The collection

"My Music":

So what do I mean by this? I don't create music, I only consume it, so when I say "my music" I'm referring to any album, EP, or single I've purchased or received as a gift (or borrowed and never gave back. Sorry, about Pearl and After the Goldrush late Friend Billy Mac!). 

But, as I get older, it’s getting harder and harder to determine what "my music" is. 

In case you didn't know, when you buy an album you don't own the music. The record company or whoever still owns the publishing rights does. (In a perfect world that would be the artist but here we are.) Without getting into the legal terms, the record you bought is just the means by which you can hear the music when you please. So at the risk of nitpicking, you own a single copy of the record, but not the music itself.

But it was still something. 

Books/Records/Space/Time, or The Sanctity of the Collection:

When reading books, I tell people that the ones I buy are too hard to get to because I'm busy reading the ones I got from the library - the ones I have to give back.

With music, it's kind of the opposite - mainly because you only need to read a book once. With music, you should be able to listen to it over and over. In order to do that you probably shouldn't have too much (a relative term, I admit) of it. Just enough to listen to enough.

And I like it that way. That's the type of relationship I want to have with music. I don't want to date it, I want to marry it. I want to take it home and get to know it. So the act of buying it implies a level of commitment - of money and time - you can't have when there's a whole world of music right at your fingertips. 

Some people own a few records. Others have complete, encyclopedic Collections. I occupy the middle ground of having more records than the average person but less than the fanatics. My collection has a small c. I don't just Hoover up anything I see. It's not about size. It's about quality. Or that's at least what men keep telling themselves.

But in this case, it's true. I'd rather have one excellent record than five pretty good ones. I don't need every Neil Young album. Just the great ones. That's plenty.

 
I first realized the importance of this when I sent in for an offer of 25 albums for $15 (plus shipping!). And it was almost exclusively garbage. I threw away all but three. But why throw away anything, you might ask? Isn't it better to have them than not? Won't I get to know and like these records more? I, who previously would have answered Yes, now realized it wasn't true. Bad music takes up too much time, and bad music on vinyl or CD takes up too much space.

Thus you might think I'd welcome downloads. Well...

The Thing:

For the longest time, in order to deliberately play specific music - ie. avoiding the happenstance of the radio - you would use a physical object to do so. And whatever you may hear these days, those things were cool. A vinyl album has liner notes and cover art. The former for us nerds who love the music enough to want to know who contributed to it in some way. The latter for everyone, which itself could be a work of art. (And yes, CDs have them as well, but have you ever tried to read those 6-pt font liner notes? Or hung a CD cover on your wall? Not bloody likely.)

And you had to take care of the physical object. Protect it from harm. But as long as you did you could play it whenever you wanted.

The thing itself has changed over the years. Wax cylinder, Vinyl, reel-to-reel, cassette, 8 track tape, DAT, CD. 

And each medium pulled us further and further away from the physical action of music creation and re-creation. There was a time when artists would record a performance directly onto vinyl. And when you played it, if you listen without the speaker on, you could hear the needle extracting the music from the grooves. 

I remember once hearing a song from a record that was rotating on a portable turntable but without the needle on it. And the song I was hearing wasn't even on the side that was facing up! Turns out a piece of plastic with a sharp (enough) point was rubbing it from below. It wasn't playing through the speaker but I could hear it very well.

With cassettes, the action took place between the tape and the tape head. You could see the tape move over the head but there was nothing you could hear without a speaker. Same with 8 Tracks, although if it was poorly made, much like my record above, you could hear phantom music from a track that wasn't supposed to be playing.

And forget about CDs. You popped those in a magic box and out came the music. And when they skipped good luck finding the smudge that caused it.

Not THE Thing, Exactly:

Even home taping or CD burning still involved having a copy of the thing. I won't go into the differences between the original vs. the copy because you still had a thing, if not the thing. Not great but it would do in a pinch. And you could dry out your ink cartridges for the privilege of printing out a crappy version of the cover art. 

But these copies never make it to my record shelves - because I never really believed I had them - and end up gathering dust in my basement.

Not A Thing, Exactly:

Then came downloading and just playing it from your hard drive.

Then take the next step of buying an album and not bothering to download it at all. It's just up there in the cloud, at the mercy of an old iTunes account whose ID you forgot. Do you own it or don't you? Sorry Mr. Jaybee but that account is no longer active. 

Thanks, Amazon?

On the other hand, I am finding albums by Lightning Hopkins, Nina Simone, Lester Young, and many others that I don't remember ever buying. 

One might this that was cool, too. Just ending up with a bunch of records without even asking for them.

And even though my "research" indicates that the Lester Young record I didn't buy is probably the best one to get by, I'm not playing it, because I haven't (yet) embraced it as "mine"! After all, what if it's a mistake? Will Amazon - which gives itself the power to control and define what is"my music" now - delete all these records when they realize they made an error?

Then where will I be? Yes, I know I could just buy the ones I liked but the whole thing makes me feel less in control, which is important when you're blogging about the sanctity of your collection.

Not A Thing, a Service:

With services such as Amazon Music and Apple Music, for a low monthly fee, you can listen to just about anything you want. And Youtube where you can just look an album up and play it. Sounds great, doesn't it? 

I want no part of it. 

I like knowing what's in the collection and what's not, and having an opinion on it. And I don't want to merge it into a larger Matrix-like musical universe where everything is kind of okay and I don't really know any of it.

If you can hear almost everything, are you really listening to anything? You would hear something once and decide it's boring, never knowing that another listen was all it would take for it to click with you.
When you get to that point you become that despised (by me) person who gets to say such edgy things like "I like all kinds of music", when I know what you really mean is that you don't love any of it.

In the seventies, Philip Roth compared Checkoslovakia to America, saying that in the former nothing is allowed and everything matters, and in the latter, everything is allowed and nothing matters.

I want my music to matter. To me, at least.

The End of the Collection:

And yet it will go away. It will survive me by a little bit but then it'll be gone, too. Yes, a record collection was not only finite but temporary. 

When I'm gone this large and varied set of music that reflects the Uniqueness of Jaybee - is just another person's pile of crap. I mean, Mrs. Jaybee does her best to put up with a lot of it, but when I'm gone, we (well, you) will know what she really thinks of Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart!

I used to think about this when it wasn’t a real thing. I fantasized about who would get dibs on these amazing records. It went something like this:
Mrs. Jaybee
Brother Pat
Friend Mike

But now that I'm 63, and it is a real thing, I'd have to add a few more names, like my kids.

And each person would take what they wanted and then pass on the rest. I'm SURE there'd be none left after all that, right?

But let's say, no one goes for that Joanna Newsom record (or two or three hundred others). I guess it becomes the stuff of garage sales and used record stores, where a record hopefully becomes part of someone else’s collection.

I've heard it said that everyone dies three times: First, when you physically die, second when your name is uttered for the last time, and then third when someone has the very last memory of you.

For the record collection, it's pretty similar, One is still when you die, but two is when your family, friends, and record collectors take what they want. Three is when the record dealer tosses what he can't sell.

So after I - and my collection - die, do we disperse into the universe like Caesar's last breath? Maybe it doesn't matter. Thanks to mass production, it's not like I have the single, existing copy of anything. Those same records are out there somewhere, part of other people's collections, and live on.

Unlike me.