How Historical Change Flows Through Us

When I was about 18 or so, I had a job in a small town, and lived in the next small town about 5 miles down the road. I couldn't afford a car at the time, so each day I walked the 10 miles back and forth. No, this isn't one of those "I walked in 6 foot snow, uphill both ways, with wolves nipping at my heels" stories; I'm not an embittered old man yet. Yet. However, I did walk those 10 miles, and honestly, I didn't mind it; it kept me in shape, gave me time to ponder things -- I always liked to think -- and in any event, on occasion, some kind soul with a car would take pity on the poor slob that was me and pick me up along the way. On one such occasion, on a sunny spring day, just such a blessed soul, some young guy about my age, picked me up with his 1969 dusty-beige Dodge Charger. Since both towns were centered on the same highway, it was obvious where I was going, so we did not exchange any words at all. He simply pulled over, I got in, and off we went. Now, this was a time when someone driving a car from the 1960s was not unusual, and indeed this Charger had not been "restored", though it was kind of different for such a young guy to have such a sporty car like that at his age. In any event, one of the reasons we didn't talk was that we couldn't hear each other; he had installed an awesome sound system in this beast which already had a powerful 318 cubic inch V-8 engine, so as he stepped on the gas the G-forces pushed us back in our seats and the engine roared us down the road. Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the drool off my chin, and the tear from my eye as I look outside at the Corolla sitting in my driveway today. Anyway, it was a nice, warm spring day, the windows were open, the sky was blue, the wind was whipping through our hair; we both had long hair. Man, I had hair then! Sorry, I keep digressing; anyway, so there we went down the road with the wind whipping through our -- whimper -- hair. It was awesome. The song bellowing -- no, booming out of his sub-woofers was Heart's Barracuda, and I'd swear the road itself was vibrating and thudding with the bass line. As the song nears its triumphant crescendo with the words...

You're gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn it to the wick Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Barra, Barracuda!

...the bass line picks up in a thunderous, testosterone-infused blow-out of a hard rock ending. Suh-weet. When we got to town, I thanked the guy for a great ride -- I still remember that ride today, decades later -- and I don't think my feet touched the ground at all that day at work.

So today's topic is music. The experience of music has changed quite a bit over the past century or so, and that has changed the music itself. I got to thinking about this because I heard Don McLean, the guy who wrote "American Pie" ("...and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this'll be the day that I die."), on the local radio as he was complaining about how the new technology of music -- downloading songs, in particular -- was in his opinion destroying music by taking artistic control of the album away from the artist; fans can just cherry-pick whatever songs they like, usually the ones to make the charts or achieve radio play, without listening to the rest. This got me thinking a bit...

In the 18th century, there were a couple levels of music. There was a formal level performed by professional musicians who travelled around to venues -- you know, the Mozarts of the world. Given that the 18th century was, for most people, all work and very little play, these concerts were very popular for all classes of society. You might think Mozart, Bach or Beethoven are stuffy music for old folks, but they were the high entertainment of their day, the cable TV of 18th century Saturday nights. Everyone swarmed to these concerts, and the music was social music; it was written and performed for a live audience sitting just a few feet away. The musical themes were taken from popular cultural themes and images, something that everyone in the audience would relate to and understand. There was another kind of music as well, the, well, let's call it "low brow" music, which was working people sitting outside in the evenings looking to blow off some steam and have some cheap fun. In Europe and America this usually involved a guitar or fiddle, maybe a few percussion instruments, a singer, and people would laugh, sing and dance with the music. Here again, the themes of these songs were generic and aimed at their audience, in this case, lower-level classes in society, with themes taken from the hard working lives they knew.

Although styles changed over time or across regions, this basic culture of music remained the same for centuries. Until, that is, a bunch of guys in the 19th century invented a way to record sound. For a while there was some fumbling over formats, with for instance Thomas Edison perfecting a clay cylinder, but eventually in the early 20th century flat plastic (and shellacked) disks won the day, and the record album was born. This was a revolution; now, an average person could bring a concert played by the professional musicians into their home and listen to it anytime they wanted. At first, recording companies rushed to record all the great professional music that had been, until then, a special event thing, but soon recorders were recording any type of music they could get their hands on. At about this same time (or maybe I should say, right on time) some popular forms of music were raging across the U.S. -- the blues, jazz, marching music -- and very quickly recording studios began recoding and selling the stuff. It redefined "popular" because now anyone could listen to any music no matter where they lived. The thing about a record was that it had limited playing time, but soon artists adapted to that playing time and began producing music suited to records. Artists understood their audience had changed, had widened now and was no longer just the local yokels out on a Saturday night; it was everybody. Jazz, blues, and their strange sibling rock and roll all grew up around this record technology, and as technology improved allowing records to play both longer and better quality sound, artists adjusted their music along the way.

Another thing about records though was that they had to be flipped over mid-way through the performance, and with more sensitive players could skip easily if someone jumped or bumped into some furniture in the room. You also couldn't leave them in direct sunlight or let them get damp; they would warp like a tortilla chip. In the 1970s, someone came up with the idea of the cassette (after an embarrassing experiment with 8-tracks), which negated some of the more sensitive issues that record LPs ("long-playing") had. This was another revolution, because cassettes were smaller and easier to carry or store, and cassette players could be put in cars, which meant you didn't have to listen to the radio anymore -- you could bring your own music along. (My adventurous car ride described at the beginning involved a cassette player in the guy's awesome car.) Now music wasn't just for home, you could take your music almost anywhere. Sony got rid of the "almost" part in the early 1980s when they invented the Walkman, which now allowed you to take your music anywhere a person could go. Soon, to the consternation of the music companies, recordable cassettes were born and for the first time, listeners and fans could cherry-pick their favorite songs from multiple artists and put together their own mix cassettes, which I assure you we all quickly did.

With each step in this technological trail, music became a little more personal, a little more focused on the individual rather than the audience-crowd. Artists understood that they were writing (and performing) not for a hall full of bored locals, not for a bedroom full of teenagers, but now for a single person walking along a beach or on a street, listening to their music. If you listen to the popular music of the 1980s, 90s and our own decade, you see that music becomes more personal, almost like a private dialogue between the artist and listener.

The birth of the 'concept album' is usually credited to the Who's 1969 album Tommy, but if you listen to any Johnny Cash, Merl Haggard, Woody Guthrie, Ray Charles, Miles Davis or etc. album, it'll become obvious that the concept album was pretty much born with the record. The concept album is seen by many as the epitome of the album, of the fullest artistic realization of what modern popular music can bring you: Pink Floyd's The Wall, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Janis Joplin's Pearl; great music that tells a story, a story for us all. I'm not complaining or bemoaning the changes technology has made, just observing. OK, I am complaining a little bit. The old Roman saying, Omnia mutantur, nihil interit -- "Everything changes, but nothing is lost" -- applies here, I suppose.

Technology has marched on, with the inception of digital music, which again revolutionized music. Digital music can be carried in even smaller portable devices that make the old Walkmans look like bricks we wore on our hips, and it can be distributed on the internet. This has opened up the music catalog because it costs almost nothing to store and make digital music available online, which means that even the oldest and most obscure recordings can be made available. It used to be that for albums by bands not yet in the popular musical mainstream, you had to either go to record shops in places like New York or Chicago which carried obscure stuff, or you could order through your local record store and, if they had your album in their catalog, they'd ship it to the store in 2 to 6 weeks. I am still waiting for an album I ordered at a store in New York state back in 1988. (Hint, hint: this refers to the unreliability of the process.) Digital music has also taken a lot of the hot air out of the music industry's sails as anyone can sell their music online and market it fairly cheaply, a fact that the industry tried to ignore for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s by suing anybody who suggested that it still wasn't 1982. Eventually they caved in and adapted, but the album as a format for music -- through the LP record, cassette and CD -- is dying, as sagging sales show. This is what Don McLean was complaining about, and I understand his pain. Folks like me who remember albums still think in that format, and we're the dying breed of fogies who still buy albums. Nowadays, digital music has undermined not only the album but the song format as well; digital music allows 13 year old kids to cut up and combine different parts of recorded songs through "mashup" software, and distribute it online, so that one file may combine Beethoven, Dr. Dre, a clip from a speech by Bush, Metallica and some Bonnie Raitt. I have to admit that some of that stuff isn't too bad, a throwback to some of the better techno stuff of the 1990s that also combined known songs and wove them around original music.

I don't have a moral here, other than to say that my story at the beginning was a point in time, a specific way in which people at that time listened to and enjoyed music. It was unique to its time, and while people still go to concerts and listen to music in their cars -- with quite frankly far better quality sound systems -- the experience of music has changed. I agree with Don McLean that I will miss the album as a sort canvass on which artists painted their music -- I think Fiona Apples's Tidal, or Cyrus Chestnut's Soul Food, or Neil Young's Prairie Wind are great albums from which I'd never want to cherry-pick individual songs -- but I am also grateful for having access to odd and obscure musical recordings I probably would never have learned about were it not for the net and digital technology. In the 1980s as a rabid Led Zeppelin fan, I read eagerly about legendary concerts of their golden age in the early-to-mid-1970s, but now I can actually listen to bootlegs of those concerts. Amazing. Perhaps ironically, the digital age has also made all of Don McLean's recordings available to me, something which would not have been possible in the age when the record store was king. So, given all this, it will be interesting to see how the newer generations listen to and incorporate music into their lives. I, for one, am going to pop in Heart's Little Queen CD right now. Thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, oh yeah.....