Once Upon A Time:

I love music. More than, I think, the average person. I’ve been in (bad) bands, I’ve worked at a radio station, and I’ve amassed a hoarder’s collection of music: first on CD, then on Vinyl, and now digitally. And with the decline of the CD, the rearrival of vinyl, and the advent of online radio, how we consume music is ever changing.

So I’d like to take a few minutes, just sit right there, and listen to my story all about how I became… err.. we listen to music in the 21st century.

Pop

By early 2000, I had a small collection of CDs. We all did, I think. General pop fare fit for the teenager I was at the time: Blink-182, Puff Daddy, and even *Nsync—hey, a good pop album is still a good album. I remember owning explicit versions of albums like The Marshall Mathers LP and Ready To Die, and having to share headphones because other kids didn’t know what the beeps were on their versions.

My parents both are huge music fans, but for some reason we never really listened to music outside the car. We were more a TV family. But my mother was a member of Michael Bolton’s fan club, and dragged us everywhere to go see him. My father white boy jams out to classic blues and blues rock bands, especially to Clapton and the Allman Brothers Band. They brought me to my first concert at age six, Toni Braxton and Kenny G. But we rarely ever listened to the twenty CDs they had. I think I had more than they did. So it was strange when we got three copies of the same CD for Christmas.

That CD was a compilation by a band I had heard many times on the radio before. In a way it is the band, The Beatles, and the CD was 1, a collection of their number one singles. Many of you will be familiar with this collection—it has sold over 12 million copies since its debut—but for me it was revelation. The opening chorus of “She Loves You” is still a thing of awe to me, all these years later. And every song is brilliant, right up through “Hey Jude”, which may be the greatest pop song ever recorded.

Within a year, I had begun amassing all the Beatles CDs I could, asking for them for my birthday, and with allowance I would buy them. I had a guitar by 2001, and the first song I learned to play was “Paperback Writer” (albeit awfully). For a while, The Beatles really were my life.

Down In The Groove

On a separate front, I had taken my love of Blink-182 to new and strange heights. I had listened to their influences, and those band’s influences, eventually finding my way to The Ramones. After hearing their debut eponymous album, I knew I loved punk. So, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, my family found themselves in a minivan driving to Cleveland (the least punk vacation/city ever, I might add).

It was there in the gift shop that I spotted two very strange items for the early aughts: vinyl records. One was Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, the other was Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Since it would be another year before I heard the full masterpiece that is Pet Sounds, I went with The Beatles record. The only problem was I didn’t have a turntable, so it sat like a relic amongst my other Beatles collectables.

That was solved the next year when on my sixteenth birthday I was given a Sony turntable, the only one they sold at Best Buy at the time. I hooked it up to my father’s old stereo equipment (which I still use, only adding a single speaker) and cranked up Sgt. Peppers. With whatever money I had gotten from my family members, I bought more music. I made my mother drive me to downtown New Haven to bring me to Cutler’s Record Store (which I wrote about here). There I bought a reissue of the Ramone’s first record. The guy that rang me out told me it was a great record.

Rock and Roll High School

Later that year (2003), Rolling Stone magazine came out with their “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list. I knew many of the bands, but I hadn’t heard so many of the albums on the list. Having just got my first job, I felt I could dip into my car savings a little. Or a lot. I bought almost every album in the top-20 that I didn’t already have. One of my great (and most favorite) life stories is when I received Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, Exile on Main Street, Pet Sounds, London Calling, The Velvet Underground & Nico, What’s Going On, and Kind of Blue, all on the same day. It was like I went to Rock and Roll High School, and graduated in one night.

But then, it seemed like overnight, the world changed as music consumption began to be taken over by the iPod. I forget the occasion, my brother and I each bought an iPod. It was 2004, and I remember hogging an already slow computer, putting one CD after another into the C drive, uploading it to iTunes. By that time I had amassed a decent sized collection, it took me days to upload all my music on that computer.