The Great CD Sale of 2010 8 comments

By Andy Whitman

I recently sold 4,000 CDs, the accumulated dross of a lifetime of listening and musical criticism. It wasn’t as traumatic as it sounds. Before I sponsored the Great CD Sale of 2010, I backed up the music I wanted to keep on a 2 TB external hard drive, backed that up on another 2 TB external hard drive, and then carefully transported one of the hard drives to my safe deposit box deep in a bank vault, where it theoretically ought to be safe from fire, theft, and thermonuclear war.

This is serious stuff, and I wasn’t about to lose decades of musical memories. Then a week later I set up approximately 200 plastic bins in my living room, dining room, and office, filled them with CDs, sent out Facebook invitations and Craigslist notices, and waited for the hordes to descend.

My first clue that some people might be fanatical about the proceedings occurred at 9:40 on a Saturday morning, when I noticed two cars parked in front of my house.

It was a cold day in early December, and the motors were running. Two figures hunched pensively over their steering wheels, trying not to look at each other. I didn’t recognize the drivers, but I recognized their type; bearded, bespectacled, pasty-faced middle-aged men who looked like they spent far too much time indoors. They were music nerds, looking for deals. At precisely 10:00 a.m., when the sale started, they exited their cars and marched up to the front door. The race was on.

Within fifteen minutes another half dozen people showed up, and I was busy, but I kept a wary eye on Nerd A and Nerd B, whose names, I quickly found out, were Kurt and Chris. Kurt was methodical, scanning the bins that were arranged in alphabetical order. Chris was more intuitive and improvisational (a jazz fan, I figured), darting from bin to bin and room to room. And Chris scored the first big coup.

“How much for the Genesis ’70-’75 box set?” he asked. This was the six CD Peter Gabriel set with previously unreleased material, hardcover book, and seven-plus hours of DVD extras. “Twenty bucks,” I told him.

Chris knew a good deal when he saw one, and he quickly snatched up the box set and set it aside on top of the piano in the living room. A more aware host/music nerd should have sensed the impending danger, but I did not.

Meanwhile, the hordes descended. At one point there were twenty music fanatics scattered throughout the first floor of my house, elbowing one another to get a better view of the musical treasures. Still, they were a friendly lot.

“Anybody know anything about Mission of Burma?” a stout, bespectacled, middle-aged guy called out, waving CDs in the air. Within seconds several stout, bespectacled, middle-aged men surrounded him. “I think Vs. is the best album,” one opined. “No way,” another offered. “I prefer their later stuff, maybe The Obliterati for starters.”

These were my people, the salt of the earth.

The first sign of trouble occurred when methodical Kurt met me as I came out of the bathroom, a familiar-looking green box in his hand. “How much for the Genesis ’70-’75 box set?” he asked.

“Sorry, Kurt,” I told him. “That one’s no longer for sale. Chris has already claimed it.”

There then ensued a five-minute harrangue/complaint about how Chris had already beaten him to several deals at an estate sale earlier that morning, and how I shouldn’t leave items that had already been sold sitting out on the damn piano, which was, after all, in the living room, for God’s sake, the same room where thousands of CDs were, theoretically, for sale, and how maybe I should tell him if there were any other CDs that looked like they might be for sale, but which were actually off limits.

I placated Kurt with a special deal on the seven CD Genesis ’76-’81 box set featuring Phil Collins, and all ended well. But it was dicey for a few moments.

My favorite moment occurred when a twelve year-old kid named Charlie asked me to help him pick out some Classic Rock. Charlie listened to the radio, and he had picked up on a few well-known names through cultural osmosis, but he didn’t really know much about the history of rock music. And so he asked me to play some of my favorite classic rock for him so he could determine whether he wanted to purchase it. “Like U2,” he told me. “My dad likes that band.”

So we left Kurt and Chris to their ongoing grim warfare and retreated upstairs with a stack of CDs. I put on The Joshua Tree, and Charlie sat back to take it all in.

“This music is pretty old, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yep,” I said. “1987. Way before you were born.”

He listened for a few more minutes.

“It sounds kind of like Coldplay, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I can hear the similarities.”

There were a dozen responses that ran through my head. U2 isn’t really classic rock, anyway. Bono can sing rings around Chris Martin. It’s a disgrace to compare U2 to Coldplay. But I didn’t say any of those things. I was thankful for a kid who loved what he heard, who would grow up to be one of those bearded, pasty-faced guys who had very definite opinions about anything and everything to do with popular music.

A little later we went back downstairs to join the fray. And I cut him a discount deal on the whole U2 catalogue.