What to listen to next? Where do I begin? Where's all my money?

Today, there are so many ways one can listen to music that an obsessive like myself can go into convulsions just wondering how in hell I'm gonna listen to even half of this shit (even while my heart soars when considering the possibilities). I have a subscription to Napster which allows me to load just about anything from their massive database onto my mp3 player. I truly love this. I have a subscription to XM satellite radio which allows me to listen to stations organized categorically by music type, era, genre, etc. I truly love this (Beyond Jazz is worth the subscription price alone!). I use online services (free!) that match music to individual artists by style, meter, instrumentation, chord structure and what-have-you such as Pandora, Slacker and Last.fm. I truly love these. I patronize questionably legal Russian music sites that cater to frugal types such as myself by selling an amazing amount of music, new and old, for unbelievably low prices. I truly love these. I am very happy with the sheer volume of music available to me.

But it's not the same - not the same at all. It's too easy.

In the seventies, in my early teens, it sometimes took months to save for an album. It was an art to convince my mother that I couldn't live without the latest Zeppelin LP. Merely obtaining batteries so that I could share my music with friends via my cherished GE Loudmouth portable music generator was work! Believe you me, when you have to choose between Kiss Alive, Aerosmith's Toys In The Attic, and Zep's Physical Graffiti in 1975 because you only have enough for one album, you truly appreciate the moment when the the vinyl hits the turntable and the needle drops gently into the groove.

Frequenting a record store was (and is) a religious experience for music lovers such as myself. These stores are few and far between of late. My brother Garry and I made a pilgrimage to Tower Records every Christmas day for many years, since we'd both receive many Tower gift certificates, owing to our mutual love of minutely organized noise.

Ah, those were the days...

Circus Magazine's Yearbook

At 14, after collecting a sizable collection consisting of Grand Funk Live, Cheech and Chong, and a lot of Alice Cooper - as well as receiving my first 8-track tape player/am-fm stereo deck with speakers, headphones and a homemade turntable (from Mom's friend Joe, who fancied himself the technician), I abandoned cassettes almost entirely. It's funny, when reading the history of audio formats, to read that cassettes replaced the unwieldy and low end audio quality 8-tracks, when my personal history was just the opposite. Cassette tapes were very popular in the early 70's. Apparently their ascent was a long one, finally defeating those fat fucking tapes. For me, there were 4 more years of those awful, clicking devices to go.



This is also the year that I bought Circus Magazine's Yearbook paperback, containing a collection of articles from the past year. The article that I remember most clearly was about heavy metal, and was written by Lester Bangs. He described the primal, raw, amplified and distorted sound of Hendrix, The Who, early Kinks, Blue Cheer and the like. Lester's flights of meth-fueled prose resonated with my budding musical sensibilities. The first two LP's that I purchased after reading it were "Kiss" and "Hotter Than Hell", the first two albums by Kiss. I remember referring to them as "full albums of heavy metal" to my buddy Paul Beattie in class at Parkview Junior High in Cranston, Rhode Island. My favorite musical genre now had a name and 70's-era Kiss has remained a guilty pleasure ever since.