Who'll buy my Dementia?

Back in my college days, many moons ago, I was fortunate enough to experience on a regular basis the comedic music stylings of Dr. Love & The Erogenous Zones and Sneaky Pete. Alas, Dr. Love's rein lasted a mere two glorious years, but Sneaky Pete is still recording music after more than 30 years. Both acts had songs featured on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento Show, and Pete grew to be a regular on the program. After one of his shows, I bought a couple of Pete's tapes, and he gave me two vinyl albums as a bonus--both were syndicated Demento shows, which were distributed to stations on vinyl back then. The local station would give them to Pete, since his songs were often featured. It was a pretty cool bonus, I must say, and kept them for years until they vanished during one move or another.

Fast forward to 1997. One day at work I got a call from the Wife (we were still newlyweds at that point, right on the cusp of becoming one of those Old Married Couples). She'd just heard a song on the radio she thought hilarious, "Star Wars Cantina," done to the tune of Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." We wanted a copy, but apparently it wasn't available in stores (the radio station had gotten it in as a promo). One radio station in the next town aired the Dr. Demento Show, however, and if there was one sure place to find that song, it would be on the Demento Show. Remembering Sneaky Pete's gift from those years before, I called the station and asked what they did with the shows after they aired. I was told they were generally thrown away, but that I could have them if I wanted. Oh, and they came on CDs, not vinyl, now. Can you say "jackpot"?

Thus began a series of monthly pilgrimages to the booming metropolis of Killeen, to pick up discs of an obscure radio program many folks had never even heard of. This continued more or less regularly until we moved to New Braunfels in 2002. I understand that radio station discontinued the program in early 2007, and the good Doctor is now broadcast on a bare handful of stations, compared to more than 100 (if memory serves) when I interviewed him the summer of 1992 (yeah, I interviewed him for a feature. Sadly, I don't have a copy of it anymore). My collection is by no means complete--many shows were thrown away despite my efforts, and others mysteriously disappeared from the studio (probably when one of the jocks heard a particular song they liked). But all things being equal, my collection eventually spanned the better part of five years' worth of shows.

Until now. Back in December, I broke out my collection of Christmas-themed shows only to discover several discs had gone bad. They were tarnished, corroded, unlistenable. The feeling of losing something so irreplaceable is a sickening one, I assure you. I'd experience this once before, when my cherished copy of "Monty Python: The Final Rip-Off" began showing the same symptoms. The disc begins to turn color, from a clean gold to a dull, tarnished bronze. The sound begins to deteriorate, slowly losing clarity until it is nothing more than unbroken static. It took about six months for the Python disc to complete this cycle, and for the life of me I can't figure out the cause--the CDs were stored in jewel cases away from chemicals and protected from temperature extremes, but they went bad nonetheless. And then I remember all those shows I hadn't listened to for years, at least not since first picking up the CDs. I went through them all, still stored in the paper sleeves and express mail envelopes they were delivered in. Most were in fine shape, but some showed early signs of decay.

Well. This sucks.

Here I have a collection of some rarity (I'm a sucker for such things--you should see all the defunct sports teams represented in my pennant collection) that I'm somewhat pleased with, but one which I don't really listen to with anything approaching regularity. And parts of it are going bad in an irreversible manner. What to do?

Sell them. On ebay.

Is that too crassly commercial of me? The Wife and I have some upcoming wish-list purchases (and they aren't the Amazon.com kind) that remain sadly unfunded and beyond the scope of our monthly budget. This is helping plug that gap, hopefully wholly but at least in part. And there are lots (well, at least some) collectors out there that are really, sincerely into collecting the Demento Shows, kinda like the way I am (or used to be) with Green Arrow comic book appearances. It doesn't seem fair to let my collection rot away if others could derive some pleasure from it.

I'm still not entirely happy with this, but I've made my peace with it. And I'm not selling all of my shows. I'll be keeping the surviving Christmas shows, along with those featuring Sneaky Pete and, of course, "Star Wars Cantina."

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