One Good Thing About Music, When It Hits You, You Feel No Pain

All this tech talk over the last few months has reminded me that I needed to wax musical. If you are a regular reader you no doubt know of my intense love for music. It is always on, and all around me. That is except for the time I am sleeping. Music has been a hopeless addiction since I was a kid riding around in my dad's car listening to the Beatles on 8-Track. My listening is really dictated by my mood. And while I tend to like most everything, my soul seems rooted in jazz and blues with my weapon of choice being acoustic guitar. Don't worry. I am not unhappy or depressed. I am really drawn to the pure and expressive nature of the jazz and blues greats, with a passion for the beautiful expression that comes from an acoustic axe. Anyway, as you can no doubt imagine, my collection is…well…massive. Classical, Rock, Jazz, Pop…you name it. And it is a combination of studio and live music.

   Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them - Louis Armstrong

Over time I have painstakingly converted old cassette and digital audio tape masters to full digital files. As for my CDs, well they were already digital; they just needed to be "ripped" (eg digitally extracted) into files. I've been doing this long enough to remember how painful this used to be. The software to rip CDs started out as just "ok" and expensive. The sound quality was lower and filled with that distinctive digital shrill. And you had to manually enter the name of each and every song. Yea, I know. Want the album cover art? You were out of luck. Funny thing: a record jacket just won't fit through one of those page scanners. So perhaps you would resort to scanning the inside paper from a CD case or cassette. Trust me, it looked awful. These days, it's easy. Throw in a CD and Windows will not only rip all the music into individual files, it will go out to the Net and download the song titles and album art automatically. Anyway, one by one, I took each album or concert, digitized it and meticulously tagged them all with the appropriate information and cover art (aka metadata). After all, if I am going to spend all this time getting everything digital, it better be consistent and complete. OCD...check! This work has gone on for over a decade with a backup running each and every day. My dear friend James reminded me of the fun you endure if you lose a drive and have to start all over again. Like dragging a needle across a record, it only takes once to learn that lesson.

Then, just as I saw the end of this monumental task; just as I reached the peak of the musical mountain, the digital music revolution took hold and everything changed.
      

Hypnotized
I started thinking about this blog while listening to Fleetwood Mac - Rumours. It is the 35th anniversary of
this very special album you know. It is by far one of the best albums ever recorded. It came from a time when music didn't suck. Artist saw an album as a body of work that told a story. Hence the term "play through" was coined to describe an album which you played from start to finish, enjoying each track. Rumours wasn't the first play-through, just the first of many play-throughs I would own. You all know nearly every single track on the album thanks to the radio. "Go Your Own Way, Dreams, Gold Dust Woman" just to name a few, are enduring songs which you've heard most of your life. What you may not know is that Rumours was the 10th album by Fleetwood Mac which, up until the album previous to Rumours (simply called Fleetwood Mac), was a modestly popular blues band. What happened next is one of rock's best "right place at the right time" stories.  In late 1974, as the original band was folding, Mick Fleetwood began looking around for replacement musicians. He was hanging out in the recording studio where he overheard the playback of a newly recorded song by a local group called Buckingham Nicks. Fleetwood really dug the sound and asked to be introduced to the guitarist. The studio engineer said, "He is right over there in the other room."  It was at this moment that Fleetwood met, you guessed it, Lindsay Buckingham.  Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join the group. Buckingham agreed, on the condition that his girlfriend, Stephanie Nicks could join too.  I think you know the rest.

Don't Stop
Enjoying my music digitally was pretty easy to do at home. I had all the music living on a hard drive and could play it through a PC. Trouble was I didn't sit at my PC all the time. As time went by, my device count grew. I have a smart phone, a few tablets, a laptop, and a PC at work. I wanted to jam everywhere. So, I discovered Pandora. No, not the expensive charm bracelet. This Pandora is free. I just saw most of you smile. Dubbed an Internet radio service, Pandora allows me to create my own radio station and she seemed to be dialed into everything else I liked too. For example, I created a station called Santana. Naturally, Pandora immediately started to spin out one song after another from the great San Fran guitarist. Yet they weren't all Santana songs. See, Pandora "listens" to the music you like and then guesses (based on certain patterns) that you will like other artists. So, while listening to Santana, Pandora throws on some Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills & Nash and so on. If she guesses right, I give her a "thumbs up" and she knows from that point forward that she is guessing correctly. I can also give a "thumbs down" when she hits me
with "Inna godda davida." Very cool stuff.

So every girl has her hang-ups, right? Well, Pandora is no exception. She very much resembles a Millennium-generation teenager. Short attention span mixed with instant gratification tendencies. Sure she has access to a lot of music. But she knows nothing about albums. All she knows are singles. This is perfect for the iTunes generation. You know, the people who say "photo" when you say "album;" who think Crosby, Stills, and Nash are a law firm, Cream is what goes in your skinny, half-calf non-fat organic blend latte, and The Grateful Dead is the name of the next zombie apocalypse movie. I don't fault them. Look, they have been conditioned to enjoy music $.99 at a time as an eclectic collection of really short stories instead of an epic tale. Hey, if you're being told the book only has one good chapter, you don't really know what you're missing, right?  Me, well I am a space-generation baby. I am all about albums. As an aside, you may enjoy Rolling Stone Magazine's  500 greatest albums of all time. It's an interesting journey on its own. Anyway, if you are an album junkie, Pandora will frustrate you. Then there is what I call the "Beatles phenomenon." It would seem that every Pandora station meanders its way back to Beatles. Don't get me wrong, I love the lads from Liverpool. I just find it funny that one minute I am listening to Johnny Cash singing Folsom Prison Blues and the next I will hear Sgt. Peppers. And finally, Pandora has no way of tapping into your personal music collection. With all that said though, I still enjoy her. Pandora fills a need in that you can have a ton of different stations and let it randomly play. Your own personal radio station made up of all the genres that you like. It's like having an old-school FM radio station all to yourself. Request lines are open...just for you!

Second Hand News

About a year or so ago, I discovered a neat program called Plex. Plex is a piece
of software that lives on my home PC and catalogs all of my personal music and movies. Not impressed? Let me go a bit further here. Plex will transmit (aka stream) my music and movie collection to nearly any device I own, anywhere I am, so long as I have Internet access. There are Plex apps for Windows, iOS, Android, and any browser. Remember, I mentioned my vast personal music collection? Sure, I have a ton of standard issued albums just like you do. However, I am also an avid collector of live recordings that capture artists in a very different way. None of which were commercially released. Billy Joel playing in a bar in 1977 before releasing "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant;" Widespread Panic performing in Aspen as an unknown jam band from Georgia. The Black Crowes doing an entire show of Led Zepplin covers, with Jimmy Page playing guitar (a subsequent version of this show got released). I'm talking hundreds of shows. So, here is what I can do now. I hop in my car and am in the mood to hear...um...the original Van Halen demo sessions from 1976. Demo sessions you say? A little side history here. Everyone knows Van Halen and their music. What you may not know is they were discovered by none other than Gene Simmons. He liked their sound so much that he funded their first demo recording.

The band's original name was "Genesis." That is until Eddie realized there was a band from England with the same name. Then it was "Mammoth." However, it too was by another band. David Lee Roth suggested something more subtle: Van Halen. A good move considering the name they almost went with was "Rat Salad." Really, that is a true story. Where was I? Oh right...Plex. I open the Plex app on my smart phone, find the album and press play. Within a few seconds, the unmistakable guitar of Eddie Van Halen goes from zero to sixty in a few seconds. I start up my car and, through the magic of Bluetooth, the music effortlessly begins to play on my car stereo…without me doing a thing. I stick my phone in the cup holder and begin to drive…never missing a beat (no pun

intended)…all the while listening to music coming straight from my house. Just amazing how all this technology seamless works together. So well in fact that it has really caused me to question even having satellite radio any longer. When I am at home, I use Plex on my Apple TV. So, my whole music collection is readily available to me everywhere in the house. And I have the added bonus of browsing my collection using a remote and my TV.  A little Ray Charles from the Newport Jazz Festival; perfect for a dinner with friends. Perhaps a day of cooking is in store? Hmmm...I'm feeling some Stevie Ray Vaughn. A few clicks and Texas Flood starts coming your way.

Then there is work. Pop open the Plex player for Windows 8 and I can enjoy some tunes at work. Some days its Bob James and David Sanborn with a mix of Aretha and James Taylor. Perhaps a dollup of Metallica with a drive-by of AC/DC and Paul Simon. Some nice toe tapping at the office. Plex is absolutely awesome! But wait, there's more! It will also stream my movies the same way as my music. So what doesn't it do? It only knows about the music and movies you own. That means I am still back to either buying music and placing it on my computer or using Pandora. For a while, between Plex and Pandora, I felt pretty whole. Then one day I met Spotify.

Dreams
Spotify came along about a year ago. I talk about it all the time. It too is an online music streaming service...with a big twist:  It was all about full albums. Hallelujah! Another free service, Spotify allows you to search for and play albums of your choice. Oh man! How good could it be for free? Limited selection right? Crappy quality? Not at all. Granted, every artist has not cut a deal with Spotify to catalog and offer their music, but most have done so. Ok, here we go. I searched for Jimi Hendrix Valleys of Neptune. And there it is…the entire album. How about the Three Tenors in Rome. It's there. Pink Floyd The Wall. There. Dave Bruebeck Take Five. There. Miles Davis Kind of Blue. There. Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, Boston, Simon and Garfunkel, Pavarotti, Strawberry Alarm Clock, it goes on and on and on. I quickly realized that much of the recorded music in my collection was already in Spotify. How convenient considering I spent...I don't know...call it an excessive amount of time and money trying to achieve digital perfection with my collection Anyway, Spotify works on all my devices just like Plex. No, it doesn't know about my home collection. But it is all about commercially released albums that I like. This is huge. Now, comes the fun part: the Spotify community.

Music-lovers from around the globe enjoy Spotify. And they create playlists of their favorite artists, songs, and albums. Here is the best part: they share them with the community. Imagine choosing a group like the Rolling Stones and building your own greatest hits playlist that consists of as many songs as you want across all the albums you love. Then, quicker than you can say "Jumping Jack Flash" you can share that list with your friends. Your very own greatest hits list without...wait for it... buying any of the music! I know, it just hit you didn't it? Who is "Jumping Jack

Flash?" That would be Jack Dyer; Keith Richard's gardener in 1968. Wait! I meant "it just hit you" that music no longer will cost you money. That is correct. You no longer have to buy your music. No CDs, singles, full digital albums…nothing. With Spotify, music becomes a cloud service where you can explore and listen to any genre, and any artist without spending a single dollar and without any limits. True musical freedom. Now then, if you want free, you have to endure a commercial or two. However, for a few bucks a month, you can have Spotify completely commercial-free.  That's right, for the price of five singles on iTunes, the entire music world is available to you sans advertisement. And recently, Spotify introduced their "Radio" service. This is a Pandora knock off that is built into Spotify. This changes everything! And, I've gotta tell you, Spotify's Radio beats Pandora. Really, it does.

Go Your Own Way
I really think the Spotify model is the future of music. Google and Apple seem to agree as they both scramble to catch up. Google says they will give you the best of both worlds: streaming albums like Spotify and your own music collection in the cloud. We'll see. For now, artists are embracing the new model. Why? because artists no longer make money on album or single sales. Instead, the money is made on the road with concerts and high priced tickets. A full reverse of the way it used to be. Nothing exemplifies this statement more than when you hear the stats of the number one album in the country. A mere 200,000 album sales and you are in the top spot. Used to be you need to get to at least Gold

(500,000 sold) before anyone recognized your album as successful. Platinum (1,000,000 sold) meant you really had something worthy.

Services such as Spotify have the ability and potential to re-imagine the music business by not only acquainting the younger generations with the concept and meaningfulness of an album, but also inviting them to explore beyond the hyper-dance, angry, auto-tuned, poaching sampling-other-people's-work-and calling-it-original-music that seems to be all around us these days. It would be nice to talk to a twenty-something and have them know three things: "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme" is not a list of spices your mom wants you go buy at the grocery store; Johnnie Lee Hooker is not the name of a call girl; And that "Great Balls of Fire" was not sung by Jerry Lewis. If we can get passed these three things, I believe there is hope.

So what has happened to me now? Well, for starters, I don't buy singles or albums any longer. Period. There
is no need. And I am not faced with cataloging and dropping all that music onto my home server. Used to be when I traveled that I needed to load up music on devices before I left town. Do you know how time consuming this is when you have a family? It took forever and you always left off the one song or album that everyone wanted to here. Mindreader = Fail. Those days are now gone. I have hundreds of playlists in Spotify, for whatever music mood I find myself. As a result, , I use Pandora less and less. Spotify rules them all, with Plex filling in where Spotify can't reach. So now that you are emboldened with this great musical knowledge, go forth and re-discover that which used to make you so, so happy. Sign up for Pandora and Spotify. Then, grab your black concert t-shirt, studded leather belt, some Levi 501 button fly jeans and a bandanna; Go now and relive your guilty pleasure of big-hair 80's bands the way you couldn't before since you didn't have any money. No cassettes, no concerts, or boom boxes required. Just you, your smart phone, and some epic air guitar with Ratt, Twister Sister, The Scopions and Motley Crue. Sure you will look like a one-man flash mob but who cares. No regrets, no judgement. That is, of course, provided you don't attempt the aforementioned task at work...not even on Halloween.

P.S. Yes, some of THAT music is in my collection too :-) One other thing: the title of this post is one that I do not take credit. It is a wonderful quote from Bob Marley.

P.P.S. A small note about Ray Dolby. He passed away late last week. Many of you don't know him, but you have benefited from his wonderful work every time you hear music and watch a movie. Thanks to Ray, the world is, and shall remain, a much quieter place.