Song Folly

I couldn't find a photo of a turntable with a hamburger.

My first job out of college was on the air at 89.7FM WGBH in Boston. Overnights and sometimes on weekends, I played jazz records, read weather reports, station promos and legal IDs, pressed buttons, slid faders, cued satellite feeds, CDs and DATs. I fundraised, urging listeners to do your part, become a member, join the community of listeners who are also supporters of the quality programming you only hear on WGBH by calling 1-888…. Including my time at WESU when in college and the handful of shows I DJ-ed on WFMU (I could not hack the 3am – 6am shift), I was on the air regularly from about 1994 to 2003.

Seven years later, I still have the occasional radio anxiety dream. It’s a recurrent nightmare, albeit a mild one. I’m on the air and: I’m locked out of the music library; I can’t find my on-air copy to read; I’m stammering, speechless; there’s a party in the studio and people won’t be quiet when I go on the air.

Last night I dreamed there was a hamburger on the turntable, the needle digging deeper into the sesame seed bun with each rotation, and I was worried the listeners wouldn’t be able to hear the records I wanted to play. Every DJ’s subconscious anxiety: hamburger on the turntable.

It turns out I don’t know the (correct) lyrics to very many songs. When it’s time to put the baby to bed, I try to think of a sweet little song to sing to him. A lullaby. I can usually get the first line out, the hook or the chorus, and then I draw a blank. This scenario plays out three ways:

1) I make up my own lyrics:

So he sailed… under the… sea… with an octopus and a shark / and a squid and a jellyfish / and a skeleton and a clam… / and a sea urchin and sea cucumbers / and an orca and a tuna fish…. We all live in a yellow submarine!

Or:

Who loves the sun? Who cares if it is shining? / Who cares what it does since you broke my heart? / Who loves my son? Who care if he is crying? / Who cares what he does since you broke my heart? / Ba ba ba baaaa! Who loves my son?

2) I resort to the songs I do know the lyrics to, which means songs I sang in junior high choir, Christmas songs, and random indelible folk songs. Thus my boy has been lulled to sleep many times by poorly harmonized renditions of the state song of Kansas:

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam / where the deer and the antelope play! Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / and the skies are not cloudy all day. / Home! Home on the range!

3) I google lyrics on my iPhone and use it as a cheat sheet. Unfortunately for the baby, this can send me awry. When searching for the lyrics to a song Doc Watson sang about Little Omie, Google suggested that perhaps I was looking for 2Pac’s Little Homie. An honest mistake.

I was on hold to a flute-filled muzak Gangsta’s Paradise today. Almost made the phone call bearable.

Just when Mike and I finished cataloging and filing our CD collection, we came across a box of freebies while walking home from the subway. People often leave boxes of free stuff out on the street, and it’s usually not worth stopping for, unless you want a water stained paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, an LSAT prep book, or a pair of slightly worn then rejected shoes. We glanced in the box, expecting the usual suspects, maybe Journey’s Greatest Hits (No. 94 on the Billboard Album charts last week?!), some former American Idol contestant, a scratched up crappy impulse buy rock record. We walked away with 11 CDs, and we were cherry picking. Two things we determined from pawing through the box of CDs:

1) Their former owner is exactly our age, and probably went to the same liberal arts college, or at least a rival, and may have been a DJ on the college radio station. (Who else would have Bikini Kill, Can and Devendra Banhart?)

2) They ripped their collection to a hard drive and realized you can’t sell used CDs anymore.

So, what do we do? Rip them to our hard drive and return them to the street? Or catalog them and interfile them into our alphabetized books? Or, uh, listen to them?

S through Z plus a few to interfile

932

That’s the number of CDs my husband and I entered into our Delicious Library catalog. Yes, we are those kind of people. We not only alphabetized our CD collection, we also cataloged it, ditched the jewelboxes and organized it in booklets.

It’s not that we need a database to remember what CDs we own and where they are.  The joy of owning a large collection is scanning shelves or leafing through booklets and finding a CD you’d forgotten about and remembering when and where and why you got it.  It’s a photo album, a scrapbook, only music.

We would not have gone to great lengths to catalog our CD collection, but Delicious Library makes it easy, maybe even fun.  Not that fun – it still took us two years to finish the job, with many dormant months between bouts of scanning UPCs. Based on the UPC or ASIN codes (or Artist and Title, if necessary) Delicious Library pulls up all sorts of extraneous data from Amazon.com: genres, retail price, current value, Amazon users rating.

We can organize our collection based on current value, which suggests Kiss’s You Wanted The Best You Got The Best is the jewel of our CD collection with a current value of £203.40, or $314.92.  (Never mind that the same album, possibly the same release, is available on Amazon for $2.98 new). Our third most valuable CD, according to Delicious / Amazon is Planete Sauvage by Alain Goraguer. It is out of print, so maybe $162.50 is… nah, I can’t value digital music like that unless there’s some seriously special packaging.  (Thank you followers of Walter Benjamin, to whom I ask, Can digital music be rare?)

Ranked by Amazon users ratings, then alphabetically, our highest rated CDs, with a full 5 stars, start with 13th Floor Elevators’s Easter Everywhere and end with The Zombies’s Odyssey and Oracle. Our 4 star CDs start with Air’s Talkie Walkie and end with The Zombies’s Odyssey and Oracle. Yes, we have two different releases of Odyssey and Oracle, the 2004 Deluxe release preferable by 1 star to the 1998 release.

Our most well represented artists:

Miles Davis – 21 CDs (of which I’m sure only Sketches In Spain belongs to me)
Richard Thompson – 9 CDs
Stereolab – 8 CDs

Number of CDs starting with X:

2 - X’s More Fun In The New World and Xingu, which might actually belong under E for El Combo Xingu.

Number of CDs starting with Q:

None. We have no Queen, no Q-Tip, no Quicksilver Messenger Service.

What I pulled out to listen to today:

Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, which happily reminds me of being a college DJ in the mid-90s.

Flipping channels last night, I paused to watch the last five minutes of Jeopardy, because if any Final Jeopardy category could cause me to wager it all, it’s 1940s Music History. Well, that and maybe Popular Noise Reduction Plug-Ins. But let’s be real.

The Final Jeopardy answer (paraphrased):

Jerry Wexler coined this term to replace the phrase ‘race music.’

The contestants answers, er, questions: What is rock and roll? What is hip hop? What is jazz?

Seriously?! No one could recall what music was popular during, I don’t know, World War II and the years shortly thereafter?

Rhythm and Blues, people!!

Aside from working on the Ash Grove archive, the Rethink Autism website, records by Florent Ghys and JAS, and a compilation of 1970s Nigerian disco funk, my entire summer has been subsumed by moving.  Cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, butcher paper, packing tape. Apartment hunting, lease signing, check writing, packing, moving, unpacking.  Three months later, I’m sitting in bed staring out my window at evergreen trees.  Evergreen trees!  In my Brooklyn backyard.  I awoke to church bells this morning and knew without opening my eyes that it was nine o’clock.  It’s lovely.  The records have been now unpacked and re-alphabetized.  But the turntable is still encased in bubble wrap in its box.  The CDs purchased in the past few months are shoved haphazardly in a shelf.  The older CDs are still in bins.  Bins, I might add, that we never unpacked last time we moved.  In October 2007.  The iPod hasn’t been updated since June, and even though I raved last month about rediscovering some of my iPod favorites, this month I’m tired of them and have stopped commuting with the iPod.  I’m reading a novel.  Jane Austen, in fact.

Yesterday, our beautiful, rich, massive, vintage Yamaha receiver blew a transistor.  It died.  We already had it repaired once.  This time it might be dead for good. The hulking Vandersteen speakers on either side of it might as well be marble statues.

And so, the rest of our summer will be silent, until we fix the old receiver or buy a new one. Or until we plug in one of our collection of vintage AM radios. Or until we pull out our guitars and revive the family band.

Heck, our home will never be silent.

Between working long and late hours, apartment hunting, and now packing and preparing to move, I haven’t really listened to much music for pleasure this summer, and I haven’t really thought about it.  I listen to music all day for work, so often I crave quiet after ten hours of mastering old blues and folk recordings.

I quit listening to music for most of June, reading during my subway commute and listening to podcasts of This American Life and Radio Lab at the gym.  I left stores if I hated the music, which happened frequently. That new Grizzly Bear CD still sat dusty and unplayed on top of my stereo.

Then, last week, I finished a book and suffered through three consecutive late night subway commutes in which passengers talked so loudly I wished for my earplugs.  So I charged up my iPod, still broken – in fact, even more broken, now that my lock/unlock button only functions sometimes – and hit shuffle.  Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Wow, music is awesome! It makes me feel so good! All these wonderful songs in random order syncing with my footsteps as I walk to the subway, blocking out the noise as I wait for the train.  My favorites from this week:

While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear

Blagged – Peter Sarstedt

S.O.S. – Abba

I Am A Rock – Davy Graham

I bought a new CD three weeks ago.  Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. And I have not listened to it yet.  Oh, I have tried.  I unwrapped it the day after I bought it but had to run out of the house before I could listen.  I put it on my iPod (which I hate to do, believing that a CD deserves a full fidelity first listening) to enjoy while waiting in the florescent lit prospective jurors room during my first time ever serving jury duty this week.  But we prospective jurors were all dismissed, so I never had the chance.

Have I not had one hour to devote to listening to a CD in the past three weeks?

Well, I guess not.  Between working and apartment hunting and a few hours of sleep now and then, I’ve been booked solid.  The only music I have listened to has been for work.  (Hours and hours of old timey blues and folk, peppered with early-70s Nigerian disco funk and French experimental — all heavenly!)

If I don’t listen to it this weekend, I will suck it up and listen during a subway commute.  But don’t you think a new CD deserves better?