It is not too much to say that Columbia House changed my life. The ads for this record and tape club were in the Sunday newspapers and all the music mags back in the day. In fact, you can find a cool retrospective on the service Columbia House provided millions of music lovers here.
But isn't it a bit extreme to say that such an organization changed my life? Sure, it offered eleven albums for a penny and the twelfth for free, but why was this different from any other promotional gimmick?
The year was 1987. I had been part of Columbia House for several years because of my fondness for...wait for it...country music. Yep. I was a huge fan of The Oak Ridge Boys, Ronnie Milsap, Johnny Lee, T.G. Sheppard, Eddie Rabbitt, and on and on. I still am. Yet one day in 1987 the latest Columbia House mailer arrived and I found in it an album by a band called Whitesnake. The description listed it as "Zeppelinesque," and while I had heard of Led Zeppelin, I really didn't know that band, so I thought I would dip my toe in the waters of hard rock by getting an album by a band that supposedly sounded similar.
When that cassette arrived a short time later, my life went speeding down the offramp from Nashville straight into the heart of rock and roll. I was hooked. Oh. My. Goodness. This was like nothing I had heard before, and I played it nonstop.
Eventually a friend told me that Whitesnake had recorded some other albums, and in my search for them in record stores and by doing research in music magazines, I discovered another universe. Through lead singer David Coverdale, I found Deep Purple, and with Purple I found Led Zeppelin. I was a kid in a candy store! I read everything I could find in Hit Parader, Metal Edge, and Circus magazines. And as I came to know and love the hard rock of the late '60s and '70s, I discovered blues. At first it was the Delta blues of artists like Robert Johnson and then, just as they had done in actual life, my tastes traveled up the Mississippi to Chicago and the likes of Willie Dixon and so many more.
Now I co-host with my good friend Pastor Wildman a hard rock & metal podcast, The Wildman & Steve Show, on which I have had the pleasure of talking with many of my favorite musicians, truly a dream come true, and to this day the best way for me to unwind from work or even to get my motor runnin' in the morning is to listen to the classic rock sounds that all started...with the Columbia House Record and Tape Club.
