Colorado Man Gets His Werewolves Direct From London

A short story long on lessons of our changing cultural and economic landscape. Also, werewolves and headless Thompson gunners.

There’s a months-old draft of a post describing my personal history with the compact disc as the medium goes slowly extinct. Recently, I had an experience ordering one that I thought would make for a fine anecdote within the longer piece. However, that piece is too long and has languished too long already. I might as well attempt making those same points here.

Ever since I realized last summer that compact discs, even copies of recent album remasters from mere months before, were becoming harder if not impossible to acquire—my copy of The Cars’ Shake It Up remaster from a year back came from Germany!—I’ve made a point of keeping a lookout for the now-classic (might as well call it “classical”) rock/pop albums from my youth. For some reason it occurred to me to look up Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy on Amazon, and I learned that a 2007 Rhino remaster was available for five dollars and change.

It wasn’t on Prime, though. Why? This is the album with “Werewolves of London” on it; even people who didn’t grow up in the 1970s know and love this song. Still, at that price, and with a stack of discount points burning a hole in my digital pocket, I added it to an order that included a calendar, an aluminum reusable pump-spray bottle, and a four-pack of compressed air in cans.

With my rewards points added in the cost for the CD was zeroed out on the overall manifest. That was the good news. The bad news was the CD was shipping from overseas, and was not expected to arrive until the 27th. I was ordering this on the 9th.

I couldn’t complain, as what little I was paying for shipping was also zeroed out. Also, consider this—it came well over a week early, taking all of eight days for a super-discounted compact disc to leave a warehouse in merrie olde England, cross the Atlantic, and then 2/3rds of the United States, through a mountain pass to my little potato farming community in southern Colorado. I never take such wonders for granted. 

Such a strange thing, though. I probably could have found Zevon’s Excitable Boy in Walmart or Best Buy where they still sell them, with an emphasis on Dad rock for cheap. I got the first Boston album and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell that way. It’s hard to believe there wasn’t a single warehouse in all of North America that didn’t have Warren Zevon’s best-selling album, with a song that was heard as recently as a 16 January episode of the television show Supernatural. (Two werewolves dance to it.) 

There it is, though. Thank you, Amazon UK for coming through. Given the vanishing medium in favor of all things streaming, I’m grateful I could get it at all.