Back around 1991, I think I only owned one album on cassette tape and that was Girl You Know It's True by Milli Vanilli.  I already discussed that whole saga in an earlier entry, but suffice to say music wasn't especially on my radar at the time.  My interests were really taken up by comic books and it didn't really even occur to me that collecting music was a thing I would be interested in.  

I don't remember exactly how, I think it was some sort of Secret Santa gift exchange or something like that, but somehow I ended up getting a gift certificate to Sam Goody's.  I suspect that's a store that hasn't been around for a long time, but it used to me a music store at the mall.  I feel like every mall was obligated to have one.  The gift certificate was just enough to pretty much buy one album on cassette.  Since I had it, I figured I may as well use it.  But what to get?

I think I was only intermittently listening to the radio, but I remembered there was this one song that I thought was sort of catchy.  I didn't know exactly what it was, but I somehow figured out it was "All 4 Love" by a band called Color Me Badd.  I knew absolutely nothing about them, but I couldn't really think of anything else, so I figured I'd just use the gift certificate to get their album.  

So I'm at the store and I go and grab the cassette and I get in the back of the line, but it's taking a while and I use the time to look at the album cover.  It was like four extremely early 90's looking pretty boys giving smoldering looks to the camera.  The longer I looked at it, the more I was feeling this doesn't really look like my vibe.  Here, let me see if I can find a picture to give you an idea.  Give me a sec...

All right, here we go...

Totally awesome, right?  

I was almost to the front of the line and it was really occurring to me that I didn't really want to buy this album.  Suddenly I remembered that my friends had showed me this album I liked called Out of Time by a band called R.E.M.  I got out of the line, put back the Color Me Badd album and went to check out the R.E.M. section.

It turned out R.E.M. had a lot of albums.  You'd think I would just grab Out of Time and call it a day, but since my friends had shown it to me, I got to thinking maybe I could find an album to show them.  I didn't know anything about any of the other R.E.M. albums, so I grabbed the one that had the most songs on it.  That turned out to be one called Dead Letter Office.

Interesting story, Dead Letter Office isn't exactly a "real" album.  It's something called a B-side album.  I had no idea at the time what a B-side album is, but basically it's a collection of songs by a band that they didn't think were good enough to go on their real albums.  Usually they would end up being released on the second side of a popular single, hence the name B-song.  Generally speaking, B-side albums are not where you want to start investigating a band.  If anything, they're usually the last thing you want to get when you're already a big fan of a band and have everything they've released and you still want more.  

Dead Letter Office is most definitely not one of the best R.E.M. albums, but it still has some okay songs on it along with some kind of weird covers of songs by other bands.  But hey, it introduced me to the Velvet Underground, as they cover no less than three of their songs on it.  I can say with absolute sincerity I'm glad I got it instead of the Color Me Badd album.  I'm sure Color Me Badd is perfectly fine for what it is, which is a mainstream pop album, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for at the time.  Plus one of their other hit songs of the time was called "I Wanna Sex You Up" and it was about as deep and thought-provoking of a song as you might imagine.  I can for sure say R.E.M. eventually led me down some pretty interesting musical paths.  

Just for comparison's sake here's "All 4 Love" by Color Me Badd and "Ages of You", a song from Dead Letter Office.  This is the first time I've heard "All 4 Love" in probably close to 30 years and I can admit I actually still find it kind of catchy.  It's just not really a style I'm generally drawn to.  "Ages of You" is far from the best R.E.M. song you'll ever hear, but it's kind of typical of the early R.E.M. sound and it isn't bad.  

https://youtu.be/gaJtHeLXqJs

https://youtu.be/l5EX-v7Sz4A

At any rate two versions of me diverged into parallel universes at that point in time.  One version of me bought Color Me Badd.  I don't know where he ended up.  Maybe he really liked it and became a diehard Color Me Badd fan and went out and started his own boy band.  The other version of me, the one that exists in this reality, bought Dead Letter Office and went down the path I went down.  This feels like more than enough for today so I'll discuss more of that later.