Now and Then

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I write 3 of these things a week, so have to be open to ideas, wherever they come from.

It could be a WTF political moment, or a trip to the grocery store, or hearing a certain song on the radio. It can be a birth or a death or escaped monkeys on route 80.

Early this morning a phrase came into my head. I was half asleep. It was still dark outside. "Now and then". No other explanation came with it. Just some weird synapse firing at 4am, reminding me that the week is almost over and I'm still short one column. Now and then. No context. Just....now.....and then....

Ok, I'll run with it.

There's so many roads and forks and rabbit holes I could take here....but let's settle on one, shall we?

Music. And let’s reverse the order.

Then.

It was the anticipation. Word of mouth. Or you heard it on the radio. Or read it in one of the music magazines. That new album was coming. That new single. On this or that date. Down to the record store you'd go....fingering the money you scraped together just for this (much of it was change...but record store clerks never judged. They understood these things...). Finding the record in the bins. It shone like a diamond in that shrink wrap, like a Civil War musket gleaming in the sun. The front cover. The back cover. If you were lucky, a fold out. Maybe the lyrics were in there. Maybe liner notes. Who played on what track? Who wrote what track? Maybe even a poster for the bedroom wall….

You walked out with it under your arm. NEVER opened it until you got home. Bad ju-ju. So you'd run inside and up to your room and slice through the shrink-wrap with your thumb nail, trying not to paper-cut yourself and bleed over the product in the process. Just the cut to get the record out. The rest of the wrap could remain as long as it held together. Take the record out. And just stare at it. Pristine. Perfect. There was no better feeling than this.....that moment when the needle dropped for the first time, and you sat back and hugged your knees and studied it all, looking for clues. It was one-on-one. The band was talking to you. These songs were written for you. That $5.99 you handed over (maybe $10.99 if it was a double album) was like signing a contract. You held up your end. It was now on them....

You might have friends over....and you'd sit and listen to it together. Discussing the artwork and the sequencing (albums were like 2 act plays….side A and B splits meant something) and the guitar tones and the deeper meanings of life hidden in the grooves. What did this mean? What did that mean? Who were they talking about? What was that line again? If a song grabbed you, you'd repeat it endlessly. You hands were never steadier than when they picked up that needle and moved it back. You'd place it perfectly every time, right on the black. Never drag it. Ever. People who treat records that carelessly should be shunned. These same people flip them onto turntables with one hand, fingerprinting them to death. They are monsters. Records should forever be treated like they are part of a crime scene.

Your room was nothing more than a place for all your records that you somehow managed to fit a bed into. Records were lined neatly against the wall. Or on shelves. Or spread out everywhere. They were alphabetized or stored by date of purchase or by genre or they were tossed about like laundry. There was no mood you were in that did not have a record to go along with it. Your room was your refuge because that's where the music was.

Hundreds of records. When you did the math on the $$ you spent, it seemed surreal. THOUSANDS of dollars. Crinkled up fives and singles and all that change....all those years.....you never spent this much on anything else in your life. You worked for it...shoveled snow or raked leaves or cut grass. You begged for it. You saved your birthday and Christmas money from aunts and uncles. And it was still a bargain.

And now?

It's a small monthly fee on the credit card (about the cost of a 70s era double album), and for that we get the entire world of music on a device smaller than a 45. In the process we de-value it all. Because we've been conditioned to think that the entire world of music SHOULD be accessible for the kind of money we used to scrounge from seat cushions. And there's no shrink wrap to slice or liner notes to devour, or even song credits to peruse. All of that is white noise. Get to the part that triggers the $0.003, because this is all progress. Think of all the space you save in the bedroom!

There’s a reason top artists are selling off their catalogs. There is no more one-on-one contract. No more looking the clerk in his gleaming eye and handing over that $5.99 or $10.99

It’s been replaced by fractions of pennies.

All those kids slicing their thumbs on that shrink wrap are now double-thumb-tapping their phones. Nobody has to lift the needle to hear the song again.

It feels dishonorable.

Now sucks. Then was better.

In a bit..

—tf