I was talking to some friends recently and the question came up what was the first music album you ever owned?  Obviously being the old codger that I am my first album acquisition occurred more or less back in the dark ages.  After racking my brains for a moment, I realized it had to have been "Girl You Know It's True" by Milli Vanilli.

Do you remember Milli Vanilli?  They were these two kind of model looking guys with some long dreadlocks.  They also had really thick European accents when they spoke, but their singing sounded like a native born English speaker, which should have seemed suspicious at the time, but nobody noticed at first.  They were all the rage for a very brief time in the late 80's and early 90's.  They had a few #1 hit songs on the radio and even won a Grammy for best new artists, which they were later stripped of in shameful fashion due to a scandal.   But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

From what I recall I was in 6th grade and I didn't know anything about music, but I kind of wanted to get into it because it seemed like that's what all the cool kids were doing.  It was that awkward age where you have one foot firmly still in childhood and the other foot in wanting to be seen as a grown-up.  I wasn't totally ready to give up on my toys, but I also wanted to start having what I perceived as more mature interests like music.  The only way I knew of at the time to hear new music was to listen to the radio, so I started doing that religiously for about a year.  I remember listening to Casey's Top 40 every week, in which Casey Kasem would count down the biggest hits of the week.

On a side note, did you know that Casey Kasem provided the voice for Shaggy on Scooby-Doo?  I learned that around the time I was in college and it blew my mind.

Anyway, I got exposed to a lot of hits circa 1989 by listening to Casey's Top 40 and I was trying my best to be open-minded and like most of what I heard, although a lot of it was really bad.  I did kind of like some songs by this Milli Vanilli group I heard on there.  Specifically, "Girl You Know It's True," "Blame it on the Rain," and "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You."  Three songs by the same group!  That pretty much made me a fan.  

It still never occurred to me that you could go out and buy albums so you could listen to songs you liked whenever you wanted.  My best solution up to this point was to us a blank cassette and try to record songs off the radio as they played.  

Then at some point we had a fundraiser at my school.  I think we had to sell magazine subscriptions or something like that, and depending on how many you sold you could win various prizes.  I think I sold a few subscriptions to my parents for magazines they probably already subscribed to anyway.  They were somehow able to credit their subscription renewals towards my fundraising numbers.  I certainly don't remember being super go-getter about getting out in the neighborhood and selling magazine subscriptions to total strangers.  Maybe my Dad also convinced a couple of his co-workers to subscribe to People magazine or something.  

At any rate, I somehow sold enough subscriptions to win an album on cassette tape, which is the main way people bought albums back then.  There was a whole list of artists I could choose from and, while I initially blanked, I suddenly remembered I kind of liked Milli Vanilli, so that was the tape I chose.  

For a while, that was the only tape I owned so I listened to it a lot.  In addition to the hits I already knew and loved, I got to know all the other songs on it really well.  In other words, the ones that weren't deemed good enough to be singles on the radio.  Just right now I looked at a track list of the album and I instantly remembered every single song on the album except one.  I decided to look that one up on YouTube and within the first 5 seconds, I remembered that one, too.  I  guess I just forgot its title.  

As I got a little older, my music tastes changed.  I stopped listening to the radio altogether.  One of my friends introduced me to R.E.M., which became my new favorite band and I eventually went down a path of semi-weird and obscure rock music as my go-to listening choice.  Milli Vanilli kind of got left in the dust.  But it wasn't the end of their story.  Not by a long shot.

It turned out Milli Vanilli were frauds!  It turned out they hadn't performed on their album at all and instead they just danced and lip-synced during "live performances."  I don't know exactly how the news came out.  There were rumors that a disgruntled manager thought they were getting too big for their britches and spilled the beans.  It was a huge scandal at the time and big news.  Like I mentioned they ended up being stripped of their Grammy award in disgrace and that was sort of the last time we heard from them.  Allegedly the real band who recorded the songs wasn't deemed "photogenic" enough to be popular, so that's why the record company hired these two models to pretend they were the band.  I heard they released a second album billed as the "Real Milli Vanilli," but it totally tanked.  Maybe the record execs knew what they were talking about.  I've never heard a song off of it, although I'll admit I'm a little morbidly curious.  Apparently one of the fake guys committed suicide a few years back, which is an unfortunately tragic turn of events to this whole story.  Although, it does beg the question why haven't we gotten a movie about Milli Vanilli yet?  This seems like a total no-brainer to me.

Sometime after the scandal broke I remember getting a card in the mail inviting me to participate in a class action lawsuit against Milli Vanilli, since I owned one of their albums and thus had been defrauded by them.  All I had to was fill out the card and return it.  It even had pre-paid postage, so it took me all of two minutes to do it.  After that I completely forgot about it.

Several years later I received a letter in the mail informing me the lawsuit had been settled and it included a check for my share of the settlement, which came to a whopping one dollar.  Still, considering I hadn't paid anything for the album in the first place since I won it from selling magazine subscriptions, I actually came out ahead in the deal.  

And that's how I made a buck off of the Milli Vanilli debacle.