Today it worked to my advantage. I was forced against my not very strong will to listen to the radio. I don't listen to the radio unless I'm in my wife's truck and then it's whatever is on and usually for 10 minutes tops. If there is a chance I'll be in there longer, I plug in my phone and put on a playlist.
I was driving south and the link for the USB wouldn't turn on so I snapped on the radio and started to do the scan through the local stations in LA. I haven't done much radio listening int the last 10 years because ITunes and Shazam have made it so easy to find out what you are listening to without much effort. It reminded me of a time when finding a song in the music store or on the radio was a quest for glory and riches.
There were two phases in this process. The first was hearing this song/album/artist in a local grocery store, shopping mall or school dance. You would ask around to the sage's who may know what or who sang it and get 2-4 educated opinions.
You would then hook into the local radio and hope for the pure luck that was a replay. Most likely the song was replayed 100 times between 8:15 am and 2:40 pm while school was in session. The few times you tried to listen during school hours equaled you getting your Walkman taken away. You eventually quit going down this path.
If you caught it on the radio, you would find space on the one cassette you owned and hope for a perfect shot to record without the DJ going on about some truck show at the Salt Palace this weekend.
Once that failed, you returned to the mall and the music store to wander the aisles looking for tapes or CD's of the guesses your local school sage had opinions on and you started spending hard earned allowance, or later job money on albums you didn't need and weren't sure contained what you wanted. Desperation had set in and it created dangerous purchasing behavior. You bought and if you were lucky, you found it within 4 albums. The problem with this working is you continued using it as a template for 10 years after the average album purchase was closer to 8, not 4. You spent thousands of dollars you really shouldn't have in the quest.
Now I've read over this process and the general tone of this blog so far would communicate that I hated this process. It is completely opposite. I have found so much good music from this search that I sometimes forgot what I was looking for. Obviously the process is much more simple now but I miss the days of the quest. I still spend as much random money on music but now my purchases don't have much value because it was just so easy. The lack of the mission to find the song has cheapens the experience so I'm always looking for something to make it rich again. That in itself has given me back some of the thrill of the hunt.
And damn...my music library looks fine!
PS...I never did buy the Gerardo album that contained Rico Suave that I heard in 7th grade.
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