Scout Vintage Prefers Motley Crüe Over the Ramones

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

Forget the Billboard charts or VH1's Greatest Hits of Whatever Decade. The true litmus test of a musical artist's distinction and endurance is on the vintage concert t-shirt racks at overpriced used t-shirt emporium Scout Vintage T-shirts on Mulberry Street. It's a strange land where both reincarnated-as-a-hipster-go-to band Hall & Oates and New York punk legends the Ramones share the same real estate space, as well as the same exorbitant price tag of $168. And it's ripe for pop-culture analysis.

Under the guise of research, we had the best old time musing down memory lane looking at every single shirt. Prices range from a bargain-basement $58 for Tommy Page (90's one-hit-wonder of "I'll Be Your Everything" fame...you know that you know that song) to $188 for bands like Motley Crüe (we must admit that the red "Shout at the Devil" 1983 tour tee was pretty awesome) and, well, Genesis.

Grid View

Expand

• Probably the only time these two artists were ever in the same room together.

Sensing a theme, we found that even though the golden days of hair metal are over, the genre is still hot stuff at Scout, commanding $128 for a baggy, faded Slaughter "Stick it to Ya!" tee and $148 for a gloriously high-haired White Lion tee. At first we were surprised that Van Halen was priced at a somewhat insulting $128, but then we realized that it was from the Van Hagar era. David Lee Roth would have bumped that back up to $168 at least.

Adult contemporary and easy listening are in high demand, too, with Barry Manilow, disco hip-swiveling Andy Gibb, and everyone's guilty pleasure Bryan Adams sharing the same $148 price tag as Billy Joel. Sorry, Billy. We also saw some odd bedfellows within the same price points. For instance, a skillfully made up Boy George during his Culture Club days cost $168, as did Styx of "Mr. Roboto" fame and the legendary Led Zeppelin (plus a solo Robert Plant.) Also, apparently Air Supply (the long pastel blue sleeved tee was really cute) and Eric Clapton have the same retail power—their price tags were both $158.

Two questions prompted by our research: How can these people sleep at night charging such insane prices on t-shirts that were probably worn twenty years ago by some mullet-coiffed sweaty guy from the Midwest? And how do they decide that Genesis has a higher cachet than Elvis? A staffer told us that the tees are sourced and priced in Atlanta (which maybe explains the preponderance of $88 Randy Travis?). The pricing is mainly based on which artists are the most popular, if the tee is a limited edition from a specific concert, and also, of course, the condition. (Though we did notice a couple holes in the sleeve of a $168 The Cars tee.)

If you're like us, maybe you recall attending, oh, say, a Slaughter concert back in the 90's. Had you known then that you could have made a 600% profit twenty years later, wouldn't you have bought out the entire merch stand?
· Scout Vintage T-Shirts [Official Site]