Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  Do me a favor and hold my beer. Thanks, dude. I’ll be right back.

  Yeah, but have you ever seen Michael Bublé play live?

  Don’t you wish these jazz dweebs would learn to play a real song?

  Exile on Main Street is okay, but it’s no Steel Wheels.

  Did you ever want to be, like, a musician yourself?

  Paradise Theater is an American classic.

  3. Blüdthirsty.

  4. The song is about a blind and deaf quadriplegic boy. Imagine the Who’s “Tommy” without any major notes and told from the point of view of the pinball.

  Configurations (or How The Industry F’d Us)

  Back in fourth grade, Alissa Fox brought to class a miraculous device her father supposedly helped invent. It had a numerical keyboard and performed all four basic math functions, with the results visible (sort of) on a tiny gray screen. Of especial interest was the fact that you could turn the machine over and type a secret series of numbers, so as to produce words such as “hello” and “boobs” and “bigboobs.” This machine—called a cal-cu-lator—so totally blew our minds that it was assumed that Alissa Fox’s dad was in the CIA and could shoot lasers from his teeth.

  Back when I was teaching undergrads how to write short stories that would horrify their parents, I often told this story, in an effort to compel my classes to think about how quickly technology has transformed our species, has shifted our attention from individual imaginative tasks to collective screen addiction and thereby replaced the peculiar sensitivities of our internal lives with a series of frantic buy messages. One of my students would eventually respond to this by smiling timidly and saying, Man, you’re really old.

  Yes I am. I’m so old, in fact, that I’ve experienced all five of the major configurations by which recorded music is received. (I exclude the player piano, which predates me by several months.)

  The Phonographic Era (1966–1979)

  Things I loved about vinyl records:

  1. They were large, pitched to the scale of their emotional importance. You could sit them in your lap. You could study their intricacies without squinting, which was essential because it was impossible to understand the songs without having decoded the messages embedded in the album art, e.g. the significance of the four cards held by the mustached magician on Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune, which Dale McCourt insisted represented the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, while his nemesis Gary Lahr said, no, they were tarot cards representing death and the grim reaper (somehow distinguishable) and, if memory serves, the Holy Grail.

  2. Albums were fragile and therefore precious. You had to hold them by the edges, and flip them with great caution and slip them into their special paper sleeve before filing them away. You couldn’t take them places. You couldn’t leave them outside. They warped.

  3. They exuded a faint and intoxicating cardboardy odor.

  4. They invoked a process. You didn’t just press a button. You had to interact with the technology in minimal but crucial ways, not so much by dropping the album onto the turntable, which anyone could do, but by lowering the needle onto the record, which you could only do if you were old enough. What excruciating pleasure! To set the tip of one’s index finger under the arched band extending from the end of the stylus, then transport that feathery aluminum arm (with its glamorous and barely visible tip) toward the spinning record! There was a right way to do this and a thousand wrong ways and the results were amplified. If you got the yips, the needle went screeching across the record. If you missed the thin band of ungrooved vinyl, you landed in the middle of a song. If you dropped the arm from too high you produced a crisp pop, known in the parlance of my crowd as popping a goochie. (You yipped it, gooch.)

  And the needle—the needle was not to be touched! The needle was MADE OF DIAMOND. Diamond was the hardest substance on earth. And yet the needle was the most fragile object on earth. How could this be? It just was. Touch the needle and the house will collapse around you. Your cat will burst into flames. Your parents will start having sex right in front of you on the living room rug for an hour. The most you could do was blow on the needle, so as to remove the dust gathered thereon, and even this was risky. (You fucking loogied on the needle, gooch.)

  But if you got the needle onto the record? Suddenly, the air around you was painted with sound. You had engineered a miracle, an intricate mechanism of conversion visible to the naked eye. You could track the minute dips and risings of the needle over the grooves, something I did religiously, until I had discerned the precise spot where the wispy jet engine that opens “Back in the U.S.S.R.” was interrupted by the thrilling squawk of George Harrison’s guitar. If you lost yourself in a record, lay back and closed your eyes, you would eventually reach the distant surf at the end of each side.

  The effect was never the same with 45s, which I listened to as a very young boy. I hated 45s, not just because of those loathsome self-vaporizing yellow inserts without which they were impossible to play, but because of the first 45 I ever purchased, which I assumed was the theme from the short-lived and frankly racist cartoon Hong Kong Phooey but which turned out to be the short-lived and frankly racist disco anthem “Kung Fu Fighting.”

  The 8-Track Era (1973–1975)

  For all the aspersions it has suffered, the 8-track remains a bellwether configuration. It is best understood as a pioneer technology in the incremental attempt by Americans to convert their automobiles into dwellings. Ashtrays. Bucket seats. Climate control. Why not a stereo?

  My exposure to this innovation came via our babysitter Kay, who had a player in her Barracuda. On a few memorable occasions, when our parents needed to “unwind,” Kay whisked us away for a weekend in Hollister, a town best known for its rather shortsighted nickname, The Earthquake Capital of the World. This meant the damp, doggy aroma of her apartment, shared with half a dozen Belgian sheepdogs, and a diet of A&W onion rings with the soggy onion removed.

  How many nights did I lie curled in the back of the Barracuda as Kay cruised Route 25, Hollister’s main drag, with Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” pumping from her 8-track console? She took drags from her Parliaments and sang along—She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness—and the sheer gypsy longing of that song made me feel like a gypsy, mystical and exiled, and made me realize how sad Kay was, her voice rising through tendrils of blue smoke, her eyes bound in mascara and fixed on wherever she was going, which was where I was going too, which was nowhere.

  The Cassette Era (1980–1991)

  I can’t remember exactly when cassettes displaced vinyl, but it happened quick and mean, like most everything else in the eighties, with a reflexive disdain for the relics of the past. Albums were clunky and lame, so 1979. Tapes were sci-fi marvels—an entire record that fit in your pocket. Then came boom boxes, which brought music into parks and abandoned homes and culverts, places where it was possible to smoke dope without having to exhale into a bottle of Brut cologne. You could carry a boom box on your shoulder. You could become a one-person mobile radio station with shitty reception and BO.

  Then, about two seconds later, the Walkman appeared. One could now listen to music as a private activity in a public space. One could listen to the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo” while actually moving in stereo through the main quad of your high school, in such a manner that regular people and objects assumed a sudden aqueous and symphonic significance, a discernible rhythm, and hitherto undetected emotional valences. Everyone became deeper and more beautiful.

  We weren’t just the stars of our videos. We were the directors, too. If we wanted the world to shimmer with exuberance, we played Katrina and the Waves (“Walking on Sunshine”). If we wanted to wallow in romantic suffering—and what adolescent doesn’t?—we chose “Tempted” by Squeeze. If we wanted a dark jolt of aggression there was always Sabbath. Music, which had been a kind of world to which we applied, became something we applied to the world.

  Cassettes could also be copied. The whippersnappe
rs in the crowd, for whom the teat of piracy has come to feel like a birthright, will have trouble comprehending our dazzlement. Cassettes ran nine bucks retail back in 1983, or $2,700 in 2010 dollars. But you could buy blank tapes for forty-nine cents. So now we were into the production biz, too.

  Inarguably, there were major drawbacks. To play a particular song required endless fast-forwarding and rewinding and declarations of “Okay, wait a second, dude, okay, here it is … shit, okay, just chill, it’s right here….” Tapes tended to melt in hot backseats, to warble in the presence of large, invisible magnets, to snap/tangle/unspool if you looked at them funny. I should mention the hiss, too, which grew increasingly prominent depending on the provenance of a tape. My copy of Prince’s Black Album, for instance (bootlegged from a real live drug dealer!) included such classics as “Rockhard in a Hissy Place,” “Superhissycalifragihissy,” and, of course, “Let Me Stick My Big Hiss in U.”

  My loyalty to cassettes was inexplicable. I hated them. Hated them. But I had become a Fanatic at the dawn of the cassette era and soon had hundreds. I was, I’m fairly certain, the last music critic in America requesting cassettes. “We don’t really make tapes anymore,” one flack told me. She paused. “Wait, were you joking?” I would still be listening to tapes, I suspect, had I not taken a new job and driven from El Paso to Miami in July of 1991. Half my collection melted on the trip down.

  The CD Era (1992–2004)

  I claim no romantic attachment to compact discs, nor can I explain in any reasonable fashion how I came to own four thousand of them. The crude math suggests I was acquiring one disc per day for these dozen years, with one day of rest per fortnight, a sort of Drooling Fanatic Sabbath. It’s certainly true that my only consistent social activity was visiting used record shops. But now that I think about it, the reason I chose used record shops was because they accepted trade-ins, and I was trading in constantly, hauling dirty plastic sacks with shitty product someone else might want. So if we’re being accurate, I’ve probably owned more like six thousand compact discs, or roughly 187 days of music. This figure is especially difficult to fathom, given that the job I took in Miami was as an investigative reporter.

  Then again, I devoted far more time and imagination to the acquisition of CDs than to any of the jobs I held during this era. I lied to publicists more or less constantly. I trolled the dusty bins at Goodwill. I shoplifted. Even after quitting journalism and vowing never to return, I took a temporary position as a music editor to get myself back on the Music Industry Dole. Actually, I did this three times.

  In 1997, I finally quit the papers for good and moved to Somerville to teach composition. It struck me as perfectly natural to demand that my students make me a mixed CD as part of their final exam. And to volunteer at my local NPR affiliate for the chance to pilfer the stacks of promo discs. I found an old Italian guy who built shelves and sold them out of his driveway. I ordered two CD shelves and two book-cases. Within a year, I had cleared the bookshelves to make room for CDs. Then I got the milk crates involved. Well, you know how this goes.

  Did I make any effort to organize? Sort of. There was, for instance, a brief campaign to alphabetize. And a subsequent effort to organize by genre. For the most part, the CDs just piled up—on the coffee table, on the floor, on the windowsills. I had a small cache in the trunk of my car. Visitors were impressed by the size of the collection, though I could rarely find the particular CD I wanted them to hear. It might be said that my retentive compulsions had overrun my capacities for order. To quote my wife, upon her initial viewing of what I had described as my music archive: “Oh Jesus.”

  The Digital Era (2005–)

  Knowing the dangers of a technological lag, I resolved to go digital the moment I heard about iTunes. First, though, I had to spend some time bitching about capitalism. This took five years. I then proceeded to the nearest Apple store and did my patriotic duty. iTunes was a revelation. Several tons of cumbersome recorded music could now be burned onto my hard drive, where it would be stored in perpetuity, available for play and distribution. I had gone from being a guy with CDs under his couch to a mid-size record company.

  In those early days, I often fantasized about the truly epic library I was going to create, one that included not just my favorite albums but the one or two standout songs from the hundreds of mediocre records I owned, that would serve as a kind of distillate of my bloated collection. This library would be divided not by the dull and inadequate genre tags of the market, but by a more precise set of terms. Pimp Soul for Cee-Lo Green and Chuck Brown. Ecstatic Rainy Day Stomp for Phil Cody and Patrick Park. There’d be a whole section devoted to covers. And songs that mentioned candy. All tracks would be cross-referenced. There’d be a schematic tracing lines of influence, and a collateral filtering function. It was a beautiful vision, mathematical in its elegance.

  Alas, my sloth. Transferring CDs to computer is not a particularly strenuous activity as compared with, say, harvesting potatoes. But it does require a degree of patience. There are decisions to be made. (Which albums to include? Which songs to include? How to classify and rate a particular song?) Heretofore, my collection had been predicated on not making such decisions. I was not so much a curator as a hoarder. To this day, less than 15 percent of my collection has made it onto the computer, and a good percentage of these songs are unidentifiable, because they were ripped from homemade discs and I was too “pressed for time” to type in the artist or track name. My own laziness saddens me.

  But here’s the thing: even if I had the energy to create such a library, I wouldn’t have the room. I know this for a fact because my hard drive fried a couple of years back and I wound up paying a geek extortionist 1,300 smackers to get the thing running again, an operation that involved a new hard drive with “extra memory sticks” to accommodate the 8,500 songs in my library. And because my computer contains my entire creative life, I live in perpetual terror of doing anything to make it crash and so I’m terrified to add any more songs unless I remove an equivalent number, decisions over which I can easily fritter away, say, fourteen hours.

  I assumed moving to a home three years ago would solve the storage crisis. Instead, owing to space issues associated with human breeding, my collection was stowed downstairs in what we call the Serial Killer Room, so called because it is dark and contains various menacing tools and stains on the concrete floor that are perhaps dried blood. The net effect of my digital revolution, in other words, is that I now have access to approximately a sixth of my collection.

  The other eensy problem is how to play the music. In my old place, I wound up rigging the computer to connect with my Bose boom box. In our new place, thanks to technological constraints far beyond my understanding, the Bose is no longer an option. So I wind up listening to music mostly on headphones plugged into my computer, or the computer speakers themselves, one of which recently blew. This is my fault, but I suspect there are a good number of you out there in the same bind. You’ve spent several thousand dollars to create an ultraconvenient digital library with the sound quality of a 1958 transistor radio.

  To be clear: I don’t begrudge the kiddies their jukeboxes the size of postage stamps, their boundless online troves. I’m thrilled to see the record companies properly fucked by the fans they’ve been fucking for years. I’ve rather enjoyed seeing musical equity return to its origins: live performance, those ancient rituals of collective listening.

  Still, I can’t help but view our sonic innovations as part of a massive techno-irony loop. Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I don’t want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it’s just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn’t going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence?

  I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn’t at our fingert
ips, when we had to hunt and wait and—horror of horrors—do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred. I miss the part of Fanaticism that involves unrequited longing, if that makes any sense.5

  List #3

  Rock’s Biggest Assholes

  Compiled in the full knowledge that rock stars are paid to be assholes.

  1. U2

  Conceived of a concert tour mocking consumerism that was so grandiose and unimaginative it actually served as an advertisement for consumerism. At a show in Oslo, the quartet got trapped inside the giant mirrored lemon from which they were supposed to emerge. Tragically, they were rescued before they could eat each other.

  2. Mick Jagger

  Hey, Mick, how do you justify charging thousands of dollars for concert tickets? “It’s super-competitive out there. There’s a lot of tickets to move … It’s capitalism. It’s America. It’s 2005.”

  Oh.

  3. Madonna

  Responds to criticism of her devotion to Kabbalah by stating, “It would be less controversial if I joined the Nazi Party.” I smell a career move!

  4. The Beastie Boys

  What’s most obnoxious: that they dumped their original drummer because she didn’t have a dick, that they appropriate the bankable parts of African-American culture, that they mock the rockers from whom they’ve stolen their best riffs, or that they now condemn misogyny after years of inspiring dudes to get trashed and paw women? I give up.

  5. Pete Townshend

  “I hope I die before I get old, or, at least, before I have to be propped up onstage and have large sticks attached to my arms so I can execute my trademark windmill guitar until such a time as my broker wires the proceeds directly to my dialysis machine.”