By Frank “Smokin” Truatt
It was the 1970’s, when a trip to the record store was always an adventure. I would look for the new songs they were playing on the radio, and I would pick up a couple of 45 single records. Occasionally, I would pick up an album if I liked the artist enough to drop the extra bucks. Some of the 45’s came with what they called a picture sleeve, usually a picture of the artist posing for the title of the song, usually limited to the bigger artists and released in a limited supply. The real visual impact came from the album. There were pictures of the artist and sometimes even the words to the songs on the record jacket. Buying 45’s was reasonable, usually from 79 to 99 cents a disc. Buying a bunch did start adding up, so many of us discovered a record company called K-Tel Records. For those that remember, K-Tel would take some of the biggest hits of the day and put them on an album. They would fit about 22 songs on a record that was reasonably priced. Most of the songs were hits, and a few were songs that never charted that well, exposing us to a bunch of new artists and songs. If this all sounded too good to be true, there was a tradeoff. In order to fit 11 songs on the side of an album, the quality of the recordings became a bit compromised. To fit 20 minutes of music on a side, they placed the record grooves closely together, affecting dynamic range and, therefore, sound quality. To make 11 songs fit into about 20 minutes, songs were edited to make them shorter, or they were faded out early. Even though the pressings of the records were not high quality, and the records sleeves were flimsy, K-Tel gave us a way to enjoy the hits of the day at an amazing price. Not bad for a Canadian Company that also brought us the Veg-O-Matic food processing appliance. The albums, as well as their many household products were advertised on television. Albums like “Music Power,” “22 Explosive Hits” and “Dynamic Sound” sold well in the record stores. By the way, K-Tel is still around today, and they distribute 200,000 songs worldwide a year on digital platforms! In 2013, Forbes wrote a piece on K-Tel stating that the way people discovered new music in the 1970’s was through their compilations, similar to the way Spotify playlists are used to find related artists today. It was a great idea for its day, and those K-Tel albums, those that survived, are now being sold on eBay for more than we paid for them back in the day!
