I do not understand why a company that has a good product suddenly decides to discontinue it. Windows Movie Maker was so intuitive. I created countless videos using that software. Then suddenly it was gone. I had a light bulb idea last night as I was falling asleep for a new video -- with a specific song as the backdrop. I'd forgotten that Windows 10 didn't include Movie Maker, and in searching, I found that Microsoft no longer supports it, and doesn't even offer it without support.
I subsequently downloaded and uninstalled various "alternatives" that were awful. I love how they all tout their "ease of use". Okay. No. The wondrous thing about Movie Maker was that it was drag and drop. How difficult is that to recreate? Apparently really difficult. I spent hours today adding photos and (sometimes) music, if the program would let me; only to find that the damn thing didn't work. As for effects? These programs claimed to have them. They didn't. The "fade" was imperceptible.
And either the audio track would start and stop -- hiccup -- or the app didn't hold the approximately eighty photos I had painstakingly added. (A three minute song requires a lot of pictures -- trust me. I've been down this road before.)
Clicking on a plethora of icons is a pain in the ass, hoping to find the one I need. And getting more and more pissed.
Trust me; I've done tons of videos for Red River. Granted, some of them weren't done well, but I learned. The creative process is difficult enough without having to deal with a dodgy program.
Tonight I found a YouTube video touting a way to get Movie Maker. And so I downloaded the program from a (hopefully) Microsoft site. We'll see. I've already wasted my entire day adding photos to sundry apps and then throwing up my hands and deleting the programs all together. And now the day is done.
I'll try again tomorrow.
In the meantime, just to demonstrate how easy Window Movie Maker was, here are a few of my favorite Red River videos:
I wasn't a toy kid. One must understand, in the early sixties, there weren't a lot of fun toys. Boys had Tonka trucks -- and they were the ones with the sharp metal edges; not the molded plastic "safe" ones. One unfortunate stumble in the living room could result in a nasty head wound, which in modern times would mean a trip to the ER, but in the sixties Mom would slap on a Band-aid on and call it done. Boys (and moms) were tougher back then.
Even though I wasn't really into toys, I was into the Sears Christmas catalog. That awesome cornucopia of glossy full-color images showed up in our rural mailbox sometime in November, and I lay prostrate on the kitchen linoleum with a sharpened pencil for hours and days, circling every shiny thing I wished for, for Christmas. I really, really wanted the Barbie wedding dress. Really.
I never got it. Apparently it was "too expensive". But Mom said that about everything I wanted. How much could a Barbie wedding gown have cost in 1963? $3.99? What could Mom and Dad afford -- a Three Musketeers Bar?
It wasn't so much that I liked dolls -- I didn't. But I liked pretty dresses. I had a baby doll once. I think I cut her hair and then she looked hideous and I shunned her. She was one of those dolls that you fed water through a bottle and then she wet her pants. Apparently bed-wetting was a desirous trait in plastic dolls in the sixties. Shoot, I had a little sister for that.
(Me, pretending to like my doll.)
I also never got a Chatty Cathy doll, which is just as well. Look at her:
She is reminiscent of seventies horror films. I think this is where the inspiration for "Chucky" came from.
I liked coloring books and crayons. Again, I wanted the box of 64 crayons with a built-in sharpener, but the most I ever got was the 16. I made the best of it. There was a wondrous invention -- paint that, when you touched the brush to a coloring book drawing, it created sparkles. Sapphire, emerald, and ruby shimmers. That engrossed me for approximately one evening.
I also had paper dolls. Those were fun. I had the Patty Duke ones -- you know, Patty and her identical cousin, Cathy.
Come to think of it, I was a very economical gift recipient.
The weird thing about my mom, who I was convinced hated me, is that she always found stupendous gifts. One year I got a cardboard storefront with pasteboard shelves, fake bottles of milk and counterfeit boxes of mashed potato flakes and a cash register with pretend money. Suddenly at six I was a proprietor. I loved imagining.
(The store is on the left. The people are all nuts, except me, in the lower right.)
Of course, the very, very best Christmas gift she ever got me was my record player. And I had no inkling.
Maybe Mom wasn't so bad after all.
The most fun I ever had with toys was when I shopped for my sons for Christmas. Those are the toys I remember best.
My oldest son liked toys, no doubt. He loved Transformers. But his gig was Lego sets. He would sit on the living room floor for hours building all manner of structures out of Legos. Sort of like my crayons, he was into creating things.
For my youngest, one year when he was around three, I got him this:
He probably doesn't think of this as his very best Christmas gift ever. I can attest that he liked it, though.
I wonder if life consists of collecting memories. When we don't even know that we are.
I try not to play this song at Christmastime. But I inevitably do. And then I tear up.
Okay, what is he saying, really? I have no idea, but as far as I'm concerned, it's all about the cereal.
Which is kind of weird, because who sings about Sugar Crisp? And why?
I don't blame myself. I blame Elton. Elton John is known for creating a bit of mystique with his singing style, which is rather awesome, because that allows listeners to essentially "write" their own songs. Not that those songs make any sense. Try singing any Elton John song; I dare you. You are going to get it wrong.
There it is -- sugar bear! C'mon, you heard it, too. If not, then you tell me what he's singing.
The funniest incorrect interpretation of lyrics I've heard came courtesy of Jimmy Fallon:
Kiss This Guy is the premiere site for insane interpretations of actual lyrics. It says more about the listener than the singer. The site is a window into a disturbed soul.
I'm not a native Minnesotan. Well, I sorta am, in a roundabout way. I lived in Minnesota for the first eleven years of my life; northern Minnesota, which is different from "Minnesota" as most people know it. Then I moved to North Dakota and resided there for around thirty years, so, yes, I'm a North Dakotan.
I moved back to Minnesota eighteen years ago, and it was strange for the longest time. I know residents of other states are conceited (see: Texas), but I've never seen such self-lauding as I've found here, and frankly, for so little reason. Guess what? Minnesota has brutal winters -- just like North Dakota. Granted, Minnesota has trees, which most of North Dakota doesn't have, but trees are hardly a reason to pat oneself on the back. I mean, they're trees. Not exactly a scant commodity.
And if I hear the term, "Minnesota nice" one more time, I'm gonna puke. Apparently, in addition to trees, Minnesotans pride themselves on being nice. What's interesting is that the people here aren't actually nice (though some are, just like everywhere). What Minnesotans are is "passive-aggressive". Just venture out on the roads.
"Nice" is a loaded term. Some people might call me "nice", but what I am is "polite". That doesn't make me nice. I'm not Mother Theresa.
My first week on the job, as everyone I encountered made a point of ignoring me, the term "Minnesota nice" kept rifling through my head, and I thought, well, no; these people aren't nice. The people in North Dakota are nice.
Once, in the mid-1990's, feeling compelled to attempt to drive in to work, even though we'd just been umbrellaed by a monster snowstorm and the snowplow drivers were too scared to venture out on the roads, I (naturally) managed to get my Ford Taurus mucked inside a snowbank somewhere between the main thoroughfare and the tiny side street I normally motored down to get to Master Insurance Office. It was six o'clock in the morning and cell phones had not yet been invented. I pushed my car door open and mushed through the snow drifts (in my heels) until I spotted a house with its lights on. I rang the bell and a stranger whipped open his front door. I explained to him that I was a complete idiot, and he offered to drive me home (I only wanted to use his phone).
That's nice.
I felt guilty forever for that favor. That's another component of "nice". You feel like a jerk for putting someone out.
I don't know about other states and how their residents refer to themselves. Maybe everyone is boastful (except the Dakotans -- because bragging would be...well, impertinent).
I'm not big on self-aggrandizement. If you have to tout yourself, a big lie lies beneath.
Don't get me wrong -- I like Minnesota now. Not as much as I love North Dakota, but it's okay. I had to get used to Minnesotans' worship of local TV newscasters, but I solved that by just not watching the news. And the seasons are nice; at least two of them. However, give me a rural county road any day. Much more aesthetically soothing than a battle-ram freeway.
And "nice"? That's a loaded word.
(Thank you, Zal.)
(Thank you, Brian.)
When you look at it that way, nice is kind of "nice".
I didn't begin to put it all together until I was around age nine. At nine I saw Manfred Mann and most importantly, Roy Orbison, on TV for the first time. "Oh, Pretty Woman" was the absolute, bar-none best song I'd ever heard in my whole life (to date).
And this song was profound (okay, not really), but I really, really liked it:
But I also lived in an apartment attached to a country-western bar, so I was confused. Buck Owens and Bobby Bare poured out of my uncle's juke box, while my little plastic table-side radio blasted out The Dave Clark Five and the Animals. I was warbling, "There goes my baby with someone new" as part of my little cousin trio. I had the Beatles, of course, tucked in my pocket. The Beatles were still my secret in 1964.
1964 was a Pop Rocks explosion of music. Once I moved back home to the farm, I had Shindig on ABC TV, where I saw the Righteous Brothers and Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Beach Boys. And I had my big brother -- the supreme arbiter of musical taste.
It wasn't until 1965, though, that it all became clear to me. In addition to my brother, I had a best friend who I discovered music with. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to discover music with somebody who shares your sensibilities. My brother was an expert, but my friend Cathy heard the same songs at the exact same time I did, and we reveled in our shared awe.
Music was joyous in 1965. Maybe it was partly me, but I really think the music was buoyant. It was a musical renaissance. Sort of like today's sensibilities, the music before '65 had been all message-driven. It wanted us to think (think!) about things. I blame Bob Dylan. I was too young to think! Think about what? I didn't even know what the heck the folkies were complaining about. But they sure were bitchy. That wasn't music to me. Music was supposed to be fun. That's why they were called "songs"; not "dissertations". Even today, I hate, hate when people try to preach to me. "The answer is blowin' in the wind". Okay, well, blow away, dammit! Leave me the F alone!
Even the sad, morose, songs in 1965 at least had a catchy beat.
And there were the songs that made no sense, and that was the point, A guy from Dallas, Texas, named Domingo Samudio could dress as an Arab sheik and do something like this:
I frankly thought "Sloopy" was an unattractive name for a girl. It sounded like "Sloppy", or like someone who dribbled a lot.
I wonder whatever happened to the McCoys. (I used to do The Jerk, too. Didn't everybody?)
I never could figure out why Sonny Bono dressed like Fred Flintstone. It was a fashion choice, yes, but not necessarily a wise one. I half-expected him to scuttle away in a car that was powered by his fat bare toes. Nevertheless, who hasn't attempted this song on karaoke night?
I never could quite get into the Rolling Stones. That still holds true today. I have honestly tried -- honestly. I want to like them. My husband reveres them. They just don't do it for me.
My recollection of this song is me standing outside in my circular driveway, holding my tiny transistor to my ear, and hearing a guy talking about someone smoking cigarettes, which I could relate to, because my dad smoked cigarettes. But other than that, ehh.
Shindig loved the Righteous Brothers. I
loved the Righteous Brothers. This track was produced by an insane
killer, which unfortunately colors my memories of the song, but geez,
it's Bill Medley:
The Beach Boys were gods. Still are. I didn't know which one was Brian, or which one was Carl or Dennis, and it didn't matter. What mattered were those overly-tight white pants (just kidding! But not a wise fashion choice.) This track is notable due to the fact that they finally let Al Jardine sing lead. Of course, I didn't know that then. To me, the Beach Boys were the Beach Boys. I was not obsessed with who sang what. I still liked Little Deuce Coupe the best, although that was like a foreign language to me. I thought they were singing, "little do scoop". Which has nothing to do with this song:
Back to my brother: He liked this song. I'd never heard the term "boondocks" before (or frankly, since). I remember pondering that word. I finally settled on "boondocks" equals "woods". I think that's wrong. But at ten, I pictured Billy Joe Royal singing about his life living inside a grove of trees. You be the judge:
My brother also had this single. He informed me that Gary Lewis was Jerry Lewis's son, like that was supposed to be a big selling point. I thought Jerry Lewis was a whiny overgrown child who was definitely not funny. There was an actual child in my household who was three years old and he was funnier than Jerry Lewis. I didn't actually mind Gary Lewis, but his entire recording was a fake, recorded by the Wrecking Crew, with even someone in the studio "helping" Gary with his vocals.
Of course, I didn't know that in 1965. I didn't even know, or think about, how records were made. I thought they appeared by magic. I had absolutely no conception of someone standing behind a mic in a studio. In my ten-year-old mind, a bunch of guys got together and sang. That was the entire process. It was like Elvis breaking into song on the beach -- no instruments; yet I heard them. No microphone -- his voice carried across the rolling waves with nothing but a trio of dancing "friends" behind him in the sand. It's sort of how food appears on one's plate. Somebody disappears behind a door and comes out with a platter. I love magic.
People's memories are selective. Sure, when we think about '65, we know about the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan and Blah-Blah and the Blah-Blahs. But do we remember the Beau Brummels? Well, we should, because they were on the radio all the time. You couldn't click on your transistor or flip on the car radio without hearing this song:
Speaking of Dylan, here's the deal: I didn't know who this guy was in '65. I liked Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35, because I found it weird, and weird was good at ten years old. My brother told me the guy's real name was Robert Zimmerman and that he was from Hibbing, Minnesota. Okay. Well, good. My brother bestowed this knowledge upon me like it was very important. That's why I remember it to this day. I guess you had to be nineteen to "get" Bob Dylan; not ten.
I still think he is a bad singer -- I mean, come on. Nevertheless, the man can write. This became clear to me when I was watching a documentary about Duluth, Minnesota, and the narrator recited a line about the city that I thought, "Wow; great line!" and then she said, "This was written by Bob Dylan." That's when I finally got it.
This song is preternaturally long. The Beatles' tracks were 2:30, tops. It's not as long as "American Pie", which is like comparing "Achy Breaky Heart" to "Amarillo By Morning". Apples and putrefied oranges. But it's still long. Again, I did not understand at age ten that DJ's needed bathroom breaks. I thought they just sat there and listened to the records like I did. And every once in a while, they shouted out the station's call letters and the current temperature. But disc jockeys, just like real people, had to heed nature's call, so they really (really) liked this song:
I was fascinated by Roy Head when I saw him on Shindig. This was the most rubbery performer I'd ever seen! I remember worrying that his tight pants would split, but that could be just a false memory. Still, this guy was limber!
My boys were everywhere in '65. There was the Saturday morning cartoon, which was awful, but they played the songs, so, of course, I watched it. There were Beatles figurines. My mom bought me Ringo (thanks, Mom).
(notice that they all look basically the same)
Of course, if I still had that figurine today, I would be a multi-millionaire! (Okay, maybe not.)
My boys had three records in the Billboard 100 in 1965. Here's one that doesn't get played a lot:
Another artist who's mostly forgotten, but shouldn't be, is Johnny Rivers. "Live At The Whisky A Go Go" was monumental. Never mind that they apparently didn't know how to spell "whiskey". In the early two thousands, I had the opportunity to see Johnny Rivers live, and he was still phenomenal. And everything that Jimmy Webb wrote in his awful book about Johnny means absolutely nothing to me. Mister Balloon Man.
Johnny hit the charts in 1965 with this:
Let me tell you about joyous music. The first time I heard The Lovin' Spoonful was when "Daydream" wafted out of my transistor's speaker. What a day for a daydream. My best friend, Cathy, and I skipped along the streets of downtown Grand Forks with our radios pasted to our ears, warbling "I'm lost in a daydream, dreamin' 'bout my bundle of joy".
Then there was Zal Yankovsky. Zal knew that music was joyous. I don't even have to point him out to you in this video -- you'll know him. That's how music is to me.
I was thinking about work tonight, which is not like me. When I leave my workplace on Friday afternoon, bye-bye! One needs to maintain a separation between work life and actual life. I know people who live for their jobs. That used to be me, but I'm older and much wiser now.
I got my first real job in 1973; and by real job, I mean one in which I didn't report to my parents. As a newly-minted high school graduate, with no idea why I would want to attend college, I realized that I needed to put my two years of typing class to use. I'd also taken two years of shorthand, but you know what? Nobody in the course of history has ever employed shorthand in an actual job. Shorthand was a scam, but I prefer to call it a "lost art", because it sounds mystic.
Living in the capitol city of my state, government jobs flowed like water. Luckily for me. I landed a job as a Clerk Typist I in the State Health Department, Division of Vital Statistics. The office housed all the birth, death, and marriage records from the early days of Dakota Territory to the present day. Of course, the first thing I did when I had the chance was scan the shelves to find my own birth certificate, and then my dad's. Then I located my mom and dad's marriage document. None of those records contained anything eye-opening. But, after all, who wouldn't have looked? There were rack upon rack of big dusty books in the bowels of the Vital Statistics office.
Folks would pop in from time to time, ride the elevator (that had its own valet) up to the seventeenth floor, fill out a form and leave with a certified copy of their record of birth. I typed up my own copy for myself; made myself three years older than I actually was, so I could go to bars and not get kicked out. (Is it okay to admit that now? I'm thinking after forty-four years, the statute of limitations has run out.)
After a few months of manning the front desk and trying to look busy during the quiet times, I was chosen to be part of a new (exciting!) project. The big dusty books had to go -- we were now going to microfilm all the ancient reposing records. Microfilm. Much like shorthand, microfilm is a remnant of a bygone era. A microfilm machine was a big camera that one slid papers under and pressed a round red button. Oh, but I bet everyone else in the office was keenly jealous! Who wouldn't be?
As an eighteen-year-old, I didn't fully understand the solemnity of my charge. We were a three-woman team -- our new supervisor and a girl named Alice and me. We had an office in the back with a door that we closed behind us. We sat at two desks -- one for the supe and one for Alice and me. And we lugged those powdery books from the shelves in the catacombs of the warehouse back to our little cubby and traced with pencil over the ancient typing that had turned faint from decades of being encased between stiff binders. Ahh, the glamour! Then each of us would take a turn behind the secret curtain and snap pictures for an hour. Over and over and over.
Do that for a day and you will never want to come back. Do it for a year and you will be tempted to hurl yourself out the seventeenth-story window.
Luckily, we had our radio. And cigarettes. It was a putrid, smoky closet that had nice tunes.
AM radio was our suicide repellent. It was all that saved us. KFYR featured all manner of songs; radio was not yet compartmentalized in 1973-74.
We heard songs like this:
That's when I realized Barbra Streisand was actually a really good singer.
Nadia's Theme, we knew, was the theme song for the Young And The Restless. You can call it what you want, but come on.
I wonder if they still use that theme song today. My soap days are long behind me, so I don't know. I suppose Katherine Chancellor is long gone. She'd be about a hundred and ten years old if she were still around.
I told Alice she should use this next song in her wedding. She demurred. I still feel I was right:
I liked this one. I knew BJ Thomas had done the original, but Blue Swede took it to a whole new level:
I guess the bandwagon was filled to the brim with old songs done in new ways:
I never lie on this blog, or try to recreate history. This was a big hit in 1974, and we liked it:
I'm somewhat proud to say that one of the two worst songs of all time was released in 1974. It's a minor conceit, admittedly, but I'm going to claim it:
No offense to my little sister, but these next two songs remind me of her. While I, at age eleven, was grooving to the Beatles, she was stuck with tracks like this:
I won't delineate here why this next song is, to me, synonymous with tornadoes. That's a whole different scary story, but here it is:
We didn't exactly think Jim Stafford was funny, per se, but he was odd. If I was of a mind to look him up, I'd probably find that he had some serious songs. To everyone's dismay, though, he will be remembered for stuff like this:
"Star Baby" was a revelation and taught me that Burton Cummings was a sex-drenched god. But the Guess Who chose to follow that hit up with this one. Nevertheless, we liked it:
There was also this new guy who popped up around 1974. He was British. He could sing. He could definitely sing. He liked feather boas and humongous eyeglasses.
But, boy, could he sing:
Yes, the tunes went on forever in that tiny, choke-filled room, and we tried to remember that there was actual breathing life somewhere far below the seventeenth floor.
This song was to me...in 1974...as I struggled to believe that blue sky existed somewhere...everything:
The first "magic music box" I remember was our kitchen radio. Mom spent almost all her waking hours in the kitchen. She liked to listen to Arthur Godfrey, who was apparently the Regis Philbin of the late fifties. If I remember correctly (and I'm sure I don't), Arthur Godfrey had a radio talk show that went on for about three hours every morning. But also, the magic box played music! And shoot me, but I didn't care how bad the songs were:
My big sisters did a fascinating dance on the kitchen linoleum to this:
That's the moment when I learned it was okay to move to music and people wouldn't point at you derisively.
Upstairs in their bedroom, my sisters had something called a "record player".
They wouldn't let me touch it, which was just mean. I did have hand-to-finger dexterity; it wasn't like I was going to crack their precious "records", which is what they called them.
The weird thing about our household was, we had scads of records, dumped inside a round ice cream container -- some with sleeves, most without -- but Mom and Dad owned nothing with which to play them. Sifting through these records, I wonder now if they were purchased at rummage sales. It was an odd collection of German drinking songs, Sheb Wooley ditties, singles by Lawrence Welk's orchestra.
Speaking of Lawrence Welk, there was one particular record that scared the crap out of me. My parents were diehard Welk fans -- it was the fifties, after all. I played this record upstairs when my sisters weren't around, apparently because I liked being scared:
It still kind of freaks me out to this day. Maybe it's just a flashback.
So music was good, and it was also eerie. Naturally, I preferred the good.
Mom and Dad had two albums; yes, just two. These were 33's. The dial on the record player could switch from 33's to 78's to 45's, but one needed to insert a special spindle in order to play the '45 singles my sisters were in love with. I don't why my parents owned albums, but I do know why they owned these two. I think they loved the songs so much they just had to own the LP's, even though all they could do was admire them.
Still two of the best country albums of all time. My parents had great musical taste.
I think I was five when I got my very own record player for Christmas. It was blue with snaps. Portable!
Granted, I owned no records. The most money I'd ever had up to that point was a dime my mom gave me to buy a fudge-sickle from the creamery delivery man and some foreign coins my grandpa had given me, which turned out to be worthless unless one lived in Australia. It would take me a while to build up my own personal record collection. Not to fear -- I had that ice cream "hat box" full of miscellaneous odds and ends. Basically, anything that was musical fascinated me. I will say that the music of the late fifties was not good*. *Granted, my parents did not own any Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard singles. I did take one record to school for kindergarten show and tell, and did a complete lip-syncing song and dance number to what I realize now was wholly inappropriate for five-year-olds:
As time went on, I managed to collect a dollar here and there (not from actual work). I thus purchased very select '45's, mainly Beatles singles, which had the added benefit of both the A and B sides generally being good songs. This was new, as the accepted custom was to put a pile of crap on Side B. Thus, with the Beatles, I only paid fifty cents per song. Thanks, John and Paul.
My other singles were birthday gifts from friends (they were poor, too). My brother bought me a couple of LP's, which was an entirely new concept. Rock albums? Dang.
He bought me these two:
Yes, quite the disparity. I loved the first one -- the second one I played possibly once. My brother rarely steered me wrong, though. Of course, he saved the very best LP's for himself.
Sometime around age ten I acquired a new sleek player. It looked like this:
Sure, you might ask, how is that an improvement? Well, it ran on batteries! I'm not sure now how that was an advantage -- batteries back then were not "alkaline" -- they were just plain old D batteries that ran down after five plays. But I felt like I was on the cutting edge of new technology.
I thus borrowed my brother's "Help" and "Rubber Soul" albums from his room and learned, really learned, about superior music...until my batteries ran down. I carried that battery-powered player with me to Bismarck, North Dakota, and even treated Merle Haggard to an impromptu replay of his biggest hit, outside his motel room -- apparently because he might have forgotten how the song went (or something). In my defense, I was twelve.
Around age sixteen, I had managed to save up enough money to buy myself an actual stereo sound system from JC Penney. It cost $100.00! This is sort of how it looked:
I eventually supplemented it with a big reel-to-reel, which allowed me to experiment with bouncing tracks and other stuff that I had no actual knowledge of, but which turned out to be something that actual musicians do. Meantime, sometime around 1970, my dad bought his latest Lincoln, which featured something that looked like this:
(Missing the cigarette smoke wafting out of the ash tray)
Eight-track tapes had some intrinsic problems. Number one, they were bulky. Dad needed to buy a special case to house his (three) tapes. The other issue someone should have considered was that the tape stopped in the middle of a song, and one would need to flip it over and insert it back into the player to hear the remainder. That sort of killed the effect.
Good music, though, is good music, and you take it where you find it. Dad owned this eight-track tape, which I maintain today is a superior effort:
Around 1980 or so, I needed a new sound system. A slick salesman at Pacific Sound told me that Bang and Olufsen was the best around, so I fell for it.
Thus, I commenced to make payments, which were penurious -- some ungodly sum like $100.00 per month. It was worth it, though, sound-wise. I will say it was the best sound system I ever owned.
Strangely, I was still a singles gal mostly, which I suppose kind of defeated the dollar output; but I did buy albums, too, which mostly consisted of Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers.
Cassette players were more of my little sister's era. I didn't begin to buy cassette tapes until sometime in the eighties, and that's only because I owned this:
Cassettes were a means for me to capture songs off the radio. There was a program on Saturday nights that played classic rock songs. I don't remember the name of it, but I listened to it religiously, and tried my best to record songs without the DJ cutting in to blather about who sang it and what year it'd hit the charts, and other minutiae that just served to ruin my otherwise pristine recording. I compiled tape after tape of awesome lost songs.
In 1989, for Christmas, my oldest sister sent me a gift certificate for a CD. That was great, but I didn't own a CD player. I'd heard about them, but I hadn't seen the point. I already had all my music in long-play form. I could pick up the needle and drop it on whatever song I wanted to hear.
What was I going to do? Start buying up all the albums I already owned, only in CD format?
Yes.
Because that gift certificate weighed on my mind, I went out and bought a CD player. This is the first, the very first, CD I purchased:
I don't know why. I guess because it was the latest CD at the time, and I liked Rodney Crowell.
The sound was a revelation to me. I don't know if a CD actually sounded better than an album, but I sure thought it did.
And thus began a lifelong quest...to buy up every album I'd ever cherished in CD format.
Today I can buy a single song. That's nice, but something is missing. When I bought albums when I was sixteen, I got the songs I wanted and songs I didn't know, but some of those unknowns turned out to be gems. And I got to read the liner notes. I knew who the players were and who produced the album. I knew who wrote the songs. That was all vital information. One might not think it is, but it is! My musical education came from liner notes.
So, what's the best music technology?
Albums.
Hands down.
I like everything aural. I like MP3's. I haven't bought an MP3 in...forever. But who knows? I might one day hear something I want to buy.
But MP3's are rather cheap and tawdry. They're the backstreet, cynical, man-handling of music. They're music for those who don't really like music.
That said, I'm ready for what comes next. Brain-wave music? I've kind of already got that, but I'm open to its possibilities. The songs in my head don't currently feature that desire surround-sound.
