Get “The Complete Oblivion Records.” Free.

Get “The Complete Oblivion Records 1971-1975” for free. by just shifting your mouse to the right hand column of this blog and clicking on the record covers.

“Free?! 55 tracks —plus outtakes— worth more than $75 for nothing? Really?! How come?”

Well, there are a few reasons, some will make some sense to you, some not:

1. We like our catalog, and some 30 years after recording them, we’d still like people to hear it.
2. The people buying CDs are mostly over 30 years old, and it’s usually young people who like to discover music.
3. A physical release would probably lose money, so why not easily share the music with the entire world?

In 2004, five years after my Oblivion partner Tom Pomposello passed away, his son Travis and I talked about re-releasing the complete catalog, maybe as a box set. All the music was special, each was important in its own way in both blues and jazz genres, and though it hadn’t all been successful it seemed like it all had a place in the 21st century.

Sample covers for “The Complete Oblivion Records on MP3”

A box set seemed like it would never sell since the audience for each record was often different. I thought we could create a “revoltutionary” format and put all six album on one reasonably priced CD in an all MP3 format (MP3s were at their peak of making record companies crazy). Since the most active audience for music, people under 30, weren’t buying too many CDs anyway, why not go all the way and speak in a contemporary language? I even comped up a few covers and a poster. Then my day job got way busy and the whole idea was dropped.

As the music business the way we knew it continued to implode over the next few years it looked like MySpace was introducing more music to people and I set up an Oblivion site, but I wasn’t the right guy to work it. Eventually, it occurred to be that the costs of finally putting out the CDs, and tallying up the work it would take to get them distributed, would probably wouldn’t do anything but lose me money, and besides, not that many CDs would actually sell. So, in the end, there wouldn’t actually be too many people listening to the music anyway.

But by starting this blog to chronicle my recollections of the history of the label, encoding the music as MP3s, and posting all six records on my music blog, the audience for the Oblivion catalog would be the largest it could possibly be.

So, take the music for free. Enjoy it, play it for your friends, expose it on your radio shows. It’s yours.