Neat thread. I remember having my own holy grail of CDs since the mid to late 1980s.
I'd always been a fan of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but for many years all I could find were re-orchestrated versions of the soundtrack. Then when the first of many director's cuts began playing in theaters around 1990 it seems a revival ocurred and a few years later a CD release followed. These days, you can find Hungarian, Malaysian, etc... releases of the Blade Runner soundtrack on eBay. They're every where!
I was trying to find Russ Ballard's "Voices" for so long. I liked the song when I was in college, and I remember being chilled to the bone by it when they used it in an early episode of Miami Vice as Crockett and Tubbs are riding that cigar boat to the Bahamas to kill Calderone. Then one day around 1995 after years of searching the bins of used CD racks I walked into a music store in Century City during lunch. There I found an old, banged up, sticker-covered used Rod Argent CD that had some Argent and Russ Ballard singles on it. Voices! I here voices!!
One that continues to elude me in a strange way is Tim Heintz' "Tim Heintz". I really love the song "Dear Jacqui". I can remember one day in a Wherehouse in the late 1980s, I had only enough cash to buy one CD. It came down to a choice between Patrick O'hearn's Eldorado or the Tim Heintz CD. I said to myself, "in a month or so I'll come back and get the Tim Heintz CD." Well, months turned into years and I searched for that elusive CD, but it had long been out of print and no one had it on eBay, Amazon or any other place I searched. Web searches turned up nada. Then one day about five years ago, Google delivered a hit for me. It seems a smooth jazz radio station in the San Francisco Bay area issued one of those compilation discs for charity and "Dear Jacqui" was on it. Since then I managed to find another similar compilation disc and bought than one too. Strange thing is that this one has a speed problem with it. It's almost as if the master tape was playing at the wrong speed when they transferred it to CD because it sounds slightly slow which gives it that faint "Exorcist" type voice. Weird. To this day I still haven't been able to locate the actual Tim Heintz CD, but at least I have Dear Jacqui on my iPod now.
