REO Speedwagon - Roll With the Changes

You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish; how the Columbia Record & Tape Club expanded my early music collection ten-fold

You mean I could have ordered reel to reel tapes of all these classic albums?

It seemed too good to be true.

11 albums or cassettes (or 8-tracks or reel-to-reel tapes) for a dollar? And all I had to do was buy “as few as” 8 more albums at regular club prices over the next 3 years? What was the catch?

The catch was, with the added shipping and higher than record store album prices, you could pay a pretty penny by the time three years had passed.

But, what if you simply never ordered any new albums? What could Columbia House Record and Tape Club do? Especially if you were 13 years old, like I was?

“All you have to do is check the box saying ‘I do not want this month’s selection’ in the monthly mailing,” my buddy George Nescromny said, showing me the booklet and form that Columbia House sent to him the month prior. “They count on people not returning the form so they can send the album of the month to their house and bill them for it.”

George was the same age as I was and that bit of dialogue clearly sounds like an adult speaking, but the sentiment is the same:

Eleven goddamn free albums and we were fucking kids — so what the hell was I waiting for?

That actually sounded more like George.

What was I waiting for?

George gave me an enrollment form and a copy of the Columbia House catalogue to take home. I filled it out and mailed it the next day.

Not my actual jacket. Obviously.

At age 13, I was a rocker. Rush was my favorite band. I wore a jean jacket festooned with patches from many of my favorite artists and groups. Van Halen. Aerosmith. Kiss. Black Sabbath. I’m pretty sure I had the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo on the sleeve of my jacket. Thanks, Mom, for handling the sewing for me!

The selection of cassettes — I was yet to become a vinyl collector, though that was just around the corner — was limited. But when you have maybe ten or fifteen to your name, finding eleven acceptable albums to choose from out of the maybe 150 in the “rock” category wasn’t too difficult.

This was 1980. Rush’s Moving Pictures, which would become my favorite album for the next decade (and remains in my top 5 today) was still a year away from release, so I went with Hemispheres and A Farewell To Kings, the Canadian power-trio’s late 70s prog-rock classics. I had Permanent Waves and 2112 already so didn’t need those.

I can’t recall the rest of the tapes I chose in my first go-round with Columbia House Record and Tape Club. Yes, that’s foreshadowing.

But it’s certainly possible/likely that a Kiss album was one of them. Probably not their 1977 classic, Love Gun. It was more likely either Destroyer or Kiss Alive II that I ordered, but that’s splitting hairs.

I included this particular Love Gun album cover above because it had the iconic pink lines on the cassette spine that signified that the tape was from Columbia House. See the “CRC” in the middle of the spine text? That was the acronym for Columbia Record Club. ¹

Did it mean that the CRC was making copies of the original cassette and selling that to their customers? Maybe. If true, I would have to assume they did so legally. My foggy memory does slightly recall that the pink-label CRC tapes did sound muddier than the tapes that appeared to match the ones in the record stores.

Not all the tapes I received from the CHR&TC had the pink-border spine markings.

If I was a true researcher I’d not give up until I found the answers to the differences between pink label versus regular label cassettes and honor my journalistic integrity instead of leaving you wondering. But that’s what the comment section is for! Maybe I’ll find time later to supply additional information regarding this great mystery. Or perhaps one of you will do the honors.

Here’s a “leave a comment” button so you can do so now!

Roll with the Changes

One album I know I “bought” from the Columbia House Record and Tape Club was REO Speedwagon’s 1978 classic,You Can Tune a Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish. There are some serious grammar and capitalization issues with the way the title is written on the album cover. I’m just noticing this now.

If you can get past the horrible cover image and the stolen grandpa pun that the band used for the album’s title, the music is unexpectedly quite good. Why I chose this album as one of my eleven freebies will forever remain a mystery. It is possible that one of their two hits, “Roll with the Changes,” or “Time For Me To Fly” were played on the radio and so that informed my decision.

Or maybe my love for puns, for better or for worse, began quite young and so I chose it based on the title alone.

It was “Roll with the Changes” that appeared in the not-deep-enough recesses of my mind recently, thus becoming this week’s earworm.

I usually don’t try and analyze too vigorously why certain songs, certain lyrics, cycle in my noggin. Not because I don’t want to understand myself better. Writing them out here on these digital pages is me doing that.

But I get so many earworms, if I were to take the time to explore each and every one of them I’d have to quit my job, stop watching my favorite TV shows and double up on my therapy. There are simply too many songs. The ones that feel important are the ones that you all get to read about.

So if you're tired of the same old story
Oh, turn some pages
I'll be here when you are ready
To roll with the changes

I think this song is about an impending breakup. (It does starts off with: As soon as you are able/woman, I am willin'/to make the break that we are on the brink of) But I only realized this by reading the lyrics just now.

To my context independent brain, I think I interpreted the song as a call to action.

Take the lyrics I quoted above restated by me:

If you’re tired of feeling stuck or trapped or lost, you can turn the page on the story you are telling yourself.

It’s much deeper, the way I’m reading into it, then it probably was ever meant to be taken.

But who is the “you” in the song’s story? The partner of the narrator? And if the narrator will be there when “you are ready” maybe it’s not a breakup song after all. Maybe it’s a break up to make up song.

Or, maybe the “you” is the narrator. They are singing to themselves. “I’ll be there for you, when you need a helping hand,” they’re saying to their inner lost child.

My point being: It’s all about self-encouragement.

Is it though? I just reread the lyrics and here’s the 2nd verse:

I knew it had to happen, felt the tables turnin'
Got me through my darkest hour
I heard the thunder clappin', felt the desert burnin'
Until you poured on me like a sweet sun shower

Can we pour on ourselves like a sweet sun shower? I’m over-thinking it, clearly. And it wasn’t the sun shower line that was stuck on repeat in my head.

It’s just a great song with a catchy melody and a rockin’ guitar solo, by a band that is still going strong, playing sold out crowds on rock-legends-cruise tours the world over.

Like REO Speedwagon has done over the past 50-plus years, I’m gonna heed the words of the title and roll with the changes.

"REO Speedwagon at Red Rocks July 2010 (cropped)" by Sjgkfe is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Stickin’ It To The Man

Did you think that I forgot about my earlier mentioning of enrolling for Columbia House R&TC more than once?

Back in my juvenile delinquent years, my friend George and I realized that we could acquire more free music by signing up additional accounts by using addresses for other houses in the neighborhood. Houses where we believed the people rarely were at home. We knew when the mail would be delivered and roughly how long it took for the packages to arrive, so we would scope out the houses around that time and day and intercept the boxes of cassettes before the owners returned home.

If we happened to fail in this scheme, then the residents could simply mail the tapes back. This was a different time. No credit card info was needed. Home computers were still a few years away.

I will say that our plan did work a couple of times and both George and I ended up with probably 50-60 albums and cassettes each, all for the cost of postage and 1 dollar!

My older, wiser, more ethical self sees how wrong this all was, but we felt like teenage Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and giving to ourselves. And this was nothing compared to some of the not-so-nice shit I did back in those days.

Hopefully this all didn’t set my enlightenment plans back several extra lifetimes.

• Do you remember the Columbia House Record and Tape Club? Are you too young? Is your response, “What are records and tapes?”

• Sure, “Can’t Fight the Feeling” and “Keep On Loving You” are the epitome of cheese, but there are enough rockin’ songs in the REO Speedwagon catalog to mark their place in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame! Who’s with me? Um, I’m not sure I’m even with me. Here’s an article that argues both ways.

• Are REO Speedwagon’s breakup songs better than their love songs? “Take It On the Run,” “Time For Me To Fly” and “Roll with the Changes” still stand the test of time for me. And is “Roll with the Changes” a breakup song? Discuss.

• And finally: Next week will mark 1 year on Substack. 52 weeks in a row with at least one post! If you are new to Earworms & Song Loops, check out the 51 plus essays on my archive page here!

In word and song,

Steve

1. Columbia House is still going strong (or, well, at least going) under the ownership of BMG Music. It calls itself BMG Music Club now. It doesn’t offer cassettes or albums now, just CDs, which is kind of ironic with the resurgence of vinyl and cassette tapes. What goes around comes around! If you try this out, let me know!