Saturday, February 24, 2007

The Good, The Bad and The Big Audio

Saturday night's 1 a.m. broadcast on Encore Western of "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" IMDB quotes, a quote from Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan-Maria Ramirez, "Who the hell is that? One bastard goes in, another bastard comes out!" reminds me of hearing it in a different context, as a sample in a song by Big Audio Dynamite called Medicine Show from their debut album This Is Big Audio Dynamite.

This album was an important part of my early musical education, recommended for me early in my college days by my best friend, deceased just for a year as of 2 weeks ago, so I'm understandably nostalgic about things like it.

As a former disk jockey and music director, I've got a pretty large music collection, all of which has been digitized for well over 5 years now, so if I own it, it's on my computer. Unfortunately for me, even in 20 plus thousand songs, the only copy of "Medicine Show" I had owned other than the original cassette Greg made for me was a bizarre-o 12-inch remix that just wasn't going to cut it.

Five years ago I would have fled to Napster or Kazaa/Limewire, etc. where I'm sure a decent copy of the song I remember could be found. They aren't really that obscure of a band, and it was on a major label, so somebody out there is bound to have posted it at one point or other. Five years older, and in the iTunes Music Store world of today, I decided to first look there before I fled to the wilds of free. Ten minutes and $7.92 later I've got it and near instant gratification in one ear and the soundtrack in the other.
see on iTMS.

Who loses? Comcast/Encore, as they had no way to leverage my interest in their content into cash in their pockets. Who wins? Apple/Big Audio Dynamite, as they made it possible for me to enhance my experience for a reasonable price on my schedule. And I spent that extra money even after already owning a copy of the DVD box shown below, and Ennio Morricone's most excellent soundtrack, containing The Ecstasy of Gold, the song I chose as my debut track on the nominally 80s radio show on WNRN-Charlottesville I helped create back in the mid 90s, Les Temps Perdue.




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