Seeing as how I invoked this post, I thought, hell, let's check the Amazon music store (I'm shilling it for absolutely zero $s, baby!) for the theme song of Flambards. Sure enough. The Amazon MP3 download store is slightly borked, incidentally - it keeps trying to make me download the downloader over and again. Still, I got it. Now I got two copies, my hiss-n-poppy 45 transcription, and my shiny new digital download. There's a longer story attached to that, but I'll probably never bother telling it...
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
Saturday, July 05, 2008
So Walk Tall... Or Baby, Don't Walk At All
Maybe someday it will become the download store review site I pine for it to be...
One of the problems, incidentally, is Amazon.
Example: my recent loss of a significant number of CDs to basic distraction and merciless physics is, in fact, dwarfed by a not-quite-as-recent intentional loss... I sold all of my audio cassettes (aside from the 8-tracks) to a used record store...
Late in high school I took some of my not-insignificant savings (oh how I pine for those long-lost net black ink days) and bought myself a boombox produced under the Realistic brand by Radioshack. In my little rural Minnesota town Radioshack was run by Reed's Music, a sort of one-stop for musical instruments traditional and electronic, as well as the various technical ephemera of ye olde nineteen eightees. Ah, nostalgia. Anyway: 'twas a thing of beauty, dual cassette with hi-speed tape-to-tape dubbing, RCA line in and out, stereo divided line in... a number of my earlier recorded masterpieces were slammed directly to this beast. It was all I had. The first commercial tape I ever bought was Lou Reed's Street Hassle, from some bargain bin in Willmar, the nearest "big" town to my home in the (extraordinarily misnamed) Montevideo. Changed. My. Life.
I never listened to those dozens and dozens and dozens of tapes anymore, the classic rock and odd alternative and heavy metal and psychedelic and blues I collected from off-brand department store bins, from the ever-dwindling tape racks of city music stores. I access my music collection through my computer, and to a lesser extent through my car's CD player. I fooled around a little bit with transcribing tapes and albums to digital but it was too big of a hassle. A novelty, the novelty wore off. I sold them to clear up some space without having to add to the week's landfill quotient. I got an okay price, to my surprise. I probably lost 5 times as much as I did when I let a wallet of CDs blow off the roof of my car in that sale. I had a lot of cassettes. It was my sole format until like my senior year of college, when I bought a cheap portable CD player I could line-into that self-same realistic boombox, and my first CD, Pink Floyd's Meddle (a terrible digital transcription which sounded ten times worse than a tape my brother made me from his used LP).
Bringing us to this: a phrase rose in my mind, just moments ago. "So walk tall.. or baby, don't walk at all." Bruce Springsteen. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Disdain, if you wish. This is my youth, my childhood, that I can't quite believe is gone although I'm (gasp) pushing 40 (I'll turn 37 this year). It's also a great album. I haven't owned it in a couple years, I suspect I haven't heard it in quite a few more. I sold it, it's gone.
I looked it up on iTunes, I guess I still have some grudging allegiance to the Apple. No dice, not Plus, fuck it. Amazon has it, DRM free, and for EXACTLY the same price (Iiinteresting...). I gots me some one-click, which is actually like five click (I have to re-download the Amazon downloader, like, WTF Amazon?) Oh well. And just like that, I'm hearing it again, after so many years, in a matter of minutes. I suppose I date myself that it still amazes me. Delights me.
"Sandy... that waitress I been seeing lost her desire for me... I spoke to her last night, she said she's not going to set herself on fire for me, anymore..."
Seriously, it's hard to be a Saint in the City. But I guess that's a different download...
It's easy to get distracted by the great back-catalog that is Amazon (and soon, I suspect, just a whole bunch of places). Any idea you might have that the digital revolution automatically trumps the old school of pop filtration is, I must assure you. misconstrued. I'll get there, nevertheless. Promise.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
One of the problems, incidentally, is Amazon.
Example: my recent loss of a significant number of CDs to basic distraction and merciless physics is, in fact, dwarfed by a not-quite-as-recent intentional loss... I sold all of my audio cassettes (aside from the 8-tracks) to a used record store...
Late in high school I took some of my not-insignificant savings (oh how I pine for those long-lost net black ink days) and bought myself a boombox produced under the Realistic brand by Radioshack. In my little rural Minnesota town Radioshack was run by Reed's Music, a sort of one-stop for musical instruments traditional and electronic, as well as the various technical ephemera of ye olde nineteen eightees. Ah, nostalgia. Anyway: 'twas a thing of beauty, dual cassette with hi-speed tape-to-tape dubbing, RCA line in and out, stereo divided line in... a number of my earlier recorded masterpieces were slammed directly to this beast. It was all I had. The first commercial tape I ever bought was Lou Reed's Street Hassle, from some bargain bin in Willmar, the nearest "big" town to my home in the (extraordinarily misnamed) Montevideo. Changed. My. Life.
I never listened to those dozens and dozens and dozens of tapes anymore, the classic rock and odd alternative and heavy metal and psychedelic and blues I collected from off-brand department store bins, from the ever-dwindling tape racks of city music stores. I access my music collection through my computer, and to a lesser extent through my car's CD player. I fooled around a little bit with transcribing tapes and albums to digital but it was too big of a hassle. A novelty, the novelty wore off. I sold them to clear up some space without having to add to the week's landfill quotient. I got an okay price, to my surprise. I probably lost 5 times as much as I did when I let a wallet of CDs blow off the roof of my car in that sale. I had a lot of cassettes. It was my sole format until like my senior year of college, when I bought a cheap portable CD player I could line-into that self-same realistic boombox, and my first CD, Pink Floyd's Meddle (a terrible digital transcription which sounded ten times worse than a tape my brother made me from his used LP).
Bringing us to this: a phrase rose in my mind, just moments ago. "So walk tall.. or baby, don't walk at all." Bruce Springsteen. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Disdain, if you wish. This is my youth, my childhood, that I can't quite believe is gone although I'm (gasp) pushing 40 (I'll turn 37 this year). It's also a great album. I haven't owned it in a couple years, I suspect I haven't heard it in quite a few more. I sold it, it's gone.
I looked it up on iTunes, I guess I still have some grudging allegiance to the Apple. No dice, not Plus, fuck it. Amazon has it, DRM free, and for EXACTLY the same price (Iiinteresting...). I gots me some one-click, which is actually like five click (I have to re-download the Amazon downloader, like, WTF Amazon?) Oh well. And just like that, I'm hearing it again, after so many years, in a matter of minutes. I suppose I date myself that it still amazes me. Delights me.
"Sandy... that waitress I been seeing lost her desire for me... I spoke to her last night, she said she's not going to set herself on fire for me, anymore..."
Seriously, it's hard to be a Saint in the City. But I guess that's a different download...
It's easy to get distracted by the great back-catalog that is Amazon (and soon, I suspect, just a whole bunch of places). Any idea you might have that the digital revolution automatically trumps the old school of pop filtration is, I must assure you. misconstrued. I'll get there, nevertheless. Promise.
See previous reviews and submit sites for review at that Index Page
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