
Seriously, if things don’t work out stateside, I think I have a future making pirated media in Hong Kong.
And the Borders price? $10. I probably spent that in postage in 1999. All I had to do was wait eleven years.
But this isn’t about time or money. It’s more about the serendipity of browsing bookstores. (Even a giant chain store behemoth like Borders.) And sometimes it is possible to create something not only just as you imagined, but just as someone else imagined, too.
And that’s my find Borders story.
