There Have Been

Bad Moments

Capstans
Soup is good food; you'll make a good meal...…
6-12

Social changes move like rivers -- picking up loose grains underneath their currents, carrying them along as far as they can before depositing them somewhere down the line. Once there, the silt ebbs and flows with the tide, build upon each other to form alluvial plains or deltas, and gradually slide away into the sea, only to be replaced by others.
 
The music I listen to isn't cool anymore. The clothes I like are horribly out of step with the fashion trends of the day. Sometimes these things bother me, if only in the sense that my opinion of the things that are good, vital, and important don't seem to match up with what is passing for worthwhile these days. It makes you realize your time passing, and you sort of feel out of the loop, and that can be a bummer.
 
But at the same time, my tastes were always a little outside of the curve to start with, so the fact that I can't be identified with any of the latest trends in pop culture doesn't really bother me all that much. I mean, let's be honest -- a lot of the music I like was recorded before I was even born, so it's not hard to fathom why it never gets talked about much on Total Request Live.
 
It's just part of the wheel spinning. I don't like much of the music that my father listens to, and eventually Curren will turn his nose at my tastes as well. It's as natural as the leaves turning in autumn, and growing back in the springtime.
 
But at the same time, I do miss some things.
 
I do wish that some of those old ideas were still around. As with anything else in the world, new improvements to our lives have come at the cost of others. And despite the fact that when you put them side by side, the benefits of the new and improved versions are easy to see -- sometimes the old things had a value that wasn't always obvious.
 
For example, improvements in digital technology have certainly improved the state of stereo equipment over the years. A personal stereo system now is a hell of a lot more powerful, versatile, and durable than it used to be --- but in my opinion, all of this improvement has come at a price.
 
You simply cannot find a boom box with a microphone built into it anymore.
 
Every boom box I ever owned growing up had a microphone on it. It was standard. You could record anything you wanted to directly to cassette with your boom box, and then play it right back. The sound quality sucked, but it was the price you paid for convenience.
 
As a musician, I cannot tell you the value I got out of being able to record song ideas directly into my stereo, or make recordings of jam sessions with bands I was in. If I wanted to record my music quickly now, I would have to drag out a whole mess of devices, microphones, mixers, cables, and who knows what else just to get ready to start. And with the way my mind sometimes works, the time it would take me to set all the stuff up might just be enough of a pause for me to lose whatever creative spark I was trying to capture in the first place....
 
I know a lot of people have little home studios, and everyone likes the control that you can get from digital recording -- but to me, all the setup thats neccesary is kind of a hassle. If I hear a guitar noise or a song idea in my head, I want to just be able to toss in a blank cassette, hit record, and doodle the idea out so I won't forget it.
 
I made so many tapes of crappy guitar ideas when I was younger. For me, it was part of the process of learning to play. Like an artist's sketchpad, or a writer's idea journal, these boom box scratch tapes were the place where the good stuff was developed, and the bad stuff was pruned away. I used to stay up to insane hours of the night just messing around on the guitar, the tape recorder pushed right up to the speaker on my amplifier (which was turned down as quiet as it could possibly go so it wouldn't wake up my parents).
 
The following day I would listen to the tape in the car on my way to school, and study my own playing with a critical ear. A lot of times when I drove other people to school, I would force my passengers to listen to my playing as well. I can't say that they always enjoyed listening to tapes of me playing the same four chords over and over, but everyone understood how important the music was to me, so they sorta put up with it.
 
Guitar playing was an integral part of my life at that time, and the fact that I could simply push the record button and capture the inspirations that were inside of me helped to make me feel like I the music that I was making (however juvenile it actually might have been at times) was real, and important. The ablility to have a semi-permanent record of my art that I could take with me wherever I went made me a very happy guy...
 
OK, I admit it --- I miss cassettes.
 
They had their problems -- they were fragile, the sound quality was never all that great, if you were like me you always forgot to label your home-made tapes, so you were constantly erasing things you wanted to keep. I also had the bad habit of accidentally getting fingerprints on all the good parts, ruining them forever. Admittedly it was imperfect technology, and the development of digital media such as CD's improved on all of the shortcomings that came along with relying on magnetic tape.
 
But at the same time, the process of recording a CD (at least for someone with my budget) is so much more hackneyed than recording on tape that it's sort of a pain in the ass.
 
Recently I've been putting together song lists so I can make some mix CD's for my friends. Making a mix tape is something that I have always loved to do, and I make it a point to try to make the coolest mix tapes I can for the people that I care about.
 
I used to do these "Radio One" tapes where I served as the morning show DJ for an imaginary radio station. In addition to songs we had commercial spoofs (many of which were homemade), comedy clips, and all sorts of other craziness. I used to plug a microphone into the effects pedals that I used on my guitar, change my voice, do impressions... it was a massive undertaking. To fit all of this into a package that provided the most bang for the buck, I used to always use the ultra-fragile 120-minute cassettes that you could only buy at Radio Shack (since the big name cassette makers refused to put their names on something so completely unreliable). They were always painted hideous colors, and would pretty much fall apart after being played a dozen or so times. But they were the longest tapes available to the public, and that was what I wanted.
 
At times I would even get out a razor blade and physically splice things together, creating collages of sounds from different places. Anything was fair game to get the mix to come together right. If I needed background music, I would play a stereo behind me while I talked. If I needed two voices, I would record on the left and right speaker separately. There were overdubs I made by daisy chaining several tape players together, cramming as much information as I could onto the same stretch of tape. Once I had the tape the way I wanted it, I would make copies, each becoming more faded and fuzzy as the source tape was stretched and demagnetized.
 
And even though I know that all of this stuff is available to me digitally, and much of it has been simplified down to the touch of a button, there is something different about it. Something that feels removed, plastic. You can't tinker as much. You can't get outside the box unless you have serious machinery on your side.
 
Trying to hang on to these scotch tape and chewing gum methods makes me feel like an old school fogey -- but at the same time, It just seems like I could accomplish so much more with cassettes than I can with CD's right now.
 
If I want to make a CD that can be played on a regular stereo with the software I am currently using, I can only get about 19 to 24 songs on there, depending on how long the tunes are. I guarantee you that I could easily cram three times that amount of music onto a tape. The tape might only last you a week, but I could always go back and make you another copy.
 
Plus, the ability to get into the bones of the stuff and mesh sounds together seems much more involved than it used to be. Even though I can do much more exact matching and sonic trickery with computer-based sound editing software, there is a sense of simplicity that seems lost. I can't just spin the sprocket back a half turn with my finger and have one song segue directly into another anymore.
 
It's tough to be so wired into ways that seemed to have outlived their usefulness, tough to look into the mirror of your tastes and see those tell-tale lines starting to appear under the eyes. It's sort of like the way that I love the instant gratification that email gives, but I secretly miss the intimacy that comes from being able to hold a letter in your hand...
 
And I know how all of this makes me sound. I grew up with people telling me that movies were a nickel, and that all the gas stations were full service, and that people knew respect and everyone walked barefoot in the snow to school, and I hated hearing that shit.
 
But I'm not asking for the world to go back to a place where we have black and white TV, drive-in theaters, and waitresses on roller skates... All I want is for Panasonic, Emerson, or whoever to sell boom boxes with microphones in them again.
 

... And pop rocks. I miss pop rocks, too.