Best use of an air-raid siren in music.

Once in awhile, when I’m too lazy to select something to listen to from our iTunes library and way too lazy to load an LP or CD, I flip to the audio channels provided by our cable service, which are surprisingly diverse, if ultra-genrefied. Usually I pick Singers and Swing or Solid Gold Oldies, two genres sorely lacking in FM representation, not that anyone listens to the radio anymore. Today I scanned by Sounds of the Season, paused, and thought, what could they possibly be playing on September 30? Not Christmas music yet, I hope. Nope.

Oktoberfest!!

Then, when we’d had enough of the noise, heat and crowds and were heading back to the subway, we heard a boardwalk announcer introduce the first contestant in a karaoke contest. She took the mic as we passed by, and the opening riff to The Beatles’ In My Life came over the PA. Just enough of that familiar guitar introduction to set the scene: sandy boardwalk planks, the roar and whistle of arcade games and carnival rides, late afternoon, late summer sun, and the gentle recognition of a sentimental song. Which the karaoke contestant then started singing in a perfectly tuneless thick as mud Brooklyn accent:

There are places I remember / all my life though some have changed…

And that’s how I said goodbye to summer, with a sweet and salty smile.

It’s like the Full Metal Jacket of musicals.

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.

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.

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.