The Atrocious Music Collection

A long time ago, before the World Wide Web existed, I collected atrocious music. Over many years, I assumed some of the most wonderfully awful recordings ever made, building up this collection. Then, around 1990, to celebrate the positively awful, the first (and last) Atrocious Music Party was held in Bloomington, Indiana. What had largely been a private collection was shared with a small number of invitees, who were encouraged to bring their own terrible recordings to share.

And then the vault closed. The collection grew a little bit in the next few years, but largely remained as it was. The rise of the CD (and later the mp3 and audio streaming) and the slow death of vinyl took much of the wind out of the sails of the Collection, and my own life entered new stages. Coincidentally, the rise of the web led to a completely different world in regards to collecting this repertoire. The atrocious now sits on equal footing with the great, or the just plain (unenjoyable) awful, and at our fingertips are the details of the artist's life, the story of how the recording got made, what happened to them later. What had been a game of nearly pure speculation, with only the record jacket and sleeve providing clues, has become a simple matter of typing in the appropriate search keywords.

In this digital age, it may be hard to imagine the many hours of binning required to amass this collection. Whispers of the truly sickening or just plain weird might need to be tracked for years before finally locating the prized recording. Networking with like-minded individuals might lead to the gift of a cassette copy of a rare find. And then there were the chance finds, a purchase perhaps made solely based on the cover art - which often would only disappoint by containing music that really wasn't that bad after all. Or was only "bad," and not truly atrocious.

I have reached a point in life where I am divesting myself of ALL my records, carted around from state to state and house to house with each move. No more. Some I am digitizing, some not. The Collection, however, has led to the most soul searching. Are these (to some extent irreplaceable) records worth digitizing? Since the cover art and linar notes are often as important as the audio, would digitizing them really be "saving" them? And what would it say about me if I got rid of all my records except the very "worst" of them? (Maybe we shouldn't answer that...)

So, I have decided to preserve the collection on the web. For the first time since the Atrocious Music Party, the vaults have been opened to permit YOU access to some of the most poorly conceived musical projects of all time. Enjoy audio, cover art, factoids, and commentary! Begin you journey below...

--David Heuser, 2019

Chapter 1: Uri Geller

Chapter 2: David Geddes

Chapter 3: The Buckinghams

Chapter 4: Dora Hall

Chapter 5: Klaus Nomi

Chapter 6: Legendary Stardust Cowboy

Chapter 7: Louie, Louie

Chapter 8: Don Johnson

Chapter 9: Jake Thackray

Chapter 10: William Shatner

Chapter 11: Leonard Nimoy