Walmartallica

At the start of this month I was on a holiday in Floria. I hate December in the UK and in recent years have gone on trips to escape it. Florida isn't too far and has good weather, so it ticks the boxes. Well anyway, one day we decided to go to Walmart to get some supplies, and that's where the adventure began...

For anyone reading this who hasn't been to a Walmart, at first it seems like an amazing thing. It's kind of like a supermarket that sells food and then also sells pretty much everything else you could need - clothes, sports equipment, electrical goods, home goods, etc. Basically they sell everything. So we walked into this huge aircraft hanger sized place and then spent some time walking around just checking out the store. And of course, with it being 2023 and every man and his dog now interested in buying records, it wasn't too long before we stumbled across had a music section with a rack of records.

I was intrigued as to what records were for sale in Walmart, so I decided to have a quick flick through the rack, and immediately it seemed kinda cool and kinda fun. What I found was:
- There was a mix of old 'classics' and new releases
- Circa half of the records were pressed as 'Walmart exclusives'
- There were dividers (e.g. A-E, G-L, etc), yet absolutely nothing was remotely in alphabetical order.
- The records were crammed in so tightly that it was impossible to flick through them. I had to take handfuls out of the racks and them look through what was in my hands.

We ended up going into a few Walmarts over the course of a couple of days (more on that later), but the record sections were all pretty much the same in each. The most shocking was the total lack of organisation. I couldn't help but wonder why they bothered with the alphabetical grouping dividers at all.

Anyway, the game started when I came across a couple of Metallica records that were Walmart exclusives. And then something weird happened. I decided to buy them. Holding the sealed records in my hands, the artwork looked cool, the little Walmart exclusive stickers looked cool, and they were pretty cheap. So basically I just got sucked in and decided to buy them. Whenever I am in America, I have zero control and just buy all kinds of stuff because prices are good and it's so unlike my life at home where I never really go in any shops that sell records.

So I picked up both 'Master of Puppets' on 'Battery brick vinyl' and 'Ride The Lightning' on 'Electric blue vinyl'.

Now, before I continue, I need to backtrack a little and explain my relationship with Metallica. I've been a fan of Metallica since the early 90s. However, over the years I have listened to some (but not all) of their records, and those that I have listened to represent an almost random selection from their catalouge. The first one I heard was the self-titled 'Black' album a few months after it came out (1992) and Literally only a couple of months later I ended up listening to 'And Justice For All' as one of my friends bought it and played it a lot. And that was as much as I knew until 20 years later when, in 2013, I decided to check out the first three records ('Kill Em All', 'Master Of Puppets' and 'Ride The Lightning') all at the same time through the magic of downloads. And then only a few months after that I also checked out 'St. Anger' purely because I read a blog post from someone about how it was the worst record ever made... except I ended up loving it. And then seven years later, in 2020, I got around to checking out 'Death Magnetic' and also loved it. And that brings us up to date. So here I am calling myself a Metallica fan, yet there are still at least three albums that I have never heard so much as one song from - 'Load' (1996), 'Reload' (1997) and 'Hardwired to Self Destruct' (2016). So I think its fair to say that my journey through the Metallica catalog is both slow and unorthodox.

Also, even though I love most of the Metallica records that I have heard, I own none of them on any format other than digital files. Believe it or not, there are some bands that I like for which I have never been interested in buying records. The main three that come to mind are Metallica, Black Sabbath and Foo Fighters. The theme here is more 'mainstream' bands who (until recent years at least) never really had any 'limited edition' or colour vinyl releases. Back when I first heard Metallica, their records were all just standard black vinyl pressings probably pressed in hundreds of thousands or millions of copies. There was no colour vinyl and nothing limited or cool to chase, so I didn't care. And here I am in 2023 and it's way too late to try to get into buying original, first press Metallica records. I just never intended to buy any of their records at all. Yet here I was making a conscious decision to buy two records.

Well, that was the start of the game. Having read online that practically all of the Metallica albums had been pressed on colour vinyl colours for Walmart, I figured this represented a 'set' that I could collect. So I decided I needed to collect the set whilst I had the chance.

So we left Walmart and then the next day, on our drive south to our next hotel, I decided to stop at another Walmart to see if there were others that I could pick up...

In the second store I found '...And Justice For All' on 'Dyer's Green vinyl' and the black album on 'Some blacker marbled vinyl'.

And here's a picture of one of the black LP records with some light behind it to show what it looks like in real life.

After picking up four records I was then on a role, but I knew I still needed 'Kill 'Em All'. So I programmed another Walmart into Google maps, and when we eventually arrived I did managed to fine it. This one is pressed on 'Jump in the fire engine red vinyl'.

In total I had stopped at 3 Walmarts over a distance of 84 miles. I decided to save the route here just for fun.

So that was that. Objective complete. I had set out to pick up the Walmart exclusive pressings of the first five albums and I had done it. The drive to different stores made it feel a bit like a mini quest and was a bit more fun than if I had just been able to buy all 5 in one shop. But this was not quite the end of the story...

(To be continued...)