Bless You, Spotify

I’ve been talking music lately with a youngster and it’s got me thinking… reminiscing more like, about the music I love. And I do love music, maybe more than anything. You kids today are soooo lucky, and soooo spoiled. I can’t imagine being a kid and having every song ever written at my Spotify or Apple fingertips, and what gibberish that ability might lead me to listen to?

You see, when I was a kid you had to patiently seek out music on the radio, or maybe television. There were always relevant musical guests on Ed Sullivan and Hee-Haw. Or you could tune in to “The Johnny Cash Show”, or the “Glenn Campbell Good-time Hour,” where you knew you’d find interesting and diverse music, but mostly you tuned your radio dial in quiet desperation… flipping past the latest, current, costumed thing like The Village People or Kiss (I apologize to those of you who are fans of these bands. No really! I am truly, truly sorry) until you found something to revel in, something that fucking moved your everlasting soul.

That was the music I was in search of when I was thirteen and the lights went out in my bedroom. I didn’t really care if it was rock, or pop, or soul, or disco. I just wanted it to make me feel something. It might make me laugh (The Streak), or cry (Cat’s in the Cradle), or think (Ode to Billy Joe), or dance (Proud Mary), but it had to make me feel alive. And once you found it you had to wait for it… and wait… and wait some more until you heard it again, usually at the very worst possible time, when the song was already half-way through, and you’d have to beg everyone in the room to shut up as you cranked up your single speaker, AM only, transistor radio, and of course you were always the youngest one, so no one paid any mind to your “ridiculous” pleadings.

And records cost money. They were precious. You might ask for The Eagles’, “One of these Nights” album for Christmas and get KC and the Sunshine Band instead, because “the department store was out.” And you also wanted a book. Your single, working mother couldn’t afford both, so you read your book and you listened to KC and the fucking Sunshine Band until you knew every word to “Shake Your fucking Booty.” Trust me when I say it was a difficult time, a time when one was literally forced to thank God for an older sister whom one hated, and who hated you, just because of her record collection.

Because you see, when something is rare you value it more. When I finally scored that Eagles album it was like owning the Mona Lisa. I lovingly cared for it. I only handled it’s outer edges, and I routinely changed my turntable’s needle, and I never, ever failed to return it first to it’s original paper sleeve, and then to it’s cardboard jacket if something, say by chance an afternoon baseball game, called. That Eagles record stayed in playable shape right up until CD’s came out, when it was retired to memory where it’s songs still haunt my showers to this day.

But please don’t take this as complaining. I am forever grateful that I was born in the age of radio, and of recordings. I truly don’t know how people survived before Barry Gordy and Sam Phillips saved this rockin‘ world, but they thankfully did, those Neolithic souls, somehow struggling along in their music-less lives so that we could live in an age where we are mercilessly bombarded with music, good music and bad, and where I, for one, love every damned song someone feels the urge to sing.