Record Stores

So...online music is great and iTunes has changed everything but...I miss record stores. I know I am dating myself even more but I really miss browsing different record stores to see what I could find. Record stores...records are an anchronism. Some old people like me have turn tables but the only other people who have them are elitists and bands seem to put out some things on vinyl primarily just to prove how cool they are. So when I say I miss record stores what I mean is I miss records AND CD stores. I don’t have any problem with CD’s other then the tiny liner notes that my old eyes do not handle allthe tiny liner notes all that well.



Growing up there used to be all kinds of St. Louis record store options. A lot of small shops and department stores all had record departments. This was back when their were 45’s but they held on into the Album era and then the record stores came in. There was the Peaches chain and no one in town was really cool unless they were keeping their albums in a Peaches crate. It was as big as a super market with aisles and ailes of music and if it was out there to be found they normally had it. They were bought out while i was in college by the much larger Sound Warehouse chain and things kind of went to hell after that.

Streetside records reigned for a long time. They had a hip Webster location and a hipper U-City location and as they expanded the chain they seemed to hire knowledgable people and were good places to shop. In expanding the chain they brough a lot of convenience and they held on till the late nineties before compressing back into what I believe are only two stores left. One in St. Louis, one in Columbia. Sadly at this point in time they do not even have a web site and other then for hip hop music in St. Louis have faded into irrelevence. I could not even find one of their logos on line.



Sometime during their reign Best Buy and Circuit City starting selling music and Circuit City stunk but there was a hay day where you could find all kinds of obscure stuff and imports at the Best Buy on Watson. There was was some great stuff there for a few years I assume because they had a musichead manager.

That came to an end and about that time Barnes and Noble and Borders started to really get into the music business and you started to be able to get stuff on line. A few smaller stores survice but both selection and service are eclectic and can be somewhat annoying at places like "Now Hear This." We do still have the hallowed Vintage Vinyl store on the loop and Euclid Records in Webster. Those are places where you can hear something obscure being played when you shop and get into an annoying discussion with the staff about what was REALLY the best album by the band "Soul Coughing." But those kind of discussions are few and far between and the people at barnes and Noble and BordersBetween file sharing with Napster and the others before they became legalized and with Limeware and Soulseek afterwords. iTunes we discussed above but there are a lot of places to buy music online, sometimes fromt he record companies directly and sometimes from the artist site directly I cannot say enough times...online changed everything

iTunes

iTunes


So....we music heads have had iTunes for quite a while now. At least since 2001 and it along with the iPod has been thoroughly assimilated and almost as thoroughly accepted by pretentious music heads as well as the general populace of radio listening, MTV watching slouches and know nothings. My son, the pretentious indie rock snob would no more do without his iPod then he would go without food and shelter. But iTunes drives the system. Originally I flirted with and actually (shamefully) had a relationship with Musicmatch which was at the time a sad jukebox program which required (in the dark ages) not just copying the CD onto your computer (we had not formalized the language of piracy as of yet to call this “ripping”) but then arduously having to fill in the information regarding track title, artist and album in the appropriate boxes. In light of the process now it was the rough equivalent pf scribbling with chalk pictures of bison on a cage wall. Now I pop a CD in the disc drive and it asks me if I want to import...or it just imports and it pops up in my iTunes library alphabetized by artist. Very handy.

The CD ripping project started on Musicmatch and then had to be replicated all over again when I got iTunes and finally, magically my Apple Computer. I had 15,000 songs on itunes when I got rid of my first Apple. I had backed them up on an external hard drive but that hard drive is not governed by iTunes so the reimporting process in inexact and requires more discipline then I currently posess. I now have 11,599 songs on my iTunes library and I would guess that about 200 of them are doubles I have been too lazy to delete but it could be as many as 500. It took months of sitting at the computer every night. Going to the basement, grabbing CD’s I wanted on there (and some that I did not really want on there but new that if another pretentious music snob looked on my computer I would want to have them on there. Not that it would ever happen but your cant be too careful when you are a pretentios music snob.) and then ripping then one disc at a time with it taking a few minutes a disk. Perfect work to watch TV by and the library grew and grew.

At first it was magical having this much music at my disposal but on my first 40 gig Mac it really did effect the computers speed having ALL memory sucked up by these music files. Still I persevered. In college and after I had always been a huge mix tape maker (once again in the dark land of the forgotten past of “cassettes”) and when we moved to digital music, mobile digital music, the fairly short lived discman portable cd players, it was a real hassle to make mix CD’s. I even bought a CD burner component for my stereo never even sensing that we were two years away from having high speed burners on our computers. So when I got the Mac I was able to start cranking out playlists and mix CD’s for the car and....life was sweet. looking at the library with its extensive (somewhat obsessive) compilations of music by Alejandro Escovedo (52 songs), Ani Difranco (82 songs), Beatles (88 songs) Bob Dylan (245 songs)...you get the idea. It was heaven. Obscure stuff. Mainstream stuff. Whatever I wanted. Multiple cuts of the same song (23 versions of the Pixies “Wave of Mutilation”), odd musicians and combinations of musicians illegal downloaded in that earlier age through the goldem time with Napster. All manner of those things musically Becker.

But now I have assimilated this technology. I take it for granted that the favored part of the CD library (because I still have not put all of the 1400 or so discs on a computer) is at my fingertips or available for my ears whenever I want. With this familiarity has come the hated contempt. Now having several thousand songs at your disposal at any given moment seems inadequate. It seems like there are only so many mixes I can put together without them rutting into a numbing sameness. the fact that the list is alhabetized leads to a lot of CDs starting with songs by the Afghan Whigs or Alejandro Escovedo. there is always newer music to put on but evidently all this digital music at my fingers, or just growing old, or just growing broke and buying fewer CDs has caused me to listen to less new music...which is ashame.



Thene there is the iTunes music store....the financial engine that drives this free service. If you don’t know what your looking for it will find it for you. It will look at your music library and “suggest “ things. It is insisious and expensive. Would I EVER go out and buy a CD with King Harvest’s “Dancing In The Moonlight”? NO. WOuld i click and pay 99 cents for it on a whim? ABSOLUTELY. I think I did that about 300 times in 2006. I even bought a few full length CD’s online but of course the ancient snob in me still likes to have the jewel box and they still have not found a good way to download liner notes and CD art. Early on I explained to my son that the world was divided into two groups of people, those who read liner noes, and those who did not. Still the ease of say...hearing the song “Click, Click Boom” on TV or the Sopranos theme “Got Myself A Gun” and then jumping online and buying it is too much of a temptation.

There is a laziness to this digitized music that the purist music lover in me holds in contempt. I remember back when I was twelve making mix tapes on 8 Tracks. 8 Tracks, those clunky tapes that had 4 diferent “tracks on them which on an 80 minute tape meant four 20 minute segments to program which meant adding up the times of the songs to do it right and not have the irritating “clunk” suddenly end a song. Cueing up 33’s and occasionally a 45 from ine or my brothers collection laboriously timing the hitting of the “RECORD” button with the start of hissing needle finally getting to the song. Ahhh...suffering for art. now it is click, click, click and done. I can do a mix CD for any occasion and looking at the playlists it appears I do with CD mixes made for trips, events, months, sporting events, any “occasion”. I plunk out CD’s for friends that they do not even want just to go through the exercise. My most recent compilation (being a hater of Christian rock) is a compilation of songs by secular artists that appeal to my bent brand of Christianity including songs like Johnny Cash’ Cover of Depeche Mode’s song “Personal Jesus” and Tom Wait’s “Jesus Gonna Be Here.” Eclectic, pointless and all mine. Very sad. I am, if nothing else a complainer.

I do not know where it takes me next. My next computer and iPod will likely have the capacity for me to have all my arcane CD and album library at my disposal. 30,000 or so songs. And in time that too will become inadequate. Like me.