plucked from the $1 bin

Plucked from the dollar bin: Judybats

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I find it impossible to stay away from a $1 CD bin and thankfully have discovered that there are a few prime locations to come away with huge scores if you’re willing to put the time in to digging through piles and piles of junk. This feature will focus on CDs that I’ve plucked out of dollar bins.

Judybats – Pain Makes You Beautiful (Warner Bros.)
Original release date: March 9, 1993
Purchased at: Half Price Books (Westerville, Ohio location)

Listening to the Judybats some 17 years after this release, it’s hard to believe that this lightweight, Brit-dream-pop-inspired music created by fresh-faced, just-out-of-college-looking Tennessee guys was considered “alternative”. But, in the early ’90s, artists like R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet … heck, even Toad the Wet Sprocket … were creating jangly pop music that didn’t really sound like the mainstream rock that closed out the ’80s. And, so, these bands WERE alternative when compared to artists like Poison, Genesis, Bobby Brown, New Kids on the Block, and whatever else dominated the charts during my final high school days.
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Plucked from the dollar bin: Sponge – Rotting Pinata

Sponge – Rotting Pinata (Sony Records)
Original release date: August 2, 1994
Purchased at: Half Price Books, Columbus, Ohio location

My friend Andy was a college rep for Sony in the mid-90s, which meant every time a Sony-affiliated artist came to his region (Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland) he was encouraged to go out and support the artist, put up posters in clubs, make sure all the local media had copies of the artist’s most recent CD, sometimes take the artists out to dinner, etc. He called me one afternoon and asked if I’d tag along on a trip to Cincinnati to see this new band called Sponge that he would be working with once their debut CD came out. I think he said they were an “alternative grunge” band or something like that and with nothing better to do that evening, I went.
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Plucked from the dollar bin: Ratt – Reach for the Sky

Ratt – Reach for the Sky (Atlantic Records)
Original release date: November 1988
Purchased at: Half Price Books, Worthington, Ohio location

This was the fourth full-length Ratt release in 4 years and the last they did with producer Beau Hill. If I remember correctly from VH1’s Behind the Music special on Ratt, there was a lot of tension among the band members and with Hill during the recording of this album and in hindsight, the album isn’t as strong as the three that came before it. But, there are still a few MTV hits among the batch of songs, including “Way Cool Jr.” and, my favorite from this CD, “I Want a Woman”. Back when this was released, CDs were still more of a novelty than they were the norm, so when you look at this thing split into Side A and Side B, the first side (or the first half of the CD, if you will) is actually pretty strong with the two aforementioned hits as well as “City to City,” “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds,” and the power-ballad “I Want to Love You Tonight”.

As you’ll discover in this column, I’m a sucker for hair metal releases that I find in the dollar bin and among the ones I’ve found in previous shopping trips, I suspect this one will get more spins than the others. It was definitely worth the dollar spent to purchase it and it’s very indicative of the hair metal scene of the late ’80s.

“I Want a Woman” video