Is Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy Gold Yet?

Art Edwards
2 min readJan 25, 2020

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Everybody has their tickets for the Murphy’s Outlaw show with me — Bud — at Rock Bar in Scottsdale, AZ on Friday, 2/21/2020, right?

This was a series I last ran at my blog in 2012. Because of the gracious efforts of John Principale, we have some updated numbers on the sales of Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy, and whether the album has gone gold or not.

For those unfamiliar with gold record status, it’s when an album has shipped 500,000 copies from the record company to retailers (or at least that’s what it used to be). No one knows for sure how many units an album has shipped other than the record company (in our case, Mercury Records). That zero actual records “ship” in digital forms makes everything even more confusing.

So, neither I nor John Principale knows exactly how many copies of Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy have sold, but that hasn’t kept us from speculating in the past. It’s been eight years since we last explored the issue, so here are the latest Soundscan numbers on Fizzy, which back in the day tracked about 90 percent of all album sales.

According to Soundscan, Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy has sold:

400,779 copies

For those of you keeping score, that’s a nice increase from when John last checked these numbers in 2012:

386,543 copies

That means Fizzy has sold about 14,000 copies according to Soundscan in about eight years.

So, if Soundscan is listing over 400,000 Fizzy sales, and Soundscan still represents about 90 percent of the total sales market for an album, then that would put the total shipped copies of Fizzy at something like:

445,000 copies

That’s still over 50k short of certified gold.

So, Fizzy is not gold yet, but hey, maybe someday.

Also noteworthy is the fact that, according to Soundscan, The Bottle and Fresh Horses has sold:

64,208 copies

So, together, the pair of records have probably sold about a half million copies. Nothing to sneeze at.

Wanna hear some live versions of songs from both Fizzy and The Bottle and Fresh Horses played by three of the four founding members of the Refreshments, plus Jim Gerke? Then, come see Murphy’s Outlaw in AZ on 2/21/20!

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Art Edwards

Art Edwards is a cofounder of the Refreshments. His latest solo album, Loving Every Other Minute of It, came out in 2020, his latest novel, Badge, in 2014.