wax No Good Will Here Dirtying our fingers in search of bad music. If it's bad music you seek, you can look to the many informed picks offered this month by earSHOT's array of contributors. But when you've read enough curmudgeonly criticism from folks, who - and admittedly I'm one of them - spend their waking hours puzzling over why Sun Ra, Pylon and Half Japanese never ruled the charts, there's another, perhaps better, barometer. Rummage through the grimy dollar-and-under bins at local Good Wills and thrift shops. These records are so bad they were given away. 1) Andy Williams is the hands-down king of the giveaways. On a particular Saturday afternoon trip to secondhand stores in Philadelphia and South Jersey, we found no less than 10 different records by the blue-eyed, whitebread crooner. After seeing Williams' smiling, dorky mug on the covers of Warm and Willing, Call Me Irresponsible and To You Sweetheart, Aloha, it's easy to understand the urge to get rid of these. What's harder to pin down is why they were purchased in the first place. 2 & 3) (tie) Not surprisingly, Barry Manilow rated second in this informal survey. The man who brought us "Copacabana" and "Mandy" has revived his career on the premise that he's America's guilty pleasure. What was unexpected was Johnny Mathis matching Barry record for discarded record. 4) Disowned Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass albums turn up just about everywhere you look. Which is odd. Regardless of your take on the smooth sounds of Alpert, the group's sleeves are an aesthetic goldmine. The most celebrated, Whipped Cream & Other Delights, features a seductive brunette clad in nothing but dessert topping. 5) Three copies of Amy Grant's Unguarded showed up in the Trenton Good Will. It's probably just a statement on the decline of religious virtue in the Garden State, but Grant's canon, apparently, is no ark of the covenant. 6) Jim Nabors: Well Gaawwlee. Need we say more? 7-10) (tie) It gets kinda dicey keeping score at this point, but four of the more notable forgettables are misfits from the '70s. Little Tony DeFranco and The DeFranco Family's Save The Last Dance For Me, the Bay City Rollers' Rock and Roll Love Letter, Rick Derringer's Spring Fever and the Village People's Go West all struck chords. Honorable Mentions: Ferrante & Teicher (Dial M for Music), a cassette of The Swans' White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, Ted Nugent, Ratt (Round and Round), Debbie Gibson (Out of the Blue), Hall and Oates (Big Bam Boom), Emerson Lake and Palmer (Brain Salad Surgery), Jerry Vale's World and a series of "Pleasure Programmed" Readers Digest 8-track anthologies titled Hey Good Lookin', With a Song in My Heart and Thanks for the Memories. And on morbid note, the 8-track version of John Denver's Some Days are Diamonds turned up at the Village Thrift near Temple. Implicit in the album's now eerily poignant title is that some days are not.. - Brian Howard this month | archives | masthead | cp site