If you were a music fan back in the ’70s, you no doubt heard about the products released by Winnipeg-based K-Tel International.
There were K-Tel Records compilation albums advertised on TV all the time.
“20 Original Hits! 20 Original Stars!” the announcer enthusiastically declared while trying to sell you maybe seven songs you liked and 13 you could do without.
I’m pretty sure one of those K-Tel Records was the first album I ever bought, in the early ’70s, before I started investing in “real” albums like Deep Purple’s Fireball and Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death. The thing I remember most about that old K-Tel platter is that it included a song by Looking Glass called “Brandy”.
Man, I used to love hearing about “Brandy” and what a good wife she would be.
Of course, once you bought a bunch of K-Tel albums you needed some place to put ’em, so they tried to get you to buy the “space-age designed” K-Tel Record Selector as well.
How could you not want to shell out four bucks for something that not only “has a mind of its own”, but is “attractively finished in a gift box”?
I remember K-Tel. One compilation album I think everybody had in late 1973 was called “Fantastic.” It had 22 songs including two by Elton John.
This wasn’t the first K-tel album I owned (“20 Explosive Hits was the one), but in order to christen the new GE plastic $35 stereo I got on Christmas morning, my Mom got me “Fantastic”. My aunt, who worked at Gertz Department Store, not to be left out of the fray, got me the Carpenters “The Singles” and my brother “Under the Influence of Love Unlimited”. I remember my grandmother sitting and “tsk-tsking” while I was playing “Armed & Extremely Dangerous” and saying that she’d “like to take the one screaming instead of singing and throttle her”. She didn’t understand the vocalists on an R&B record.