The Endless Parade of Unfamiliar Music

I'm familiar with the work of a lot of bands and musicians. But there's very few of them I'm intimately familiar with. I just don't have the resources to own every CD by John Hiatt or They Might Be Giants or Blur, even though I have a couple of CD's by each of these performers and like them all very much. This presents a problem when a band I have a casual interest plays my fair city. I have a policy that if you travel 3,000 miles to play my town and I own at least one your CDs and have more than a curiousity in your act, I'll see you live. Sometimes, I'll get blown away. I knew a bit about the work of Primal Scream and decided to see them. And when they came out and started in our their pulsing, driving, swirl of sound, you might as well have plugged my head into one of the amplifiers because I was helplessly into it. But what usually happens is I find myself suffering through the songs of a band that I don't know that well until they play one of the 5 or 10 songs I know. That happened last night when I saw the Stereophonics. I'm a moderate fan of these Welshman --- they made the 3,000 mile journey and I own three of their albums, so I went to see them on a school night. So of course, they spend most of their set list on new stuff which is average to O.K. Then they say "Now we're going to play three songs of our first album." Finally. So I hear "A Thousand Trees" and two other songs off "Word Gets Around" and I headed home. I probably didn't get my $15 worth.