A Timeless Wavelength

Fish Karma – God Is a Groovy Guy

In general, I’m excited about the fact that music distribution is more and more being thought of as the exchange of information, rather than of physical media.  The fact that any artist can upload a bunch of MP3s to the Web and get instant worldwide distribution without having to become an indentured servant of the recording industry can only be a good thing for musicians.  And there’s little evidence to support the recording industry’s fearmongering about how filesharing will bankrupt artists (most of whom see very little profit from their record sales anyway).  Major online retailers like Amazon, emusic, and even Apple’s iTunes store now realize that there is quite a lot of money to be made selling non-DRM-crippled music, and consumers have unprecedented access to a world of recorded music they never would have found if they had to depend on brick-and-mortar record stores.

That being said, there’s one relic of the old record industry model that I will miss — the bargain bin.  In the old days, record stores would order CDs and cassettes in advance, based on what they thought would sell.  Mostly these were from artists who had already proved popular, but every once in a while they would take a chance on unknowns.  If these sat on the shelf long enough, they were drastically marked down and moved to the bargain bin to make room on the shelves for less financially risky albums.  I used to love going through the bargain bin and getting five cassettes for a dollar from artists I’d never heard of, albums I never would have bought at full price.  Sure, now there are all kinds of Web-based services like Last.FM and MP3 blogs (hello!) to help people discover new music, but there’s something immensely gratifying about finding something wonderful in a big box of stuff nobody else wanted.  It’s like dumpster diving without the smell.

Perhaps my all-time favorite bargain bin find was the album Teddy In the Sky With Magnets by an enigmatic artist known only as Fish Karma.  It consists of a bunch of hilarious folky songs, most featuring only guitar and vocals, about everything from Methodists to zombie dogs to swap meets.  It’s reminiscent in some ways of Mojo Nixon, with whom Fish Karma sometimes collaborated.  (The record store where I got this tape did not, in fact, have any Mojo Nixon, which, as the Dead Milkmen astutely observed, indicates that the store could have used some fixin’.)

The artist himself proved difficult to track down.  Sometime in the mid-’90s I managed to make email contact with a musician who had worked with Fish Karma, who provided me with the latter’s email address.  I had one brief exchange with him, in which I proposed creating a Fish Karma website, but I never heard back from him.  Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, I have since learned that he’s a former University of Arizona student named Terry Owen.  This track, a lament about divine judgement, is one of the funnier tracks on Teddy In the Sky With Magnets.

1. Fish Karma says:

   August 14, 2009 at 5:15 pm

   I apologize for not responding in the nineties. That was a regrettable lapse of etiquette on my part. Is all forgiven?

   Fish
2. cholling says:

   August 14, 2009 at 7:42 pm

   Of course! Actually, as I recall, the email account I mailed you from ceased to exist shortly thereafter, so it’s entirely possible you did reply and I never received it.

   Wow, the artists I write about actually read this thing. I guess maybe I should end my four-month hiatus and start posting again?