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.

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