Frank

I used to pay a lot of attention to artists and album names and all that. Some how it just faded away. I don't know if it was because of a shift in priorities or values. I held on to it through out my time in the military. It disappeared on me around the time I started school which also corresponded with when I became a dad.

I do remember when the obsession began though.

I was just about to enter junior high. I lived in a small town just northeast of Lawrence. On my way home from pretty much every where in that little town, I would walk by a do it yourself carwash. I made a habit of going up there and looking for change or what ever else was on the ground and I would also run my hand across the top of the little box you put the quarters in for the car wash. This paid off for me time and time again because apparently everybody put quarters up there to have them ready for the machine and many forgot to grab the ones they didn't use. This was about 1988 when 75 cents meant something to an 11 year old.

One day though I swept my hand across there and I didn't feel coins, but something more substantial. I pulled it down. It was an opaque charcoal cassette and on it was written: The Cure. Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me.

I went home, played it and something clicked in my head. Now, it's not that I think (or even thought at the time) that The Cure is fantastic music. What clicked in my head was a realization that there was more than the crappy top 40 music that I was being forced fed. It was like a thought, that I didn't even know about, had suddenly took over the part of my brain that interpretted music.

Shortly after, in an episode of possible divine intervention, I re-discovered KJHK. I say re-discovered because I had actually listened to it years before when my older brother would prank phone call Dennis Dailey's sex talk show. But we'll save those cheap thrills for another story (or maybe for the therapist).

Through The Cure and KJ, I realized that there was a world of music out there that I had to discover, but I had to push aside the easy shit and go find it for myself.

This led me to talk to anyone who was willing to talk about what music they liked. Hypies, punks, my dad (who is a jazz and big band man). Anyone.

I could spend a whole day in a place like the Love Garden, shuffling through their discount boxes, trying to figure out how to get the most bang for my buck. I did this in Lawrence as a teen ager. I did it in Chicago as a Navy recruit. I did it in Orlando and all over the north east when I was stationed in Connecticut and Virginia. I did it over seas.

But like I said, something shifted. I stopped having the time, and maybe not even the will, to put that much energy into my music.

The great thing is that now a days, I don't have to. Not because I've given up; I don't have to because there is a group of younger people who do it for me. This was impossible to do ten years ago, but now a days, a musical artist can easily be chosen by millions of music lovers who are just as enthusiastic as I was. The two big differences between today and before is that now a days people don't have to sort through a few records at a store. They can shift through an infite amount of music files at an infinite amount of stores online. And the other difference is that what the people choose to listen to is what gets heard. It's not a matter of record companies choosing what they like and then distributing. They distribute what the audience has already shown to like by the way of down load numbers from the internet.

This has been the driving force behind all of the great music that has come out in the last few years and which leads me to say that right now, there is more great music being produced in America than ever before. If you don't believe me, then just think about this.

If we wanted to throw a music festival right now, think about all the great musicians we could invite. Lets start with the oldies: The Stones, U2, Dylan, members of Led Zeplin, Leonard Cohen and countless others (even some Beatles). From there we can move into the Chilli Peppers, Will Ferrel, Butthole Surfers, Pearl Jam, Violent Femmes, Flaming Lips and pretty much just an ass ton of other college rock musicians from the last three decades. After that we have the current online generated group. The Killers, Spoon, The Shins, the White Stripes and so on. The list of great music being produced today goes on and on as far as the internet can take us.

Now you might be thinking that this makes us dependent on the taste of the masses (particularly the young masses) but I say it's better than being dependent on the tastes of a few elitists in the record industry who probably have nothing in common with me. And besides, so far, the taste of the young masses (in terms of music at least) has shown to be pretty good. The rock and roll that Jack White is turning out is some of the best I've heard and the lyrics from The Killers is...well, killer. I think in ten or twenty years from now we'll look back at this time as being the penacle of rock and roll and if we don't then that means the music went on to get even better