36, Day 54 (Written Friday February 3)
Most of the time technology makes our lives better or easier. Microwaves, cell phones, laparoscopic surgery. But there is one area where I think technology has failed to improve our experience....music. For thousands of years people made music with just their voice or their hands. Computers have made it possible for music to be made in a studio without instruments or to enhance the abilities of those in the studio. Honestly though, which do you remember more a perfectly crisp and flawless digitally enhanced studio star that was manipulated one second at a time by a studio engineer, or the raw, flawed performance of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison? It's not perfection that makes music moving, it's the real, the rough, the raw that touches our soul. It could be the four part harmony of a group of bluegrass pickers, the twangy whine of Hank Williams or the electric fire of Jimmy Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. What we love and what makes it memorable is that it is real. It is hearing someone put what is going on in their heart, their lives and their soul into our ears and letting us tap into it for three and a half minutes.
Another area where I feel technology has failed us musically is in how we listen to music. I will confess that I love what my iPod makes possible (every song and album I own in my pocket), but at the end of the day, what I want is vinyl, not digital. For nearly a century we listened to music live, or the next best thing, vinyl records. Within the last forty years our formats have changed repeatedly. Eight track, cassettes, compact disks, mp3. While these formats have made it more convenient to transport and listen to our music, they haven't improved the sound. I am a confessed vinyl record junkie. I love the crackles and the pops (although if you have a good record player you don't hear that) and the scratching of the needle. It makes you feel the record as if the music was something physical and not just audible. In my sons bedroom is my old record player and their rooms are filled with records we have collected together. There is nothing like the sound of music from a record so I introduced my sons to it as soon as they showed an interest in music. Since then we have made collecting records a hobby we share. One of our favorite things to do is scour yard sales, junk stores and record shops (yes they still exist, try Grimey's in Nashville or Pegasus Records in Florence, AL) for records on our wish list. The best part is you can get whole albums for less than a dollar. This has been a great way to introduce the boys to good old music and to take chances on something unsure without risking throwing away a bunch of money. They have learned to love Led Zeppelin, Little Feat, Faces, Humble Pie, Canned Heat, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Etta James, Muddy Waters and countless other artists, the way they were intended to be heard. I can't tell you how excited we get digging through those dusty bins of records and running across an album we've been looking for, in some cases for years. It's almost like a treasure hunt for us. Whenever we go into a new city during our travels, one of the first things we do is look for a record store. We've found some really cool ones too. We scored some major treasures in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Chattanooga, Tennessee and perhaps our greatest single day of finds in a vintage clothing store on Saint Simons Island, Georgia. On our first trip to Valdosta we discovered one of our new favorites, Red Door Records, on the square in downtown, that is also a cafe/bike shop.
The rebirth of my love affair with records began with Marvin Cooper. Marvin is the step dad of Jode Holden, one of my best friends growing up. Marvin was from Louisiana and was always a lot of fun to be around. Marvin had what is to this day, the best collection of records I have personally ever seen. If it was from the 60's to the early 80's he had it. Not only that, but he had a phenomenal sound system to play them on. We spent countless hours from the time I was 16 until I was 21 listening to those records in their living room. Jode broke my heart a few weeks ago when he told me that Marvin had gotten rid of all those old records. Oh well, maybe I will run across them in a junk store some day with my boys and then we can listen to them together in our living room.
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