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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Maybe Fleetwood Mac and Jackson Browne Don't Suck

I've gone retro.  Why not?  With my paycheck going back in time faster than a DeLorean I figured it was time to get back to basics so I dusted off the old turntable - you know, the one I spent a small fortune on in 1984 when the salesman said "CD's are fine but you'll always want a turntable for serious listening".  Yeah, right, and someday Hall and Oates will be popular again.  D'oh!

So I moved aside the Apple TV to make way for the turntable.  Wait, where's the CD player that kicked the turntable out to pasture in the first place?  Gone, gone, gone.  My entire music collection is digitized and streaming through the wifi air, pestering everyone from neighbors to future aliens with huge satellite discs looking for life on other planets.

Music today basically sucks.  I've been saying that since 1974, which was the year "Kung Fu Fighting" was on the charts - Hooo!  Ahhh!  Awww, that just plain sucks.

But now that I have a turntable again, I need records to play.  I gave away hundreds of pristine quality anal retentively cleaned albums in the 90's thinking I would never want them again, but here I am at Lou's Records looking at trashed $.99 albums.  You can see when people come in to sell their entire collection - complete collections of crappy albums by Al Jarreau, Barbara Streisand, $.99!  I was thinking back to the dorm days and the albums back then that were popular but sucked.  Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty" sucked.  $.99?  Fleetwood Mac?  They really sucked.  $.99.  How about Leo Sayer?  "You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'"?  Well, that's pushing it.  So I plopped down my two bucks and went home with two albums I hated in college.

The needle goes down.  The pops and clicks are loud and clear.  The music starts... and surprise, it doesn't suck, not as much as Lady Gaga or American Idol.  OMG, it actually isn't bad when you compare it to music today.  Wait, did I get that Leo Sayer?  Damn, I hope it's still there.  Behind that America album, next to "Frampton Comes Alive".  And is that a Captain and Tennile album?  That can't still suck, right?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sorry, amigo. Jackson Browne NEVER sucked. Your hearing has just improved. The years have honed your sensibility into a fine-tuned quality detector.

Now aren't you sorry you parted with that dbx pop-click machine? If only you could hear it breathing just one more time.