There was a priest who wrote a syndicated column in the ’80s (I wish I could remember his name) who, upon witnessing check-in day at the dorms of a Catholic university one August, was struck by how each student arrived with his own impressive stereo system - with receiver, record player, and, generally, really, really big floor speakers.
How, he mused, does that sort itself out it in a shared living space not much bigger than a typical suburban living room?
Well, in the intervening years it sorted itself out by the arrival of the Apple iPod in 2001. Young people stopped listening to their music as a shared, group experience, and began silo-ing up - listening to their music on their ear buds, very privately.
Whereas a generation or two earlier, roommates would have to work out a system for deciding whose music to listen to at any one time (and over-the-ear headphones were one option for late-night listening), nowadays those four students sharing a small dorm could pass an entire academic year and have no idea what their dormmates listen to.
The recent announcement by Apple that it will no longer manufacture or sell iPods - the once-ubiquitous personal music player that combined the portability of the earlier Sony Walkman with the music library capacity of a couple hundred milk crates full of LPs - has left music fans of a certain age wondering what this portends.
Most industry observers point out that young people today aren’t much interested in buying CDs or even digital downloads - they’re content to “stream” music from various services. But where those of us over the age of 50 once “streamed” music over our radios, today’s online portals allow the listener to set their preferences so tightly that the odds of encountering something new and startling - a job the better radio dee-jays were quite good at - have been largely eliminated..
For a generation who would pore over an album’s liner notes while gathered around the stereo listening to a new release (or a vintage find that was new to us), it seems, well, incomprehensible that music could be so solitary.
My neighbor Geoff - and my naturally competitive nature - got me heavily into collecting music early on in adolescence. When my cousins Renee and Kelly came to visit us in Ohio the summer I turned 14, they were dismayed by my dad’s Ray Conniff-heavy record collection. Off we went to the local department store to spend my hard-earned paper route money on more appropriate fare: Paul McCartney & Wings. Chicago. And, yes, Captain & Tennille.
The next summer, I sold my paper route to Geoff. He, too, started collecting records, and his taste was a bit heavier than mine: Deep Purple. Styx. A year later, I was washing dishes and busing tables at the local Bob Evans, and some of the older guys turned me on to Journey, which led to Steve Miller, the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers.
Geoff and I would go to each other’s house and listen to each others’ albums together. For awhile, I had more records, then he did. Then it became a contest of who could get to 100 first - which seemed a bit crazy, because my dad, who had a wonderful audiophile setup at our house, including an Ampex 350 reel to reel tape deck built into the family room wall, only had about 40 or so LPs, and maybe 20 reel to reel albums.
Sanity prevailed at the Benedetti household, but not for me. By the time we moved to California after I graduated high school, most of the back of my Honda hatchback was stuffed full of vinyl making the trip west.
When I got to San Diego State a few years later, and started writing for the campus newspaper, I found out that if you you wrote a review of a new LP - you got to keep the record. For free! Better yet, the editors didn’t expect you to review every single record you took - only about 1 in 10.
Before long there were 200 LPs, then 500. Milk crates were the storage vehicle of choice, and I had a lot. By the time I got married in the late ’80s, I had picked up an old newspaper back-issues storage cabinet that could hold close to 1,000 LPs. Soon that wasn’t enough, either, especially when I started writing reviews for the San Diego Evening Tribune and then Living Blues magazine.
The first dedicated record store I ever wandered into was back home in Yellow Springs, and it was called Dingleberry’s (as Dave Berry used to put it, I’m pretty sure I’m not making that up). It wasn’t very big, and it specialized in soul and rock.
By my senior year of high school, a national chain called Peaches Records had opened a store on North Main Street in Dayton. It was the size of a Kmart - and carried everything: Jazz, blues, country, classical, soul and rock. I was mesmerized. You could quite literally spend an entire day in there and not have perused even a sliver of the stock.
Shortly after, I followed my parents and siblings out to San Diego, and discovered the equally spellbinding Tower Records.
I was particularly drawn to the cut-outs section - records that hadn’t sold well and, rather than taking them back, the record label had simply written them off as a loss - allowing the store to notch the corner (the “cut out”) and sell them at a discount as damaged goods.
You never knew what you’d find there: I once found a straight-ahead jazz album by Chaka Khan, “Echoes of an Era, “ years before she began focusing on jazz. It had sold almost nothing - but I picked it up on a chance, and was blown away. Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White backing the singer who had left funk band Rufus to go solo but had yet to score her biggest hits, and here she was tackling George Gershwin and Duke Ellington!
The Tower Records by San Diego State had a whole section of African music, and I’d look through there fascinated by the fact that an entire continent - with its dozens or even hundreds of musical styles - had its own stars, radio stations, festivals and tours that were practically unknown to American music fans. Just on random buys (there being no Internet yet) I got turned on to King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti, and others.
You could browse through albums from India, South America, European traditional folk, Dixieland, bluegrass - there were entire worlds of music I had been wholly unfamiliar with, but just by browsing records in the bins and reading the liner notes (and spending a little money) I was able to explore those worlds. (The classical section was a self-contained, glass-enclosed sound-proofed store within a store - it intimidated the heck out of me.)
I guess you can do all this same exploring on a streaming service, but it seems even more overwhelming trying to make sense of it all with not even liner notes to help you parse it down to a manageable level.
And there was something very tactile about holding an LP in your hands - buy it or not? $5.99 wasn’t prohibitive, but it was enough to make you think about what you were going to purchase that day.
It was only 150 years ago - or, for those of us of a certain age, the childhoods of our beloved grandparents’ own parents - that “owning” a piece of music inferred that you had purchased a copy of sheet music.
Of course, prior to the introduction of Gutenberg’s press, nobody outside aristocracy could afford to own sheet music, either: Hand-written manuscripts were the province of composers and the rich who hired them. Musicians who entertained the rest of society did so from songs they had memorized.
But by the 1800s, many middle-class families had acquired a piano or pump organ, and had at least one member who could play. In the age before electricity, when interior lighting was from oil or gas or even candles, home entertainment was largely devised by what the family could provide themselves. Even working-class families for whom a piano was out of reach might have a guitar or violin. Sheet music of popular songs of the day was inexpensive and plentiful.
Although Thomas Edison (and his team) had introduced recorded music in 1878 via the phonograph, wax cylinders that could hold up to 3 minutes worth of music, at first most were used in arcades where visitors could listen to a recorded song in a small booth for a penny.
The introduction of the shellac disc record - what we today call a “78" for its speed when being played back (78 revolutions per minute) - allowed for up to 5 minutes of music. They also had better sound quality than the wax cylinders, and lasted longer.
By the 1920s, recorded music was starting to make inroads into American popular culture. While the Great Depression obviously impacted sales, a growing number of families were purchasing a 78 player and beginning to buy records to listen to on evenings and weekends.
That same decade, Bing Crosby made history when one of his records became the first to sell more copies of a recording of a song than the sheet music of the same song.
The age of recorded music had truly arrived, and the Swing Era that grew up around popular dance bands in the 1930s made the phonograph a deeply ingrained part of American culture.
The arrival of the 45 RPM single, and the 33⅓ RPM long-playing record, or LP, in the late 1940s changed things up once again - and in the process, solidified the primacy of the record in the music industry.
The smaller, 7-inch 45s, which only had one song per side, allowed for the further development of the automated jukebox - allowed more songs to be packed into the same space than earlier models using the 10-inch 78s. And the more resilient vinyl 45s, which didn’t break as easily as the shellac 78s, also allowed jukeboxes to become more robust.
But jukeboxes and radio were ways to introduce fans to music; the real money was in selling the records to the fans.
Whereas the big bands that dominated the Swing Era had issued singles - which were really doubles, since each side of the 78 held a different song - with the arrival of the LP artists such as Nat “King” Cole, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, among others, helped sell the model of an “album” as opposed to a single. The original “albums” had been introduced in the 1920s as a collection of 78s sold in a collection of four or more discs, grouped in a bound binder much like the existing photo albums. (Thus the name.) But they had simply been a collection of songs by the same artist.
The LP, with its 20-plus minutes per side, made the album the default recording format, and as mentioned, Sinatra, Cole and Fitzgerald created “concept” albums - eight to 10 songs on a common theme.
Movie and Broadway soundtracks also leant themselves to the new format, since you already had a series of songs from the production.
While rock ’n’ roll began life as a singles format, the maturation into plain old “rock” also led to bands like The Beatles following their predecessors’ example and recording thematic albums. Soul music was on the same path, with Ray Charles, Booker T & The MGs and Stevie Wonder pulling together consciously organized collections of albums, and country-western wasn’t far behind.
By the early 1970s, a new radio format was growing in popularity - “AOR,” or Album-Oriented Rock. Stations on the higher-fidelity FM channels would play entire albums in order - undoubtedly allowing for home pirating by those with a tape recorder, but also driving sales.
Progressive rock - a very serious style with overtones of classical music - and even hard rock all were built around the LP album. Singles were taken from an album, but the 45s served to drive album sales.
When you went into a Peaches or Tower record store, it was organized around albums. Usually the 45s were in a small section near the front, organized by whatever the Billboard Top 40 was that week. Once a single dropped off the charts, finding that 45 was next to impossible. But albums stayed in print seemingly forever.
Albums were also issued on reel to reel and cassette tapes, but the reel to reels were the province of hardcore audiophiles, and the cassettes were considered lower-quality and typically found at gas stations and department stores.
You didn’t go to Tower to get a tape - you went to Tower to buy an LP.
The album - and music collecting in general - received its last major technological bump with the release of the compact disc.
There had been previously - and since - other formats attempted: The wire recorder used a spool of thin wire instead of magnetic tape in the early 1900s; 8-track tapes did well at selling music to 1970s’ consumers who wanted to choose their own music when driving their car. Digital Audio Tapes, or DAT, had promised the clean sounds of digital delivered by CD, but never caught on. Laserdiscs were a niche market for music videos (as well as feature films, for hardcore videophiles who eschewed movies on tape). There was also Sony’s MiniDisc, which went over about as well as its Beta-format videocassettes.
But the CD was likely the favorite format of record company executives because it allowed them to sell a new copy of the same album to customers who already owned it on vinyl!
And because the CD could hold up to 80 minutes of music, labels began to include “extras” when they reissued LPs on CD: Outtakes, unreleased songs from the sessions that led to the album, singles never included on an album.
“Box sets” - lavishly produced multi-disc sets covering a style, an era, the entire output of a small label, a band’s greatest hits - became huge business for record companies, knowing that they could never churn out too many compilations for Grateful Dead fans.
By the time Steve Jobs was brought back to Apple in 1996 to try to save the faltering tech pioneer, it wasn’t clear he could. Ousted from Apple in 1985, the company he co-founded in 1976 with high school friend Steve Wozniak, Jobs had gone on to found NeXT Computing and bought what was to become Pixar from George Lucas.
After working with the design team at Apple to develop the innovative iMac in 1997, Jobs went looking for the “killer app” - just as “VisiCalc” (one of the first spreadsheets) had helped drive sales of the Apple II in the 1970s, Jobs wanted a software program so popular that customers would purchase a Mac just to be able to run the software.
The result came out in 2001 - iTunes. You could copy your CDs to your library, and listen them on your iMac. It would be 10 months before the iPod would be released, so for the first 10 months of iTunes’ existence, Apple paired each iMac with a Rio 600 MP3 player - 32 MB of storage powered by a single AA battery. It wasn’t much, but it could sync with your iTunes library and you could download songs to the Rio to listen to on the road.
But the iTunes / iPod business model wasn’t complete until Apple added the online iTunes store in 2003.
Everyone had told Jobs this would never work: Real music fans wanted physical copies of their collection, and everyone else was simply illegally downloading pirated copies from various websites like Napster.
The conventional wisdom held that nobody would pay good money for an MP3.
But Jobs reasoned that if the music was high quality, and fairly priced (99 cents per song, originally, less than the price of a 45 20 years earlier), people would buy music legally - generating revenue for record labels, and income for musicians.
As was often the case with Jobs, he was right and conventional wisdom was horribly wrong.
While some older folks clung to the turntables and vinyl, and others their vast CD collections, others began moving toward digital. It was far easier and quicker to create a mixtape - now known as a playlist - in iTunes than it was on your stereo’s tape deck. And an entire wall of LPs could comfortably be held in a hard drive smaller than a cigar box.
Maybe the death of the iPod indicates that the current generation doesn’t have the same relationship with music. Again, my dad’s generation - the ones whose childhoods were spent in the shadow of World War II, didn’t have the same relationship with music that the subsequent rock and soul generation did.
While my 5,000 LPs may have been more than most of my friends, it was far from the largest collection in my circle.
Prior generations had their favorites - when my grandmother passed away 30 years ago, my mom gave me my grandmother’s record collection. It was all 45s - but 45 albums. There are maybe 50 albums total in her collection (including a gorgeous 45 box set from Bing Crosby where he gives a short spoken introduction to each song). And my dad, like a lot of dads in the Atomic Age, had a decent collection of exotica records - Martin Denny and the like.
The post-swing jazz culture encouraged buying lots of records - but jazz collectors tended to focus on specific artists. A Miles Davis fan may have had nearly everything Miles put out, but not a lot of other releases.
It was the late 1960s when the relationship of music fans to recorded music became much more serious, at least among fans of rock and R&B. When friends would come visit, they’d peruse your record collection - often as much to judge as to learn. Listening sessions were also often debate sessions - who had the better post-Beatles career, John or Paul? Was Yes as serious as Emerson, Lake & Palmer? Did Rush sell out with synthesizers in the ’80s? Earth, Wind & Fire or The Commodores? Who sweat more in concert - Springsteen or Thorogood? Why was Yoko Ono’s music even a thing?
A good music library seemed to us to be as essential to living a full life of the intellect as a collection of literature. And if the Doobie Brothers, AC/DC or Fleetwood Mac weren’t as portentous as Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway - well, Hemingway couldn’t clear away a bad week from your pores as quickly as Santana or Eric Clapton played at full volume..
But maybe all that was just so much pretense; maybe finding satisfaction from the assembly of one’s music library is nothing more than posturing.
It may well be that the generation coming of age now has a healthier relationship than we did - content to have music as background noise while they live their lives, and spending their money on things other than far too many records that they’ll rarely listen to. (Let’s not talk about those April Wine LPs I bought once upon a time ...)
It is certainly different from how my generation approached things, though.
I’m glad I got to experience music the way I did, when I did.
My childhood friends Mark and John buying Boston’s first album, then dragging me over to their house to listen to it on John’s stereo system. Straight through twice. I can’t hear “More Than a Feeling” without thinking of that time of my life, or the friends I shared it with. I was still in junior high when Scott and Doug’s mom semi-forced us to check out Steely Dan and Abba on their stereo console in the living room.
In college, having a neighbor named John Fahey convince me to buy an album by the eclectic acoustic guitarist of the same name (and no apparent relation) was a revelation - my roommates and I trying to wrap our heads around the keening wail of a solo guitar being played like nothing we’d ever heard.
Fighting with my future roommate Andy Rathbone over a box of new blues LPs from Alligator Records at the Daily Aztec offices in the mid-’80s, then listening together to Fenton Robinson, Son Seals and the Big Twist & The Mellow Fellows one after the other, mesmerized.
Certainly, listening to Tangerine Dream’s unsettling pre-new age electronic music “Rubycon” with two friends was more exciting than listening by myself would have been; talking about the music afterward was just as if not more important than the listening experience itself.
My entire lifetime of discovering music, of enjoying it, of trying to figure it out has been nothing if not a group effort.
If that experience was of a time, it was of my time, and I’ve enjoyed nearly every minute of it.
In my early 20s, while living at home and taking classes at SDSU, I bought a pair of huge BSR floor speakers from DAK Electronics - a mail-order firm (today an online outlet).
They could handle up to 250 watts per channel, had thundering bass coming out of their 15-inch woofers, and basically rocked anything you threw at them, Beethoven to Basie to Bachman-Tuner Overdrive.
Some years later, after my divorce, I was living in a triplex in downtown Escondido. Across the courtyard, in the next apartment complex, were two young guys in their early 20s sharing a unit. They also shared their rap music on their boombox at all hours, including school nights when my two kids were trying to sleep.
I’d gone around to their door and knocked; they never answered. I did see them a few times and asked them if they could tone the music down on school nights - they just glared at me in reply.
So.
I spoke to the other neighbors, and found they were as annoyed as I was. So with their blessing, one evening I moved the BSR floor speakers to my front patio, and aimed them at that offending apartment. I put AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” on the turntable, but didn’t press play (yet), and we sat back and waited. About 10:30 or so, they started blasting their music at full volume.
Game on.
“Highway to Hell” at 110 decibels is a special experience; with that stereo, those speakers, it sounded pretty much like Angus Young and Bon Scott were performing from my living room.
When that track ended, we could still hear their boombox going - vainly trying to keep up. “Girls Got Rhythm” was next on Side 1, and we turned the volume up a touch to try to get our point across.
Four minutes later, as that track ended, we heard ... silence. I lifted the tone arm off the record, and we waited for awhile. Ten minutes, 15 minutes ... glorious silence. My neighbor George helped me lug those huge speakers back in the apartment and we called it a night.
The two young men in question never spoke to me about that night - but they also never again played their music loud on a school night.
Some years later, those speakers were again put to interesting use. I was working at a streaming video company around the turn of the millennium. At this company, you were pretty much fair game on your birthday.
For Keith’s birthday, one of our programmers somehow got access to Keith’s work computer - on which Keith had thousands of MP3s to listen to while working. The programmer, Doc, backed up all of Keith’s music files, then replaced each MP3 with a country-western song - while preserving the original meta data, so when Keith got to work the next morning (on his birthday) it still looked like his alternative, punk and thrash were as he had left them.
Except every time Keith went to play Green Day, he’d get Waylon Jennings. Bad Brains was now Johnny Cash. Queensryche had become Alan Jackson.
To fully appreciate the inside joke you’d have to know that Keith hated country music. Hated it.
When it was our buddy Jeff’s birthday coming up, Jeff was careful to take his computer offline - and to lock the door to his office when he left the day before his birthday.
Unbeknownst to Jeff, I had those big floor speakers in the back of my station wagon. We got a ladder from maintenance, carefully lifted a ceiling tile in the hallway outside his door, crawled up into the ceiling and placed those two speakers aimed down at his desk - being careful to ensure they were snugly contained by the suspension cables holding up the ceiling. Then we ran a spool of speaker wire from the speakers to Doc’s office, dropped the speaker wire down a corner, out of sight of his office window, and connected them to a spare stereo and CD player we had.
After replacing the ceiling tiles, we vacuumed the hallway carpet outside Jeff’s office - and there was no sign we’d been up to anything.
Jeff’s birthday arrived, and nobody said anything. We had our morning standup staff meeting, grabbed coffee, and headed back to our own workspaces.
You need to understand this: Jeff hated reggae. Jeff hated reggae with a passion that made Keith’s dislike of country seem almost like admiration.
On cue at about 9 a.m., Bob Marley began blaring from Jeff’s ceiling - followed in short order by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh.
Jeff said nothing. Well, not at first. Finally, about 40 minutes into it, he slammed open his door, looked up and down the hallway, and said in a loud, threatening voice, “Enough! Turn this crap off NOW!”
Which seemed reasonable.
But the Scottish bagpipe music that replaced the reggae? Yeah, maybe not so much.
After 20 minutes of that awful noise, Jeff again came out into the hallway and yelled “STOP!”
I suppose, in hindsight, the opera that replaced the bagpipes might have been, well, cruel. I’m pretty sure Jeff just put his head down on his arms on his desktop and wept.
At least it wasn’t Yoko Ono!
Last week’s Lost in Cyberspace, about the erosion of joy and happiness in contemporary society, is echoed in this weekend’s piece by fellow Substacker Tara Hensley.
She links to a couple other writers who have written on the fact that the professional class largely eschews fun - while those who work and live in what online denizens quaintly call “the real world” are still having parties, telling jokes, letting loose.
It’s worth checking out.
-30-
So what was your second choice after “Highway To Hell”?