Remember walking into your local record store, back when LP covers graced the walls and the room smelled faintly of dust? You strolled past the displays showcasing the latest releases and headed for a lesser-known section of the shop: the cutout bin.

What Is the Cutout Bin? 

Often located in the back of the store, the cutout bin overflowed with LPs (sometimes cassettes and, in later years, CDs), often by famous artists, at a fraction of the retail price. Why? These album covers had notches or holes cut into them; sometimes the notch even cut into the inner jacket, but never the record itself. These marks distinguished the albums from regular product, often originally intended for promotional use only. Some music distributors would mark the copies when an album was no longer in print; therefore the stores could not return the unsold product. Since record stores obviously wanted to get rid of this overstock in order to carry new material, these albums could be yours for only $1. As a music buyer, the fun part was digging through bins or racks of these cutouts, searching for previous bestsellers, imports, and other rarities. You could even try unknown artists — after all, with the low cost, you had nothing to lose. I remember one of the first cutouts I ever bought: The Beatles’ Reel Music LP, but printed in Mexico. Although the songs were exactly the same, the titles were printed in Spanish on the back cover. I thought this was quite the buried treasure!

With MP3 downloads rapidly replacing the physical CD (and with LPs and cassettes long gone), cutouts have become a rare artifact. Still, the spirit of cutouts lives on — the pleasure of unearthing a buried treasure, either an unknown artist, a so-called “bomb” release by a well-known musician, or even rare singles. This column is devoted to that spirit, of revealing unjustly ignored albums, long-forgotten album tracks, and obscure artists. I welcome your input, too — feel free to post your rare gems, and I may use them for future columns (giving proper credit, of course).

"Far Out" by the Crown Heights Affair 

Let's kick off this column on a funky note with an unfairly overlooked 70's band, The Crown Heights Affair. Founded in Brooklyn, New York in the early 70s, the eight-piece group blended the sounds of Kool & the Gang and Earth, Wind & Fire to produce a danceable groove with jazz-like chord changes. They experienced moderate success on the US dance charts with singles such as “Dreaming A Dream,” “Every Beat of My Heart,” “Foxy Lady,” and “Dancin',” but managed to reach the U.K. Top Ten with “You Gave Me Love” in 1980. But the single that captured my attention was “Far Out,” a single off their 1976 album Do It Your Way. The single was written by brothers Bertram Charles and Raymond Reid, two founding members of the Crown Heights Affair.