Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (7 page)

Configurations (or How The Industry F’d Us)

Back in fourth grade, Alissa Fox brought to class a miraculous device her father supposedly helped invent. It had a numerical keyboard and performed all four basic math functions, with the results visible (sort of) on a tiny gray screen. Of especial interest was the fact that you could turn the machine over and type a secret series of numbers, so as to produce words such as “hello” and “boobs” and “bigboobs.” This machine—called a
cal-cu-lator
—so totally blew our minds that it was assumed that Alissa Fox’s dad was in the CIA and could shoot lasers from his teeth.

Back when I was teaching undergrads how to write short stories that would horrify their parents, I often told this story, in an effort to compel my classes to think about how quickly technology has transformed our species, has shifted our attention from individual imaginative tasks to collective screen addiction and thereby replaced the peculiar sensitivities of our internal lives with a series of frantic buy messages. One of my students would eventually respond to this by smiling timidly and saying,
Man, you’re really old
.

Yes I am. I’m so old, in fact, that I’ve experienced all five of the
major configurations by which recorded music is received. (I exclude the player piano, which predates me by several months.)

Things I loved about vinyl records:

1. They were large, pitched to the scale of their emotional importance. You could sit them in your lap. You could study their intricacies without squinting, which was essential because it was impossible to understand the songs without having decoded the messages embedded in the album art, e.g. the significance of the four cards held by the mustached magician on Blue Öyster Cult’s
Agents of Fortune
, which Dale McCourt insisted represented the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, while his nemesis Gary Lahr said, no, they were tarot cards representing death and the grim reaper (somehow distinguishable) and, if memory serves, the Holy Grail.

2. Albums were fragile and therefore precious. You had to hold them by the edges, and flip them with great caution and slip them into their special paper sleeve before filing them away. You couldn’t take them places. You couldn’t leave them outside. They warped.

3. They exuded a faint and intoxicating cardboardy odor.

4. They invoked
a process
. You didn’t just press a button. You had to interact with the technology in minimal but crucial ways, not so much by dropping the album onto the turntable, which anyone could do, but by lowering the needle onto the record, which you could only do if you were old enough. What excruciating pleasure! To set the tip of one’s index finger under the arched band extending from the end of the stylus, then transport that feathery aluminum arm (with its glamorous and barely visible tip) toward the spinning record! There was a right way to do this and a thousand wrong ways and the results were amplified. If you got the yips, the needle went screeching across the record. If you missed the thin band of ungrooved vinyl, you landed in the middle of a song. If you dropped the arm from too high
you produced a crisp
pop
, known in the parlance of my crowd as popping a goochie.
(You yipped it, gooch.)

And the needle—the needle was not to be touched! The needle was
MADE OF DIAMOND
. Diamond was the hardest substance on earth. And yet the needle was the most fragile object on earth. How could this be?
It just was
. Touch the needle and the house will collapse around you. Your cat will burst into flames. Your parents will start having sex right in front of you on the living room rug for an hour. The most you could do was blow on the needle, so as to remove the dust gathered thereon, and even this was risky.
(You fucking loogied on the needle, gooch.)

But if you got the needle onto the record? Suddenly, the air around you was painted with sound. You had engineered a miracle, an intricate mechanism of conversion visible to the naked eye. You could track the minute dips and risings of the needle over the grooves, something I did religiously, until I had discerned the precise spot where the wispy jet engine that opens “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was interrupted by the thrilling squawk of George Harrison’s guitar. If you lost yourself in a record, lay back and closed your eyes, you would eventually reach the distant surf at the end of each side.

The effect was never the same with 45s, which I listened to as a very young boy. I hated 45s, not just because of those loathsome self-vaporizing yellow inserts without which they were impossible to play, but because of the first 45 I ever purchased, which I assumed was the theme from the short-lived and frankly racist cartoon
Hong Kong Phooey
but which turned out to be the short-lived and frankly racist disco anthem “Kung Fu Fighting.”

For all the aspersions it has suffered, the 8-track remains a bellwether configuration. It is best understood as a pioneer technology in the incremental attempt by Americans to convert their automobiles
into dwellings. Ashtrays. Bucket seats. Climate control. Why not a stereo?

My exposure to this innovation came via our babysitter Kay, who had a player in her Barracuda. On a few memorable occasions, when our parents needed to “unwind,” Kay whisked us away for a weekend in Hollister, a town best known for its rather shortsighted nickname,
The Earthquake Capital of the World
. This meant the damp, doggy aroma of her apartment, shared with half a dozen Belgian sheepdogs, and a diet of A&W onion rings with the soggy onion removed.

How many nights did I lie curled in the back of the Barracuda as Kay cruised Route 25, Hollister’s main drag, with Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” pumping from her 8-track console? She took drags from her Parliaments and sang along—
She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness
—and the sheer gypsy longing of that song made me feel like a gypsy, mystical and exiled, and made me realize how sad Kay was, her voice rising through tendrils of blue smoke, her eyes bound in mascara and fixed on wherever she was going, which was where I was going too, which was nowhere.

I can’t remember exactly when cassettes displaced vinyl, but it happened quick and mean, like most everything else in the eighties, with a reflexive disdain for the relics of the past. Albums were clunky and lame, so 1979. Tapes were sci-fi marvels—an entire record that fit in your pocket. Then came boom boxes, which brought music into parks and abandoned homes and culverts, places where it was possible to smoke dope without having to exhale into a bottle of Brut cologne. You could carry a boom box on your shoulder. You could become a one-person mobile radio station with shitty reception and BO.

Then, about two seconds later, the Walkman appeared. One could now listen to music as a private activity in a public space. One could
listen to the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” while actually
moving in stereo
through the main quad of your high school, in such a manner that regular people and objects assumed a sudden aqueous and symphonic significance, a discernible rhythm, and hitherto undetected emotional valences. Everyone became deeper and more beautiful.

We weren’t just the stars of our videos. We were the directors, too. If we wanted the world to shimmer with exuberance, we played Katrina and the Waves (“Walking on Sunshine”). If we wanted to wallow in romantic suffering—and what adolescent doesn’t?—we chose “Tempted” by Squeeze. If we wanted a dark jolt of aggression there was always Sabbath. Music, which had been a kind of world to which we applied, became something we applied to the world.

Cassettes could also be copied. The whippersnappers in the crowd, for whom the teat of piracy has come to feel like a birthright, will have trouble comprehending our dazzlement. Cassettes ran nine bucks retail back in 1983, or $2,700 in 2010 dollars. But you could buy blank tapes for forty-nine cents. So now we were into the production biz, too.

Inarguably, there were major drawbacks. To play a particular song required endless fast-forwarding and rewinding and declarations of “Okay, wait a second, dude, okay, here it is … shit, okay, just chill, it’s right here….” Tapes tended to melt in hot backseats, to warble in the presence of large, invisible magnets, to snap/tangle/unspool if you looked at them funny. I should mention the hiss, too, which grew increasingly prominent depending on the provenance of a tape. My copy of Prince’s
Black Album
, for instance (bootlegged from a real live drug dealer!) included such classics as “Rockhard in a Hissy Place,” “Superhissycalifragihissy,” and, of course, “Let Me Stick My Big Hiss in U.”

My loyalty to cassettes was inexplicable. I hated them.
Hated
them. But I had become a Fanatic at the dawn of the cassette era and soon had hundreds. I was, I’m fairly certain, the last music critic in
America requesting cassettes. “We don’t really make tapes anymore,” one flack told me. She paused. “Wait, were you joking?” I would still be listening to tapes, I suspect, had I not taken a new job and driven from El Paso to Miami in July of 1991. Half my collection melted on the trip down.

I claim no romantic attachment to compact discs, nor can I explain in any reasonable fashion how I came to own four thousand of them. The crude math suggests I was acquiring one disc per day for these dozen years, with one day of rest per fortnight, a sort of Drooling Fanatic Sabbath. It’s certainly true that my only consistent social activity was visiting used record shops. But now that I think about it, the reason I chose used record shops was because they accepted trade-ins, and I was trading in constantly, hauling dirty plastic sacks with shitty product someone else might want. So if we’re being accurate, I’ve probably owned more like six thousand compact discs, or roughly 187 days of music. This figure is especially difficult to fathom, given that the job I took in Miami was as an investigative reporter.

Then again, I devoted far more time and imagination to the acquisition of CDs than to any of the jobs I held during this era. I lied to publicists more or less constantly. I trolled the dusty bins at Goodwill. I shoplifted. Even after quitting journalism and vowing never to return, I took a temporary position as a music editor to get myself back on the Music Industry Dole. Actually, I did this three times.

In 1997, I finally quit the papers for good and moved to Somerville to teach composition. It struck me as perfectly natural to demand that my students make me a mixed CD as part of their final exam. And to volunteer at my local NPR affiliate for the chance to pilfer the stacks of promo discs. I found an old Italian guy who built shelves and sold them out of his driveway. I ordered two CD shelves and two book-cases.
Within a year, I had cleared the bookshelves to make room for CDs. Then I got the milk crates involved. Well, you know how this goes.

Did I make any effort to organize? Sort of. There was, for instance, a brief campaign to alphabetize. And a subsequent effort to organize by genre. For the most part, the CDs just piled up—on the coffee table, on the floor, on the windowsills. I had a small cache in the trunk of my car. Visitors were impressed by the size of the collection, though I could rarely find the particular CD I wanted them to hear. It might be said that my retentive compulsions had overrun my capacities for order. To quote my wife, upon her initial viewing of what I had described as my
music archive:
“Oh Jesus.”

Knowing the dangers of a technological lag, I resolved to go digital the moment I heard about iTunes. First, though, I had to spend some time bitching about capitalism. This took five years. I then proceeded to the nearest Apple store and did my patriotic duty. iTunes was a revelation. Several tons of cumbersome recorded music could now be burned onto my hard drive, where it would be stored in perpetuity, available for play and distribution. I had gone from being a guy with CDs under his couch to a mid-size record company.

In those early days, I often fantasized about the truly epic library I was going to create, one that included not just my favorite albums but the one or two standout songs from the hundreds of mediocre records I owned, that would serve as a kind of distillate of my bloated collection. This library would be divided not by the dull and inadequate genre tags of the market, but by a more precise set of terms.
Pimp Soul
for Cee-Lo Green and Chuck Brown.
Ecstatic Rainy Day Stomp
for Phil Cody and Patrick Park. There’d be a whole section devoted to covers. And songs that mentioned candy. All tracks would
be cross-referenced. There’d be a schematic tracing lines of influence, and a collateral filtering function. It was a beautiful vision, mathematical in its elegance.