That Guy Deserves a Punch In The Face(s)

I really hate Rod Stewart. Not just in a, "I don't really care for his music" kind of way, but in the sense that being in an environment where Rod Stewart's music is being played makes me feel physically edgy. It's the sort of sensation you encounter when you're aware that your blood pressure is on the rise due to an overwhelming feeling of emotional distress and an aching desire for that particular moment of awkwardness and discomfort to come to a swift and merciful end.

There are so many reasons to hate Rod Stewart. Yet, many many people love him, or at least like him, and this immediately calls the sum total of the rest of that person's cultural knowledge into question. If you like Rod Stewart, you might also be interested in loads of other things that drive me up a wall. You may be in to a load of other things I hold dear to my heart. But, you like Rod Stewart and for me that is the cultural equivalent of having been a Nazi Party member or a part-time Klansman. Everything else will be cast in doubt because of this nefarious association with a crackle throated, dust-mop headed assbag.

A great deal of my venom for The Rod is that his appeal seems to be so vast and completely inconceivable.  Firstly, he is not a very good singer. Nay, he is a terrible singer. Sure, people like Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Neil Young have made a very nice career for themselves with the same basic level of vocal skill. The fundamental difference is that Rod Stewart is nowhere near the songwriter of those three gentleman and that he is largely seen as a vocalist. Waits, Young and Dylan are songwriters and artists while Rod Stewart is just a singer and he's just bad at it. In fact, the Rod Stewart version of the Tom Waits composition, Downtown Train is a classic example of how one man managed to ruin another man's perfectly good song. Stewart's voice is the vocal equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, but I would rather eat chalk and run my own bicuspids across the board than be forced to listen to a low-rent Jagger impersonator caterwaul into my eardrums.

From grocery stores to Barnes and Noble and classic rock radio to a movie theater lobby you're likely to be trapped in a public space with Rod's sweaty throated rasp coming at you from the PA in the rafters. This is largely because The Rod has commercially evolved and transformed to accompany his core audience to their golden years. Not only have we been subjected to his years of schlocky rock records and faux-disco and power ballads, now The Rod has in recent years made a series of recordings of old standards. I have never really understood the gaga nature of Led Zeppelin fans, the band to me seems just simply overrated. Thusly, avoiding Led Zeppelin is fairly easy; stay away from frat parties; don't accept rides from males who drive muscle cars and appear to be between the ages of 16 and 27; if you attend a function and there is a turntable and a bottle of Jagermeister in the same room you may want to develop an exit strategy. Avoiding Rod Stewart is a completely different animal. Soccer moms at the mall might really like his 80's stuff while the local pharmacy might think "Gee, I bet the older female customers would love this version of Someone To Watch Over Me". And, the dive bar with a sketchy jukebox is going to scream Maggie Mae at you before the clock strikes ten! It's a scientific fact and you had better deal with it. Rod Stewart is everywhere and it's almost certainly because there is some demographic that will walk through the door and we want to make sure they feel at home.

Right now you're reading this and probably thinking "Wait, Faces are good. You can't argue with that right?" I admit that Faces are - and please view this through the proper prism of perspective - not as awful as the bulk of his other work. However, The Faces have a special place in my catalog of ire.

In 1969, Steve Marriott left the then Small Faces after a five year string of churning out terrific records in a mold of mod meets garage meets white boy soul. The Small Faces did many of the same things that the early Who records did while encapsulating the R&B action of early Beatles' records and a much better version of what bands like The Spencer Davis Group were trying to pull off. In short, they were very, very good and under-appreciated. When frontman and guitarist Marriott left due to the ever insidious "creative differences", his bandmates decided to soldier on without him. To replace him, they hired guitarist Ronnie Wood (later of Rolling Stones fame) and, you guessed it, Rod Stewart. The result was two men replacing one and being less than they had been before. To me, The Small Faces are one of the great unheralded bands and almost everyone will recognize the name Faces before they recognize The Small Faces. This recognition is almost certainly the effect of Stewart and Wood's star power. Wood is forgiven because of his participation on some very good Stones' records. Rod Stewart takes the fall here. It may not be fair, but gets much more credit than he deserves for jumping on the bandwagon of a great band that no one knows about because they're too busy listening to Rod Stewart.

Perhaps the single most mystifying thing about Stewart's popularity is his supposed sex appeal. Are you shitting me?!? This is a guy who, even in his prime looks like an emaciated version of some bizarre troll-like creature in a Tolkein novel. His spiky hair looks as though it were drawn on with an Aryan Magna Doodle and the alcoholic bulbous ball of a clown nose seems to be something even a caricature artist would think better than to include in a carnival drawing. His Cindy Crawford style mouth melanoma, his gawky mannerisms and that hitching white boy chicken neck thing he does when he dances are among the myriad physical manifestations that would get him laughed off stage at the local karaoke bar on a Friday night. But for the Rodster this is sex appeal. It must be those wily charms that landed him supermodel Rachel Hunter. If every chick dug hair like that you'd think Robert Smith would have a wider sex appeal than just the sphere of 17 year old girls on the verge of suicide.

So, Rod Stewart is hideously ugly and makes ladies think he's sexy and manages to convince them that they might even want his body. He cannot sing as well as Bob Dylan, but millions of people bought his record of standards. By the way, these sales probably happened primarily at Target stores and Starbucks locations. Stewart needed an accomplice to fill the shoes of Steve Marriott, but Faces got ten times the press and adoration. Maggie Mae is an awful song played way too many times and should only be listened to when the only other options involve songs by The Eagles or The Doors, yet you will hear it in the next seven days somewhere unless you live in Bangladesh. Rod Stewart may be terrible at all of these things, but his success makes he think he might just be a genius. If reincarnation is a real thing, I am pretty sure there is a direct link between P.T. Barnum and Rod Stewart.

Life Is A Highway (or so I'm told)

There is a lot of driving that is required for my job. Not the sort of driving like that of a long haul trucker in a Tom T. Hall song, but a lot of driving nonetheless. In a given week I might drive a thousand miles or more. Just recently I had a three day stretch in which I drove more than 900 miles in less than 72 hours. Driving is a big part of what I do and I am very, very used to doing it.

Almost all of my driving is a solitary operation. It's not the sort of gregarious road trip vibe that most people equate with being out on the open road. I'm driving because I am working and going from place to place is a huge part of the equation, so it's easy to think of it as just one part of the job. And, because I am constantly retreading the same ground, often multiple times in the same week, the scenery is rarely interesting and never really a surprise in and of itself. This kind of driving is a kind of mindless task that seems to be overwhelmed by the vast amounts of time I spend trapped in the car; the chore of sitting in one position, barreling down the interstate and realizing that home or the office is still more than a hundred miles off in the distance.

Lots of that time trapped in the car might be spent making or taking phone calls from colleagues and customers. Keeping busy like this does help to break the monotony of the solitary sojourn, but it's not only less than ideal for perfectly safe driving conditions, it is also like doing two forms of work at the same time. So, while it is a functional way to accomplish things in tandem, it also somewhat exhausting after a while and at the very least mildly hazardous.

In an effort to make the time go faster and seem more enjoyable, there is a lot of radio listening that happens inside my car. Public talk radio and intensely specific discussions about the minutiae of baseball are the preferred auditory distractions in my fairly clean 2008 Saturn Aura. My car has a subscription satellite radio service which broadcasts all manner of niche programming that varies from right wing talk radio to a station that plays nothing but Grateful Dead bootlegs 24/7/365. Certainly this allows for a great deal of choice in between those two widely disparate ends of the spectrum, and yet almost everything in that aural rainbow seems somewhat ridiculous after a while because it is almost all segmented and based on a singular methodological approach.

There are stations I frequent and even thoroughly enjoy for stretches of time. But after 45 minutes, honky-tonk number after honky-tonk number after honky-tonk number can begin to sound almost ridiculous even though I love those songs. Furthermore, every station has a series of "personalitites" that are charged with recapping the last few songs that we just listened to and spinning vaguely anecdotal tales somehow related to the station's milieu. The personalities on Willie's Roadhouse, the honky-tonk station, all seem to be male and performing a half-hearted attempt at a Sam Elliott impression that is simultaneously soothing and irritating. Stations like the Verge and XMU are layered in teams of indie rock bloggers and pundits who all sound like synthetically energetic music nerds in their late thirties and early forties pretending as though they're 23 years old and just got back from a Vampire Weekend in the rustic woods of northern Vermont.

Because these stations on the satellite radio dial often play songs that I like, and in most cases those songs are not readily available on conventional radio - after all when was the last time your local country station played Buck Owens and His Buckaroos "Tiger By The Tail"? - it's really easy to enjoy it and to dance around the presets seeking out exciting and interesting music. After a while though, it just seems like work and the music begins to run together in a stream of mundanity and the enthusiasm it gave me an hour ago transforms into a sense of duty and obligation.

At this point, I might toss in a mix CD, or a podcast burned to disc or settle upon a mildly interesting NPR chat show and sort of tune out the sound of the radio altogether. It's at times like these that I learn a great deal about my neighbors on the road. There are innumerable sociological indicators out there on America's highways and byways.

Firstly, there are the people who you can tell at first glance are the ones who are bitching constantly about the cost of gasoline. These loud-mouthed consumer advocates are easy to spot because they are the ones driving the largest vehicles on the road and are traveling in these caverns on wheels all by themselves. They proliferate the interstate in Hummers, minivans, and overly engorged SUV type things that appear to be pregnant versions of what a car used to look like way back in the days before gas was more expensive than milk.

Next, you have the lonely driver. This driver, even in the smallest of commutes is terribly uncomfortable, and is neurotically petrified that he or she will have to spend even a few scant minutes alone in the car with actual thoughts. To combat this desolate landscape of emptiness the lonely driver makes various and sundry cell phone calls to fight off the loneliness. SIDE NOTE: Jeff Tweedy, if you're reading this, now you know how to fight loneliness for reals. For the lonely driver, leaving a rambling, disjointed voice mail for a guy you went to a movie six weeks ago and haven't seen since really is better than a moment of self reflection. Apparently, even a nagging 17 minute tirade from your haggard, chain smoking mother in-law is a better alternative than a brief interlude of peace and quiet.

Billboards and road signs are so commonplace in my daily transitory routes that after even just a short while they begin to meld in to the landscape. However, there are times when you can't help but be pulled in by their wiley charms. I am especially fascinated by the recent push to market hospital services along the sides of our interstate highway systems. Routinely, I will see gigantic photos of a doctor's head shots with an alphabet soup of qualifications after his or her name and a vapid tag line about a particular caregiver's credentials for open heart surgery or oncology. Am I really supposed to believe that when choosing a surgeon to perform an operation in which they stop your heart for three minutes that the deciding factor is going to be a mug shot on a billboard across the road from KFC? There are also a bevy of billboards to make the public aware of expected ER wait times. What the hell is this there for? Have you ever been trucked into an ambulance at 1:45 in the morning after missing a step and tumbling headlong down the stairway, your broken bones aching in gut-wrenching pain and had the lucidity to mention to the EMT that the wait at St. Lawrence is likely to be more than 30 minutes shorter than the wait at Sparrow Hospital? Of course, you know this because the marketing Gods bestowed this knowledge upon you even though they did not give you the intelligence to watch that first step before it became the doozie that left you with three cracked ribs and clavicle that snapped so badly part of it is now scraping against your ear when you turn your head.

It is even routine to see ads on the highway for funeral homes, hospice care, vasectomies and painless dentistry. I understand that these are businesses trying to drum up customers, but where does marketing stop and where does common sense begin? I cannot imagine choosing funeral services or where to get my baby-making area clipped because I saw a catchy billboard for vasectomies (and for vasectomy reversals - is this really an area where dudes flip-flop a lot?) and noticed they had what appeared to be competitive rates and a very professional marketing campaign.

I know that much of the marketing's approach here is to remind people that they might need these things. After all that is a big part of advertising. It just seems that a reminder of your own mortality might be delivered in a more careful way than a giant 60 foot sign for funeral services. "DON'T FORGET! YOU ARE GOING TO PERISH FROM THIS EARTH - MAYBE EVEN SOON. GET YOUR PLANNING STARTED TODAY!" This doesn't have the same pizzazz as a plea for you to spend $5 on a Taco Bell Big Box or a car lot offering credit to all potential buyers. Funeral services probably shouldn't be an impulse purchase and if you're being swayed by advertising for the location of your memorial service, you likely own some Ginsu knives and that pasta pot thinger I see the troll-like red-headed lady plugging on my television every Saturday morning.

Lots of people like to say lots of things with the back ends of their cars. Of course there are stickers on bumpers for a massive number of interests and viewpoints; political leanings, honor student recognition, travel destinations, rooting interest in particular sports teams, brands of choice and even preferences for a specific breed of dog - although I always feel as if this is some sort of thinly veiled pet racism; "I Heart Schnauzers" reads an awful lot like Aryan dog love and the Schnauzers are the Nazis taking the poor little Terriers and ShitZu's to Doggie Auschwitz.

I have three especially favorite categories of the bumper sticker bon vivant and what the stickers say about the owner of a particular vehicle and our society at large. They are as follows.

1. The Calvin's Bladder Viewpoint Guy
You have seen them everywhere; Calvin of the famed Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is plastered on a sticker. Calvin is standing, often with his head leaned slightly forward and an impish devil grin on his face, always with his hands in crotchal region and usually with a faint hint of carpenter's crack smiling from above the line of Calvin's pants. Emanating from Calvin's zipper area is a stream of liquid, always drawn in a dramatically arcing fashion, and the urine descends to land on an item that the owner of this particular vehicle holds in contempt. Please understand that the possibilities here are endless; political candidates, ex-wives, former girlfriends, football teams, and virtually any brands of trucks, car, auto part, snow machine, motorbike, bicycle and breakfast cereal that has been in production in the last twenty years. The concept here is that this driver can say more about himself or herself by explaining what they hate about the world than by telling you about that which they love. If Calvin is pissing on a Ford logo and they're driving a Chevy truck, it is easy to deduce that the driver loves Chevy trucks and part of the glory of that statement is that you had to know what the driver hated and then noticed the brand of truck the sticker was on and by extension where the allegiance of the driver is allied. It's a very basic form of social mathematics for the mildly retarded.

I do not appreciate the Calvin's Bladder Viewpoint Guys (CBVG) because I like the stickers nor especially the idea of using a cleverly written comic strip character to vulgarly voice one's opinons. I revel in the CBVG because they are not only so shallow and lacking in self-confidence that they need to use hate to voice their love, but they have to do it through the urethra of an ill-tempered six year old. Not only is this a fabulous parable for the state of discourse in this country, but it's also a very helpful way for you to figure out who is the person you are currently sharing the road with that is the most likely to get a DUI this coming Friday night.

2. The Stick Figure Family Lady
I am beginning to wonder if every minivan sold in the United States today comes with a free set of family stick figures. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a phenomenon in which the members of a family are caricatured into stick figures for a series of stickers that get placed almost exclusively in the lower left corner of a minivan's rear window. The sticker not only contains a stick figure approximation of each family member's likeness, but usually includes that family member's name directly above or below their corresponding image. Most of the stickers are arranged in a misogynistic fashion straight out of Eisenhower era attitudes on family life; Dad is first and then Mom and then the children are arranged in order of chronology. Many of these stickers also accommodate room for family pets as well as the humans in the family.

The logic behind this behavior is really sort of lost on me. For one, I cannot imagine why I would want the names of my children plastered on the back of our vehicle. This seems like name tags for pedophiles. It is as if, desperate moms everywhere are shouting, "Hey creepy neighbor guy, or shady dude at the mall parking lot, I just want to make sure you know the name of my kids before you go snatch them and toss them in the back of your white, windowless van". The same woman who won't let her 11 year old kid ride around the block on his bike by himself has no compunction whatever about publicly announcing the names of her entire family on permanent display in her driveway. Furthermore though, this also feels like a cry for help.

Did you ever have one of those friends who had a girlfriend that was a real harpy pain in the ass sort and he was also telling you and his other friends how great she was. He did this, of course, because he was trying to convince himself that she was great, not because he wanted you to be convinced. The Family Stick Figure Sticker is the soccer mom's method of telling you how great her family is.

She's telling you how much she loves and appreciates her borderline alcoholic insurance salesman husband who tells off-color jokes to the neighbors at the annual picnic and hasn't finished a chore without 2.5 hours of incessant nagging since the second week of their marriage.

She's telling you all about her daughter Molly, her oldest child and the daughter with whom she shares a special relationship even though last week Molly confessed that she "went to Planned Parenthood and got on the pill because it was easy and, well, Amanda has been on it for over a year and what else was she supposed to do to make boys like her?" Molly has also been sneaking out at night and is probably smoking pot already, but she is the oldest, so we put her stick figure first in the kids group.

Jason's sticker is slightly shorter than Molly's, even though at 12, he is already as tall as Molly and practically as tall as his mother. Jason is a chronic underachiever, behaves like an insolent middle schooler and has all the social graces of a death row inmate. In short, he's a little prick.

Muffy and Azrielle are the family cats. Their moppy and carefree faces are plastered at the end of the family row. Never mind that Muffy met an untimely end more than three months ago when she slipped out the front door and chased a squirrel across the road only to be squashed by a Chevrolet truck with a Calvin sticker in the cab's back window. It was a great deal like an object lesson in evolutionary stickering. In any case, because the line goes from Jason to Muffy to Azrielle, if we took Muffy's sticker out there would be a gap and that would just be a greater reminder of the loss of our precious kitty.

Don't worry about us. We haven't all had dinner at the same table since Christmas evening, but our family is great and you know that because we took the time to get custom stickers made and place them carefully on the rear window of our Honda Odyssey. Plus, we have a license plate that proclaims "Kids! Just Love 'Em".

For a more in-depth look at the phenomena of stick figure stickers and their place in the current cultural landscape, see some conjectures on the subject at the blog losanjealous.

3. Sour Grapes Political Loser
Political viewpoints are far and away the most popular form of bumper sticker expression. Stickers have been designed to encompass different drivers opposing opinions on topics like prayer in schools, abortion, political candidates, tax reforms, millage proposals, and union affiliations. Hands down my favorite political sticker is the one for the cause or candidate whose election is long since passed. That ragged McCain-Palin sticker on the back of the Buick you saw last week is exactly what I mean. These people have taken to washing the car as infrequently as possible so as to elongate the lifespan of their political message. They didn't vote for Obama, so you cannot blame them for all the bad things happening in the world. How do you know they didn't vote for Obama? Because they went to painstaking lengths to keep a navy blue mini-banner on their vehicle for three full years to remind you who they did vote for. Doesn't that help you get on with your day and to sort out your own political prerogatives? That scrubby quasi-hippie you just passed in his weathered and sputtering '96 VW Golf was expressing his disgust for the second half of the G.W. Bush administration and his inherent distrust in the two-party political system with his Nader '04 sticker, which is, of course, green. How clever.

This sort of rationale to hang on so long to a cause long lost seems not only sad, but offers an insight in to our deeply held political beliefs; we are much more interested in maintaining our own belief in our own opinion about a past action or belief than we are in crafting a way to move forward. We hate our politicians, even the ones we voted for. So, why do we hold on so tightly to the ones who didn't get the chance that we fervently believed they deserved to be hated like the others? Even if, as they say, history teaches us nothing, maybe we can learn at least a little something of ourselves in the way we refuse to let go of something as simple as a sticker for an election loser.

These and many other "lessons" are the sorts of lessons you learn out on the road.  Or, at least convince yourself that these trite observations are lessons. Like I said, these drives are almost all solo operations. And, as I slice through the lanes of our lovely mitten I am frequently amazed at the fellow travelers with whom I share the road. I am amazed at their hubris and their willingness to help a fellow stranded driver. I am amazed at their level of interest in and allegiance to specific brands of energy drink while giving non-verbal indications that they've traveled to far off lands and appear to greatly support the National Park system. My road neighbors are a weird lot, and are most likely very much like me: They are wildly contradicted in their behaviors and opinions. They are opinionated and generous. They are snarky while being sentimental. They have lots of smart ass things to say and a bumper on which to say it. I have a bumper too, but my blog has a lot more room on it. I HEART SABAUTEUR!

Put The Needle On The Record

There is a magical, scratchy popping sound in my life.  It's got a warm, sort of fuzzy yet etched gritty tone to it that fills me with anticipation and happiness.  My thumb made it happen.  That cushy ball of flesh on the outside of the opposable digit on my right hand lifted a metal arm on to a spinning disc of grooved vinyl and made this sound - and that sound is excitement.  Songs are coming; the sounds of a real live record, started with actual hands and played through actual speakers.  This action and its consequences make me unspeakably pleased.

I love my records.  I don't mean my compact discs or the shit cluttering up my iTunes disk space.  I mean my vinyl records.  If, like me, you are over the age of 30 you have at least some vague recollection of a smoky Saturday night party in your parent's rec room that involved a Boston LP or a greatest hits collection of some band you could give a damn about now like The Doobie Brothers or The Eagles.  But you remember that party.  You remember everything seemed dark and mysterious yet simultaneously bright and vibrant.  There were buckets of laughter going on almost all of the time even though no one was telling anything that seemed like jokes.  The room smelled like a summer night filled with stale beer and house plants.

Like most people, specifically most Americans in these pre-pubescent years of the 21st century, I own a great deal of junk.  My house is stuffed to the gills with stuff I don't need and things I will likely never use to their full potential.  I have shirts in my closet I will never wear and used books on my shelves I will likely never finish reading.  There are leftover magazines I store for no particular reason and board games I have played but once - and that episode of use was probably obligatory as that Jenga box came from a thoughtful relative on Christmas Eve and my wife might point out that "it would be a shame not use it at least once".  Most of this crap is just that: crap.  My records somehow have achieved a station above my other belongings.

There are something like 1100 or more records in the cabinets in the upstairs hallway of my humble house.  There is a series of nice shelving that I specifically purchased (and assembled) for the purpose of holding my 1100 or more records.  For the hardcore record collector, this number seems shamefully small.  Any self-respecting collector in their late-30's (as I admittedly am in my late 30's) should be much farther along than just 1100 odd LPs.  This may be true, but I am not a collector.  My records are not all stored in high end polyvinyl sleeves and are not purchased for their "future value".  None of my LPs are viewed as an investment and at no point have I ever once considered buying a duplicate copy of a record just to get an earlier pressing or a limited edition version.  These are not artifacts or display pieces.  They were purchased to be listened to, shared with others and mostly to be enjoyed.

To the uninitiated, the idea of housing and listening to this many physical records probably seems idiotic.  The cynical vinyl neophyte would most likely assume that I still obtain addresses and phone numbers by flipping through a physical copy of the yellow pages in lieu of getting online.  Anyone who would wholeheartedly embrace such an antiquated technology must also drive around in a car that still uses leaded gasoline, right?  A device like an iPod takes up almost no room and holds as much storage as the entirety of my myriad cabinets and stacks of vinyl.  For those who grew up after the age of vinyl or are simply sycophants for the fancies of technological advancement and seek primarily to expedite and consolidate all cultural experiences my vinyl stores must seem a colossal waste of time and money.

Music listening is not, or at the least should not, be an endeavor whose principle source of enjoyment comes from its convenience.  If things were only about convenience we would have pizza delivered for dinner every night.  I don't want my connection to all of the music ever created to be conducted through a tiny little device that is primarily designed to be used as part of a one person experience.  Sure, an iPod, - and we have two of these devices in our house for the record - can be attached to a stereo or the sound system of an automobile and dispensed for those within earshot to hear it.  Yet, the idea of the iPod and other devices like it is to regain control of our music; control over what songs we want to omit from our records; control over what order we want our songs to be played; control over what genres play nice with each other; and control over the idea a tiny digital image or series of zeroes and ones compressed into a degradable format with a little jpeg attached for a visceral experience.  There are times when this model of convenience and portability comes in handy.  Road trips, jogging and walking are certainly times when it's not only inconvenient to listen to old fashioned records, but it is indeed fabulous to take loads of music in my pocket.  That is why an iPod should be in existence; so that my records can still come with me to a place where records don't make sense.  The iPod is a Plan B for when the vinyl of Plan A is impractical.  It should not be a way to make Plan A unnecessary or obsolete.  This control has its place, but the impermanence of the equation takes too much enjoyment away for me in a place like my living room.

Perhaps the most nefarious use of the iPod is that it's changing the idea of music listening forever, whether it means to or not.  I will not, absolutely will not, go on some audiophile diatribe about why vinyl sounds better.  In very much the same way that I would never waste my time and yours to cover the merits of large format HD televisions or rave about the impracticality, nay stupidity, of the 3D television craze.  This will not become a discussion of fidelity, bass frequencies or listening quality.  Frankly, I don't care about any of that.  The quality of the sounds coming from your stereo is none of my concern.  What frosts my cookies here is that music has become a virtual thing.  It has come to be perceived like air.  It is out there floating around and if you want it, you go get it - sort of.  You open up iTunes or Grooveshark or a bit torrent site and get your fix.  As a consumer, even if we pay for the music we listen to there is almost no sacrifice.  There is no wait.  There is no sense of accomplishment.  It is all too available and it's all too easy to get at.  Because of this, we tend to view music through very much the same lens that we tend to view the stuff piled up at a weekend garage sale crammed in a weathered Banker's Box with a big sign marked FREE STUFF.  If it was any good, we wouldn't be able to get it so easily.

I can remember being in my teens and early twenties trudging down to the local record store at midnight on a Monday to snag a copy of the brand new Morrissey LP or the next R.E.M. record.  It was as much about the experience of buying the record as it was about the music itself.  On the car ride home there was the frantic removal of cellophane to reveal liner notes, lyric sheets and photo spreads.  All these things were then pored over meticulously both on the way home and during the first few nascent listens of the new purchase.  There was a physical joy and a sense of success in the purchase of a new record.  Now, it's a simple megaupload click at 2:41 in the morning something like three weeks before the record actually comes out.  No anticipation and no communal experience - just a meager and minimized reward with no interaction or genuine effort.  To a grizzled old record buyer, this seems a sad and lonely substitute for the mild satisfaction of having to wait a few days fewer.

There is also a magical creative captivity of listening to a record on vinyl.  There are a handful of carefully sequenced songs crammed into fifteen or twenty minutes on a grooved side of wax.  The technology is designed to keep you from manipulating it.  There are no options for custom playlists or shuffled songs.  You put the needle down and you listen to those records until the side is over.  At our house, we have a vinyl only on the stereo policy and with it, a game that we inherited from some friends.  That game is known as "Flip It Or Skip It".  When the side of a record is over, the person who gets to choose the next record is welcome to flip the record from Side A to Side B or to take the record off the table and choose a new LP to listen to on one side.  My youngest daughter seems to especially appreciate this game and it's a blast to watch her ruminate over whether to flip or skip.  But, even when she doesn't like the record being played, she never tries to take it off early or skip the songs she dislikes.  She waits the side out and makes her selection.  The game teaches her patience and the understanding of how a record works in the concept of extended creativity.  Music to her is not something only seen in three minute chunks.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end.  Furthermore, the actual physical act of taking a record in your hands and being careful to flip it or put it back in its sleeve ever so carefully imparts a respect of music in a concrete way.  She sees music as an actual thing, not as blips on laptop or a list of files on a device.  Music is a thing you can scratch and see and touch and feel and smell and flip.

I openly acknowledge that I have spent a lot of money on my records.  Everyone that you have ever known has spent stupid amounts of money on something you thought was bereft of value.  Everyone - even you.  Mountains of cash have been squandered on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, massage parlors, gambling, tickets to Michael Bay/Ben Affleck movies, alphabet soup books by Sue Grafton (A is for Awful by the way), gasoline tinged yet vaguely citrus-like energy drinks, $7 coffees and a whole lot more.  Are you aware of the estimated value of the NASCAR racing league?  I mean I have no idea what it's actually worth, but I guarantee you that it's more than the $3.57 value it has in my head.  Right now, if you think for just a few minutes you can think of at least one thing you waste money on regularly.  Ever bought some rare Beanie Babies, gone "antiquing" or scored an authentic Happy Days lunch box?  How about that Star Wars figure I see on your computer desk?  If that's original and you didn't get it when you were 9, you paid the street value of half of my records for it.  It's all relative and we live in the same nerdy, ramshackle glass house of cultural guilt.  Let's move on and stop judging each other.  Beanie Babies?  Really?  Jesus Christ!  But I digress.

Yes, I have spent - even wasted at times - lots of money on records.  However, vinyl is still the most cost effective way to build a sizable collection of music you want to own.  From used bins at local stores to record shows, estates sales and flea markets, record deals are out there for the intrepid music buyer.  For the record buyer with a bit of adventure a hunt for used records can lead to interesting conversations, finds of an Indiana Jones style proportion and even a few new friends.  Yes, it is exactly like bird watching or antique hunting or going for wine tastings, except that when you do those things you are almost assured of never scoring a clean copy of the White Album for five dollars at a small town library sale while on vacation with your kids.  Record hunting can remind you that there will always be more great records out there than you can keep up with and that finding a fifty cent collection of Conway Twitty hits is far more memorable and interesting - at least to me - than downloading a pirated version of the latest Rascall Flats album.

If you were there, at that party in that rec room way back when, you know what real records are and you know that they aren't something you file with thumbnails in some bullshit program that recommends more virtual files to you based on algorithms.  If you were in that room you know that the way the record sticks to the inner sleeve with a palpable static electricity the first time you slide it from it's shiny paper womb.  You know the gentle balancing act of the edge of a vinyl record resting on the cushy butt of your palm while your carefully extended fingertips cradle the label in the record's center as you ferry it to the turntable.  You know that holding a 12" x 12" record jacket comes with a musty overtone that is the aroma of youth and freedom and feels like promise in your own two hands.  And you know, more than anything, that in some way, when the moment is just so, vinyl can take you back to that room and smell that smell of summer and hear that laughter and flip (or skip) a record or two.