NAPSTER Memories

Wanna buy a Tower Records?

Drop the “The.”

 

I remember being at a rock show 20 some years ago when I worked in radio and some kid brought a hardshell case to have the band sign his CDs. I was standing behind the band (I forget who ... maybe Skillet?) and he opened the case up after asking if they would sign his CDs. All the cds were burned copies! LOL
The band was not thrilled!

 

This is as accurate a statement as I've ever seen on here.

Right now on the Hoffman forums there is a 55-page thread on "Why don't we talk about Uriah Heep anymore?"

 

One of the best sight gags in Simpsons history.

 

I spent oh so many hours gazing at the endless LPs and 45s at a Tower Records (in the Bay Area.)

Me in my late teens/early 20's: "Hey let's got to dinner and then check out Tower Records."

 

I would do unspeakable things to go back in time and have access to Tower Records on West End Ave. across from Vanderbilt again.

 

The iTunes music store lives on in the Music app on MacOS and in iTunes on Windows. The iPod was redundant given that you can get an iPhone that does more and stores more. I used to need an iPod Touch to plug into my home entertainment system; now I can stream individual smart playlists in my music collection from my Mac to my sound bar via my AppleTV.

 

Reminds me (again) of a great story from college: Two weeks before we all went home for summer break, one of my dorm-floor buddies, a senior who was graduating and off to see the real world, was cleaning out his room and, for some reason, decided to get rid of a bunch of his albums. Everything still was on vinyl, of course, back there in the Stone Ages, so he put a stack of 30 or 40 albums in the hallway outside his door and spread the word for all of us to help ourselves.

A few of those freebies were Foghat albums. By the second day, every album was gone except for all the Foghat albums. And two weeks later, when we all left to go home for the summer, all those Foghat albums were still lying in the hallway. It had become a running joke by then, but still nobody took 'em.

I didn't know shit about Foghat then, and as a result of that episode I never got into their stuff at all except for a couple of their radio songs, but I'll never forget that glorious time in dorm life and how everyone up and down the dorm hall kept saying, "Yeah, fuck Foghat. You know that shit is still on the floor outside Scott's room, right? Fuck Foghat!"

Goddamm, those were the days. Fuck Foghat!

 

It's a crazy forum. Crazy trafficked too. Like peak SJ.com in extremis. Threads literally disappear from the first page in a matter of minutes.

My favorite thing on there is some dude who teases the Beatles fanatics on there by relentlessly suggesting that "Spies Like Us" is the greatest thing done by anyone at any time in the Beatles/post-Beatles oeuvre. The humorless Beatles fans on there get so pissed off.

Stuff like ...

"What if "Spies Like Us" got recognized by the Rock Hall for its significance in music pop culture history?"

 

That thing is fucking amazing. And each page is 25 posts instead of the 11 or 12 we have here! Jesus Christ, that's more than 1,350 posts on Uriah fucking Heep!

 

At some point I want to run an experiment on there. Create a thread asking "If The Beatles were all alive and could do a reunion tour, what would the setlist look like?" And then I would count how many posts are made before someone complains about the ticket prices at the theoretical reunion tour. (My guess: no more than five.)

 

I guess the one positive to CDs and physical albums vanishing is today's college students won't experience the glorious joy that was having CDs stolen from their dorm rooms, usually to be sold at the used CD store in town. Had a $900 pool cue in the closet and these dopes stole 12 CDs.

And, yes, fuck Foghat.