Rant #3,755: Have a Nice Day

Today, I am going to write about something that interests me, makes me feel good, and is something that I enjoy writing about.

And it has nothing to do with the series of earthquakes that have hit New Jersey during the past few days.

You might remember that a few Rants ago, I wrote about K-Tel Records and their compilation LPs that were incessantly hacked on television at all hours of the day and night.

Anyway, in 1990, roughly 15 years or so after the heyday of K-Tel Records, Rhino Records came out with their own series of K-Tel-like compilations honoring the kitschiest music of the 1970s, called "Super Hits of the 70s: Have a Nice Day."

No, you won't find Elton John or Wings or Olivia Newton-John on these CDs--I don't think they ever came out on vinyl record, although they did come out on cassettes--but you will find the likes of Looking Glass, Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, and Maxine Nightingale on these collections.

And each volume comes with extensive liner notes!

Unlike the K-Tel compilations, which featured upwards of 22 songs on each LP, the Rhino collections only had 12 songs on each CD, but they were uncut amd sounded better than just about anything K-Tel ever put out.

And the initial series had 15 volumes, so there were a total of 180 kitschy classics in this series.

I went whole hog for these CDs, and I bought each of the initial 15 volumes either new or used from probably 1990 to 1992, and they had a nice place in my collection.

You would think that Rhino would have exhausted the kitschy classics from the early 1970s, but the series was so popular that they revived the series in 1993, releasing not only 10 more volumes--adding 120 tunes to the mix, bringing the total up to 300---but a promotional CD to promote the newst volumes and a massive, multi CD set of all the songs, plus news bytes from the era--think Patty Hearst and Watergate--encased in a box that had retro-1970s carpeting on its outside!

I bought Volume 16, but to me, the kitschy factor had run out by this time.

Sure, there were some great tunes on the first 15 volumes--"Brandy," "I Believe In Music," and the entire Leo Sayer hit catalog--but the next 10 volumes didn't do much for me--Wayne Newton, Meco, Player, Exile, Orleans, stuff I was never into at all--so I didnt purchsse them.

Sorry to say, these later volumes are getting more and more difficult to find, and some go for a pretty penny if you can find them.

Looking for something different to listen to. I kind of stumbled on my stash of these CDs, and have recently archived them digitally in the MP3 format so I can listen to them in the car.

And yes, I have searched around for the nine volumes that I am missing, and have cobbled together as much of the music as possible from digital files I have from other sources on a separate, external hard drive.

I don't have all the songs on the missing nine CDs, but I discovered, to my astonishment, that i have at least five songs on each of the missing CDs from other sources, so I can make up a representative collection for those missing disks.

Let me tell you, I have mistakenly labeled all the music on this collection as being "kitsch," but I mean thst in the nicest way.

There is lots of good music here, and for every "Disco Duck" and Freddy Fender tune, there are plenty of good, almost forgotten tunes by the likes of Ian Gomm, Pilot and Jigsaw.

The early 1970s--my high school years--was a period that I, personally, lost touch on a lot of things, and music certainly was one of those things.

This collection has brought much of it all back to me, and it is nice to revisit 50 years after the fact.

I don't want to ever go back to my teenage years, but this collection allows me to take a little dip in the pool without having to dive right in.

Lots of fun, and this 25-CD collection is highly recommended.

Yes, "Have a Nice Day."