In digital age, people miss out on magical experience of music

In the streamlined world of today's music, the hits come fast, easy, invisible. But do you remember what it felt like to hold music in your hands? To run home from the record store and listen to an album cover to cover, poring over the liner notes?

By SEAN DALY, THOMAS FRENCH and BEN MONTGOMERY, Times Staff Writers, and WILLIAM McKEEN, Special to the Times
Published January 18, 2008

THE BOX SET 

In the clean, clutter-free wonderland of iPod Nation -- where we strive to fit our entire record collection in the pocket of our Levis -- there is no greater grotesquerie than the box set. Why, the very notion of this bloated salute to excess -- epic liner notes, myriad CDs, assorted propaganda stuffed into a look-at-me! container taking up more precious shelf space than a burial urn -- goes against every streamlined principle of the digital age. And I love it.

The iPod, some models no bigger than a stick of Juicy Fruit, cleanly delivers an insta-blip of your preferred flavor whenever you want it. That's why "physical" sales are plummeting -- and digital sales are booming. You do not have to stop living life to be fed by your iPod. It's small, immediate, popular -- a beloved Pez dispenser of 1's and 0's.

On the other, clunkier, what-do-we-do-with-this hand, the box set, especially when made by those music geeks at Rhino Records, brings life to a screeching halt. It demands that you get on the floor, tear it to pieces, explore its guts, dig around to get the hits you crave. The box set is bulky, complicated, a mess to clean up -- a blue crab of Black Sabbath B-sides and rarities.

But much like that big girl on Grey's Anatomy, the box set can also be beautiful, sexy, chunky-but-decidedly-funky. I own box sets that are bound in black leather corsets (The Goth Box) or designed to look like old record players (Ray Charles Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings). Let it be known that my 4-year-old would rather play with these than her Barbies. I've never been more proud.

Sure, you can buy box sets in digital form, but without the packaging, without the bulk, without the ego, what's the point?

The greatest, gaudiest perk to land on my desk last year was The Brit Box, Rhino's four-disc, 78-song monolithic salute to U.K. indie music "of the last millennium." Rhino designed this sucker to look like the red phone booths of London, the kind you might see in Piccadilly Circus. If that weren't overt enough, The Brit Box also lights up and blinks. Is it obnoxious? Sure.

And I love it.

Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8467. His Pop Life blog is at blogs.tampabay.com/popmusic. There you can find his Top 10 box sets.

THE SEQUENCING 

Spring 1977. My freshman year at Indiana University. I'm in my dorm room at Wright Quad, sitting under my loft bed, dropping the needle yet again onto side one of Born to Run. I have played the album night and day until it crackles and hisses. Soon I will happily buy another copy to replace this one, just to hear that yearning harmonica conjure the first lines of Thunder Road, with the slam of the screen door and the girl stepping out onto the porch and the boy asking her to drive away with him. Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again. If this were the only song Springsteen ever wrote, it would be enough. But then comes the slinky joy of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out and the machine-gun exhilaration of Night and the cresting desolation of Backstreets. 

When side one ends, I have to catch my breath before I flip the record over. Then I'm inside the rapturous explosion of Born to Run, and the syncopated passion of She's the One, and the desperate quiet of Meeting Across the River, and that hypnotic sax solo in the middle of Jungleland, and at the end of the song, the barefoot girl is switching off the bedroom light.

When the last notes evaporate, it's all I can do not to play the whole thing again.

* * *

January 2008. Driving across the Howard Frankland at dusk with my teenage sons, both debating which Springsteen song to dial up next on the iPod. First they punch in Thunder Road, and then Incident On 57th Street, and then Badlands, and then I'm lobbying, as always, for Ramrod.

As we head across the bay in the falling light, we assemble our own Springsteen album, with bits and pieces thrown together from three decades of his music. We sing every word. But it's not the same.

How long has it been, I wonder, since I've listened to Born to Run from start to finish? Have my sons ever heard it in one sitting, surrendering to Springsteen's design? Because it's not just the songs. It's the way they glide and ignite and roller coaster into each other. It's the way they inhabit you as one flowing statement.

The beauty of an iPod is that it gives you endless choices. But all those choices seduce you away from the real story the artist is telling.

The screen door slams. The highway jams with broken heroes. The girl shuts out the light.

Thomas French can be reached at french@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8486.

THE HIDDEN TRACK

Wait for it, because it's there, all the cool kids swear, a few minutes after the last song on the CD, hiding, shhhh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There it is. 

The hidden track.

The doggie-bag encore.

The flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that will expire with the CD unless some geek can figure out how to hide MP3s in our brains, a few quiet minutes after Track 12.

The beauty of the hidden track was its appeal to juvenile subversion. It was like finding a twenty in Dad's jeans and not saying anything. Then sneaking out your window. Then buying a pack of Marlboro Reds.

The last note of the last song was a challenge to a mope-and-dope legion of frustrated suburban punks: I dare you to spend 13 minutes in silence without hurting yourself.

The Hidden Track on CD was born in the early '90s, but it took a while for your folks to catch on.

Evidence: This (stop-the-presses!!) brief from the Associated Press in 1992:

Hit Nirvana Compact Disc Contains Hidden Song

Nearly 3-million people have bought Nirvana's hit album "Nevermind," but probably only a few have heard all the songs because the 13th track is hidden behind 10 minutes of silence.

Those kids.

At first the form was exclusively alternative rock (Meat Puppets, Teenage Fanclub, Lemonheads, Cracker, Green Day, Blur and Dramarama), then others caught on, like Janet Jackson, and the cool crumbled.

In those early days, though, when it was right, it was right, and it felt like a secret gift.

Until it was no longer a gift. Until it felt old and lame, sappy and predictable, which was sometime around March 1996, when you left your girlfriend's copy of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill spinning too long and realized you were humming along.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8650.

THE LINER NOTES

Some fancy-pants record stores had listening booths back in the days of vinyl, but most of us bought our albums at Kmart or Sears. There was no Internet to go to for song samples, so if you were pondering whether to buy an album, the cover and the liner notes played a huge role in decision-making. Good liner notes were part of an album's artistic statement. The concept of "liner notes" is lost, and for the one-click generation, I might as well be talking about papyrus scrolls. The decline started with the compact disc in the 1980s, when album artwork was reduced to postage stamps and you had to pull out the Bausch & Lombs to read the credits. (Usually effusive thanks to God/Allah/Buddha/Mama, and shout-outs to every teacher since pre-K.) Thus the liner notes, now in print too small for human eyes, were diminished both literally and figuratively. A tragedy, that. 

Sure, back in the old days, record company flacks often wrote insanely hyperbolic prose to push product on music-store browsers. But at Warner Bros., there lurked the Shakespeare of the form, Stan Cornyn. Whether writing about a Rat Packer (his Sinatra notes read like Irwin Shaw short stories) or a rock band, Cornyn defined the form. His stories were often narratives of recording sessions or dinners, and at the end of a Cornyn piece, you felt you had spent an evening with the artist.

The one bright spot in CD liner note history came with the advent of box sets in the 1980s. Liner notes got some breathing room in the lavish booklets published with the full-size sets, and allowed music historians to show off. Anthony DeCurtis' overview of Eric Clapton's career in the Crossroads box won a Grammy and was included in anthologies of music writing.

But the best liner notes were always those by the musician. Johnny Cash wrote poetry on record jackets. John Lennon and Neil Young gave us handwritten liner notes. Then there's Bob Dylan. He has written some of the greatest songs in rock history, but one of the best things he ever wrote was his prose poem on the Bringing It All Back Home cover in 1965, a job description for being Bob Dylan: "a song is anything that can walk by itself/i am called a songwriter. a poem is a naked person ... some people say that i am a poet."

Downloaders miss such joys. They also miss songwriter and musician credits, apparently unimportant in today's cyber music world. Thus, to this instant gratification generation, the corporate product assumes greater prominence than the creators. Maybe that's the real tragedy.

William McKeen, author of "Rock and Roll is Here to Stay," is chairman of the University of Florida Department of Journalism. Contact him at wmckeen@jou.ufl.edu.

[Last modified January 17, 2008, 23:08:52]