I have a confession to make.
I don’t really listen to recorded music. I don’t subscribe to Spotify, or have an iTunes music library, or listen to the radio, or carry CDs in my car (never mind MP3s, which are far too newfangled for the ancient chariot which takes me to work every day). Most of the time, I’m alone with my (somewhat disturbed) thoughts, and I like it that way. Either that, or I’m laughing out loud at a joke I told myself, because I’m the funniest person I know.
I used not to be like this. I have an enormous collection of CDs and tapes and (gulp) LPs, a good deal of them accumulated during that latency period when we all accumulate our musical tastes, which means that most of the people who performed these classics are in adult diapers by now. Virtually everything newer in my collection is a consequence of my Boston folk “career”, which means that I can count the major-label commercial albums I’ve bought in the last decade on half the callused fingers of one hand.
I used to listen to my albums until I wore them out. But not anymore. Like I said, I like being alone with my thoughts. That means that just about everything I buy now gets listened to, maybe, twice, and then they’re filed, in a time-honored stacking system which pretty much guarantees that I can never find anything at all – not, as I’ve said, that I’m looking to listen to them anyway.
But this is stupid, right? I have a coworker who also has an enormous collection. He’s a bit more anal-retentive than I am. His CDs are (were?) in alphabetical order. Every so often he listened to the whole thing, every album, from beginning to end. It took him the better part of a year. Surely I don’t need to go to these lengths – but I should be doing something.
And I frequently make this resolution, and I frequently fail to do anything about it. But recently, I’ve made a little bit of progress. See, in the mornings, I have to do some stretching exercises, due to my advanced age and propensity for sloth. And it’s just mind-numbingly dull, and I hate it. So I’ve discovered what lots of people have discovered – listening to music is a great way to distract yourself from how awful exercise is.
And, of course, what I’m listening to is all the folks in adult diapers.
First, it was Southside Johnny and the Jukes. I heard one of their tunes on the radio at the Minglewood Tavern when I was waiting to do my set at the Songwriter Shuffle in January. The woman sitting next to me was just delighted about this – she was old enough to be my mother – that is, my mother when I was actually listening to Southside Johnny and the Jukes – namely, younger than I am now. I have just about all of their albums. In Cleveland in the ’70s, WMMS, the Home of the Buzzard, was the best damn AOR station in the entire world. ‘MMS didn’t catch the punk wave, but they caught everything else: the Cars were huge on ‘MMS when they first went national, and then our adopted son, Bruce Springsteen. And, of course, the Jukes. So every morning for a few weeks earlier this year, it was me and Southside, and it turns out I’m just as much in love with them as I used to be.
Then it was the Michael Stanley Band, which was e-nor-mous in Cleveland, their home town, but virtually unlistenable now, at least to me. That took five minutes, at which point I turned to Traffic’s “Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys”, which I still think is a classic, especially that riotous moment when Stevie Winwood convinces himself, incorrectly, that he can comp a syncopated rhythm with his left hand and solo with his right.
Todd Rundgren’s “Adventures in Utopia”: too electronic. Fishbone’s “Truth and Soul”: angry ska masterpiece – listened to the whole thing. Elvis Costello, “This Year’s Model”: genius. Joe Jackson, “I’m the Man”: well, that’s where I am right now, and so far, yep, also genius.
As much as I’m enjoying my trip down memory lane, I do realize that I need to be listening to something without dust on it. Fortunately, I’d easily be able to find new stuff I like, because pop music has barely changed in the last thirty years. Sure, rap and hip-hop and five-octave divas have changed the landscape a little, but the difference between my youth and today is the Beatles vs. Justin Bieber, while the difference between my youth and thirty years previous is the Beatles vs. the Mills Brothers. Hell, the Rolling Stones aren’t even dead yet (or, at the very least, they’ve managed to make it ambiguous).
But I’m pretty sure that adventure is going to have to wait. My primary music-listening time is going to be in my car, and my car will have to be equipped with some sort of fancy-dancy Internet-enabled hooha before I’ll be able to access really new music at my convenience. Of course, we’ve recently discovered that such automobiles can be commandeered from afar thanks to their fancy-dancy Internet-enabledness. So maybe I’ll just keep listening to the folks in adult diapers.