Music (Premium)

I’ve been a music lover my entire life. Literally: I received my first album, Mister Rogers’ Won’t You Be My Neighbor, at such a young age that my mother had written my original name, Paul McKiernan, on it in her careful script and then later had to cross out the last name and replace it with “Thurrott.” I was adopted—and legally changed my name—when I was three years old, so the album must predate that.

Helping matters, my stepfather, for all his other problems, was also a music lover, and I grew up surrounded by original albums from 60s bands like The Beatles, The Doors, and The Rolling Stones. I would sing along to music on the pop radio stations my parents preferred, and in 1979, when we spent a summer in Washington D.C., I bought an album for myself for the first time: The soundtrack to the first Star Wars movie. I also received Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits as a Christmas present that year.

But my music buying experiences took a leap forward in 1981 when I was able to go out into the world by myself and visit local record stores like Popcorn and Strawberries. The first pop/rock album I ever bought was Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, and the first three singles I purchased on vinyl were Stars on 45 (by the Stars on 45), Kiss on My List by Hall & Oats, and The One That I Love by Air Supply. Suffice to say, I’m a bit prouder of that album choice than I am by those singles.

As a child of the 1980s, I was influenced by all the usual rock, pop, and (occasionally) dance music of the day, was a disciple of MTV from the moment that cable TV arrived in Dedham (and was a fan of Friday Night Videos before that). I can’t really explain or apologize for any of that beyond noting that some of it still holds up today while much does not. What can you do?

From a purchasing perspective, I had some rules. Singles were easy enough: If I liked a song, I’d just buy the single. But albums, which were much more expensive, required some thought. So I determined that I wouldn’t buy an album unless I knew that I liked at least three of the songs. (I guess is that albums were roughly three times as expensive as singles? I don’t remember.)

In buying albums, I quickly determined that many albums had great first halves and forgettable second halves. But I was particularly fascinated by the concept of “perfect albums,” those albums you could listen to from front-to-back without skipping any songs. Glass Houses was such an album, so I set an unfairly high bar by making that my first (pop/rock) purchase. AC/DC’s Back in Black. Asia’s first album. Boston’s first album. And so on. I was a huge fan of the Beatle’s Red and Black albums, which were basically dual-album collections of the band’s greatest hits from their earlier and later periods, respectively, and often switched back and forth about which I liked better.

All that early music, of course, was purchased on vinyl: 33-rpm albums and 45-rpm singles. And I played them in my room using a Sears stereo system with a turntable and two cassette tape decks, another early Christmas present. The quality of the cassette deck was low, so I stuck with albums for the sound, and used the cassette deck to create mixtapes, the original playlists.

One clear memory: A friend and I skipped school one day and went into Boston. I purchased Survivor’s Vital Signs that day.

My mixtapes solved the problem with albums and radio, the latter of which was too random for my tastes, too much bad with the good. As it turns out, most albums aren’t perfect, and many don’t even half a half album’s worth of good material. So I began experimenting with creating my own mixes of songs, carefully selected and arranged in deliberate order, and often with little sound clips from movies between the songs. This was something I did throughout the 1980s and into the very early 1990s.

I bought my first car in 1985 right after high school graduation, but my best friend at the time had had his own car for almost two years by that point, and these mixtapes played a prominent role in our car experiences, which often involved just driving around town. He tricked out his car with a nice stereo, so when I showed up with my own car, a 1972 VW Super Beetle, he found a used Blaupunkt stereo with a VW logo on the cassette door for me. I always had a cassette case in the car for music, which was filled with a combination of my mixtapes and some cassettes I had bought. That was the switchover from vinyl to cassette for, in that I finally had a cassette deck that sounded good.

I had my first CD experience in 1987, when I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was going to college, and was working an amazing bookstore called Page One News (which still exists today but across the street from the original location, and it’s now a shadow of its former self). Page One had an incredible stereo system, and it was all controlled from the employee help desk in the center of the store. There, I heard New Age (instrumental) music for the first time, but the bigger deal was that I was introduced to the quality of CDs.

(I was living with my real father and his family at that time, and the house burned down a few days after Christmas 1987. A friend called me at work that night to tell me about the fire, and I walked over to a CD player in the middle of the store, put in The Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues, and played Burning Down the House.)

After the fire, I moved back in with my parents in Dedham in early 1988 and bought my first CD player. My first two CDs, purchased together, were Def Leppard’s Hysteria and a wonderful New Age album called Desert Vision by David Lanz and Paul Speer. (I’ve since purchased almost everything that Lanz has recorded and have seen him live. Amazing.) I bought them before I even had the player.

I then spent much of the late 80s and 1990s collecting CDs, which I’d play at home on a Sony component system which evolved from a single-disc player to a multi-disc player (with space for 5 CDs on a big rotating platter). A friend and I would often go to Tower Records in Boston at midnight between Monday and Tuesday to buy the new music being released then, and we frequented Boston’s many used music stores. And I became aware, over time, of the existence of alternative versions of CDs, many international, that had additional songs. And of bootleg live recording, which always fascinated me.

By that time, my real father was living in London, and my trips there opened me up to a new market of CDs that we never saw in the states, and I lugged bags of CDs home from these trips. I still listen to some music from that time, at least.

During that time, I desperately wanted to adopt Sony’s Mini-Disc format, which I saw as the successor to the cassette tape. But I could thankfully never really justify the cost, and Mini-Disc kind of came and went. Eventually, of course, we were able to record our own audio CDs, which were never called mixed CDs for some reason, and that became the cassette replacement. The first new car I ever bought, a 2000 VW New Beetle, had a 5-disc CD changer in the trunk in addition to its cassette player.

Before that, we were living in Phoenix, it was the late 1990s, and a friend began talking up MP3 audio files. They were free and they offered reasonable quality, but they were stuck on the PCs of the day, and thus weren’t initially all that portable. Music theft aside, my bigger concern, however, was the sheer size of these files. At 5 or 10 MB apiece, I could only store a few albums’ worth on the small hard drives of the day. MP3 seemed like a non-starter.

That all changed over time, of course. Hard drive capacities exploded, portable MP3 players arrived, and legitimate music services eventually replaced the Napsters of the initial generation. By the early 2000s, I would only very rarely buy music on CD, but even when I did, I often only used the CD once, to digitize it. I kept my CD collection in boxes in the cellar for many, many years.

(Somewhere in there my stepfather called to ask me if it was OK to sell my albums and singles to a collector who was going to put the 45s in a jukebox; I guess I had never taken them with me when I moved out. I OKed it, sure I’d never need vinyl content ever again.)

Of course, MP3s led to the iPod and iTunes and then to AAC and music streaming services. And here we are. Now, I make playlists of music instead of mixtapes or CDs, and they’re accessible in the car, thanks to Bluetooth and my smartphone, and at home via Sonos. Technology has changed, for sure. But the experience is both superior to, and very similar to, what I’ve been doing, music-wise, my entire life.  I enjoy the diversity of these playlists, and the interactive element where we can be listening to one and someone will suggest a song—or a skip—and I can make the change midstream.

But in listening to music this way, my wife and I started discussing some alternatives. More music by a single group sometimes. Or even a straight-through listen of an album or at least an album. I created an experimental playlist —called Cinco de Cuatro in honor of a gag from Arrested Development—that was designed to be played normally, and not shuffled, because it is a series of three songs in a row by the same band. We began to discuss this notion of perfect albums. Began to reminisce about what music listening had been like when we were growing up.

And then vinyl happened. Again.

More soon.