I was very, very late to the CD revolution. I bought my albums on vinyl for as long as I could, well into the 1980s, and when LPs disappeared from the stores, I took a deep breath and started buying cassettes if I really wanted an album.
That’s how I first heard Hootie and the Blowfish’s immortal Cracked Rear View in 1994. From the jangling opening guitars of “Hannah Jane” to the mournful a cappella verse of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the album is darn near perfect.
It was shortly after that when I discovered vinyl had not disappeared completely off the face of the earth. I found a nearby store that had a small cache of LPs for sale. I spent $96 I didn’t really have in my first visit — this was when LPs were still in the $15-$20 range — and I went back fairly frequently.
Cracked Rear View was one of the first purchases of my renewed vinyl hobby. I was not disappointed — until the very end. I have never been able to explain why, but there’s just something in the sound of a vinyl record, a presence of some sort, that is lacking in other formats.
So when the mournful sounds of “Goodbye” faded, I was very, very content and waited for Darius Rucker to sing the final, hidden track. And waited. And waited. And waited.
The vinyl version of Cracked Rear View does not have the final, a cappella verse of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” “Goodbye” is goodbye. I was extremely disappointed, but heck, it’s 53 seconds long. I could live without it, although its absence makes the album slightly less than darn near perfect.
In the late 1990s, I discovered that the prices of vinyl records had skyrocketed on eBay, and I did a little profit-taking. The most remarkable profit I made was on Linda Perhacs’ magnificent album Parallelograms, which I purchased in the early 1970s for 99 cents out of a remainder bin and sold on eBay 30 years later for $165. Those early 1990s albums were going for two and three times their original price, and so I parted ways with Hootie’s wonderful debut.
After awhile I realized it hurt not to have some of those albums anymore, especially after I finally invested in a fine Audio-Technica turntable, and in the meantime vinyl has made a respectable comeback. During my last visit to Target, I snapped a photo of their vinyl aisle and posted it on Facebook, saying “I feel somewhat vindicated. Target’s LP section is now bigger than its CD and DVD sections combined.”
After I posted it, I noticed something I had not noticed in person — one of the albums on the shelf was Cracked Rear View. I was back at Target the next day.
As I listened contentedly through the album, I thought to myself, “Surely in 30 years, they’ve rectified the mistake and put ‘Motherless Child’ at the end of the vinyl edition.”
No, they have not.
I did a casual online search or two, but I have never found an explanation why vinyl lovers can’t have the whole album complete with the hidden track. My album cover indicates it’s a 2017 reissue, and I know there’s a 2019 remaster, so maybe they fixed it then. Maybe I’ll find out someday.
It the meantime, it’s just one of life’s little mysteries.
