I purchased my first record album (a.k.a. LP) when I was in fourth grade. It was "ChangesOneBowie," and I was ten and had just come home from a summer in Burbank with my cousins. There I had fallen head over heels - as much as one can at age ten - for thirteen-year old Allan Domkus, who was the biggest Bowie fanatic in all of Burbank anyway, and who at that tender age had already recorded a demo tape of himself and some friends doing not-too-shabby covers of several Bowie tunes, with Allan on vocals.
Allan went on to found Scaterd Few, a legendary L.A. punk band who distinguished themselves as much by the fact that they were born-again Christians as by their sophisticated songwriting and musicianship, and Allan's extraordinary vocal prowess.
In any case, "ChangesOneBowie" was a great first album to purchase because, well, it's a great album - and a superb introduction to Bowie. I subsequently became a full-fledged Bowie-phile in my own right, and spent pretty much every cent I got my hands on - including the $24 a day I would take home after working eight hours in hotel gift shops (which at that time also served as concierges) with my mother on Saturdays and Sundays - collecting his albums. The Bowie inventories at the Record Factory on Polk Street and Tower Records on Columbus were my holy grail; between those two stores I collected all of Bowie's official RCA releases, as well as the wonderful comic-covered double "Images" album on London/Decca, and from thence began my long love affair with music in general.
Fast forward to the fall of 1998, when I unloaded (literally) all of my vinyl at Rasputin's on Telegraph Avenue before moving to New York. No way I was going to haul hundreds of LPs with me when I didn't even own a turntable anymore. I sold what Rasputin's would buy and left the rest of my records in two boxes on Channing and drove away.
At that point I had replaced probably 75 percent of my vinyl collection with CDs. Happily for me there is really only one item from the remaining 25 percent whose loss I have mourned over the years, and that is a Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five LP whose lesser tracks (among the greater were "White Lines" and "We Don't Work For Free") apparently were too obscure to warrant digital release.
CDs were a revolution back then, but fast forward again to 2006 and the revolution is being broadcast via your computer in the form of iTunes, and its ultimate vessel, the iPod.
Your own personal, portable jukebox bearing the soundtrack to your life - what could be better? Random play, that's what! Random play was (and is) a boon to those of us with massive music collections because it enables much needed random access to every tune in the library and liberates us from playing favorites by facilitating ongoing unprejudiced survey of the music we own. Not to mention that it creates a hell of a mix. It used to be my Walkman on the bus playing back a mix tape of my own creation - now it's iTunes on my desk (working to musical accompaniment is probably my favorite benefit of working from home) or my iPod in the glove box playing back a monstrous mix tape that draws from my entire music collection and relies on computerized statistical analysis for its always fresh track list.
As I understand it, this has been the gripe of many artists who have hesitated to make their music available through iTunes - perhaps chief among them, as far as this line of reasoning is concerned, the Dave Matthews Band. An album, after all, is not merely the sum of its parts, but a composition in itself in terms of the final track listing (at least this applies to artists who have control over such matters - and those who don't are not under consideration here). So a set of songs is labored over for months and sometimes years, a selection of songs is made, and then those songs are set down in an order that the artist feels makes the songs individually and the album as a whole convey the best possible result of their own creative process. So the album as a whole, cohesive unit has significance beyond being a vessel for the individual songs. And it is precisely the sale of individual songs that has given DMB and others pause where iTunes is concerned.
At any rate, my point is that after giving oneself over - happily - to the wonders of random play, one is in for an unexpected, at once nostalgic and fresh, surprise when one one day disables random play and listens to a familiar album in its original sequence and in its entirety. For someone like myself who grew up in the era of 33rpm format albums, on some level this experience is a flashback to a simpler point in time when listening to music wasn't about pushing play but about lowering the stylus - and, admittedly, when so much technology and so many choices were not available to us. The drill went something like this: march down to the record store, purchase an album (or two or...), march home, unwrap the album, remove the sleeve from the cover, remove the LP from the sleeve, place it on the turntable side A up, power on, and drop the needle. There was no song hopping unless it was performed manually and with not a little trouble. And if you were a song hopper, you probably purchased singles (45's - remember those too?!) rather than albums because the whole point of an album, after all, was to hear it out. It was a kick-back, chill-out experience. It was about hearing what the artist had to say.
And, yes, in a way it was about passive reception, whereas random play and the many other listener-enabling glories of the digital age make music appreciation these days a much more interactive pursuit.
But let's face it: those were the good old days. So try turning off random play and listening through one of your favorite old albums in its original sequence. You'll rediscover something special in the old order.
Oh - and p.s. - these are the pretty good new days, so you can always resume random play after strolling down memory lane.
