My Mp3 Player, The Go-Go’s, and Me
Brian Cremins
bwcremins@yahoo.com
I am writing this essay in the midst of a severe string of sub-zero days here in Chicago. Three days ago temperatures dropped so rapidly that the pipes burst in the apartment right above us. Water was pouring from the light fixtures on our kitchen ceiling and rushing like a waterfall into the alley between our building and the one next door. The guys are in the kitchen right now dismantling the old ceiling and probing for water damage. So as not to disturb them, I am listening to the new Mp3 player my wife got me for Christmas. It’s an amazing little device, but I will not mention the brand name because the first one she bought for me short-circuited after a couple of weeks. The company did, however, honor the warranty and shipped me a new one after a futile attempt at trouble-shooting the device over the phone. “So it won’t turn on at all? That’s not good. You better send it back. I think it’s frozen,” the tech explained to me over the phone a couple of days after Christmas. If only an Mp3 player were as easy to repair as a water- damaged kitchen ceiling.
As someone who still buys vinyl records and uses a guitar amplifier powered by old-fashioned vacuum tubes, working with an Mp3 player has been a real challenge. Ever since the introduction of the iPod a few years ago, I swore I wouldn’t purchase a digital music player until I could pick one up at Walgreen’s for $15 or less. For years I didn’t have a portable CD player because I was anxiously waiting for them to come down in price. I stuck with my old cassette Walkman until the CD players broke the $50 dollar barrier. And when you think about it, $25 for a CD player is a great deal—after all, not only can I now buy a player at the local drugstore, but I can also purchase a wide variety of music. Where else can you find greatest hits collections by REO Speedwagon, Eddie Money, Meatloaf, and Journey? Small independent record stores usually won’t carry these fine artists while big retailers like Tower Records are going out of business. For several years, then, the local drug store or highway rest stop have served as my personal iTunes shops, places where I can find Merle Haggard tapes and CDs and the electronic devices on which to play them.
So I was a little skeptical when my wife told me she was going to drag me into the 21st century with this Mp3 player. What would it sound like? Where would I put it? Since they’re usually no bigger than the batteries which power them, would I end up losing it? Most importantly—would it play my records? Of course I knew it couldn’t physically play them, but could I find some way to transfer my records to the digital format? The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to stick to my cassette player. I felt a little like the caveman in the opening sequence of 2001 being threatened by the alien monolith.
“You’re over-analyzing this a little,” my wife said. My two cats seemed to agree.
I am very sensitive when it comes to music. Aside from having been a gigging musician for the last seventeen years, I’ve been obsessed with rock and jazz music since I was a kid. My mother and I used to listen to The Beatles and Cat Stevens and she once quizzed me on the meaning of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” when I was in grade school (I guess that was my first introduction to literary analysis). For several years, I also had a recurring dream inspired by a K-Tel record collection my cousin bought me while I was recovering from a bout of cat-scratch fever (and when I say cat-scratch fever, I’m talking about an infection I got from being attacked again and again by my cat and not the Ted Nugent song of the same name). After listening repeatedly to The Go-Go’s “Our Lips Are Sealed,” I decided I would grow up to be the only male member of the band. I would play rhythm guitar on a candy-apple red Fender Stratocaster and sing harmony vocals with the band’s other guitarist, Jane Wiedlin. The more I played the record on my little turntable, the more complex the dream became: I was on stage with The Go-Go’s, on tour with them, shooting videos, traveling the world. I was a little too young to have a crush on any of them—I really just wanted to be in the band. I mean, I liked Van Halen and all, even Prince, but The Go-Go’s were a real rock and roll band. To me, anyway.
Over the years I found myself obsessed with the music of various other performers: U2, Minneapolis post-punk bands like The Replacements and Husker Du, sixties psychedelic acts like The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane. No matter how sad or confused, I would always feel better after visiting a record store and coming home with some obscure album or import CD which no one else seemed to have. I still vividly remember my very first cassette Walkman, a bright red plastic thing which resembled my red Converse Chuck Taylors and the red Stratocaster in my dreams. Records, CDs, cassettes—each one made sense to me. Each one could be carried in your pocket like a talisman (well, maybe not a record, but you could stash a batch of 45 rpm singles in your backpack if you were careful about packing them). Once I lost the cover for my cassette copy of Bob Dylan’s masterful 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home and I diligently set out to re-create the cover and the liner notes with a magic marker and my typewriter. I looked for a copy of the cover photo in record catalogs and old issues of Rolling Stone magazine. How could the album generate the same magic without its cover of Dylan holding a cat and staring into a fish-eye lens? Impossible. A record or cassette or CD without its cover is like Dr. Strange without his supernatural cloak.
These are old arguments, however. When cassettes and CDs first became popular in the 1980s, those of the old school railed against the death of album cover art. Would Sgt. Pepper’s cover photo have the same impact after being reduced to the size of a postage stamp? Probably not, but it sure was easier to carry around a tape than the warped old record from my mom’s record collection. At least one characteristic of the Mp3 player resonated with me: its portability and its convenience. Then again, I have always suspected that the mystical power of old audio devices lies directly in proportion to their size. Old stereos sound incredible because they have real presence: they take up a big portion of your living room, office, or bedroom. Old-fashioned stereo systems resemble miniature cities—the metallic face of the components, the towering speakers, the glass windows and plastic lids of turntables and cassette decks. By comparison, Mp3 players look like bland Matchbox cars.
“You know,” my wife reminded me, “you can play The Go-Go’s on it. It’s pretty easy. You can make a playlist with them, Rick Springfield, Mission of Burma, James Brown. Just think of the possibilities. And, best of all, you don’t have to move the needle or rewind any tape.”
So I could listen to “Head Over Heels” right after “Jesse’s Girl” without having to lift a finger? I could ride the train and go from one tune to the next without even pressing a button? “Exactly,” she said. “Kind of like taping songs off the radio only you don’t have to wait for Casey Kasem to stop talking to get your favorite song.”
I have now had my Mp3 player for over a month. Actually, it’s probably a little less than
that because I had to send the first one back to claim my warranty. But as I walk to the Brown Line stop not far
from our apartment, and I wait for the guys to finish patching up our kitchen,
I have to admit that I sort of like being able to carry one hundred songs in my
shirt pocket. Now I can walk with The
Go-Go’s anytime I want to. Maybe my
dream of becoming the only boy Go-Go will come true yet.