Streaming! Don't Talk To Me About Streaming

One of the unintended consequences of our recent house refurbishing is that I broke my CD player.  I had to get the electronic stuff off the floor until the new hickory was installed.  No problem, but when I brought it all back upstairs and started putting it together, I discovered that somehow the CD player had been stepped on or otherwise rendered useless.  This would not be a problem for most people, but it is for me.  When I told Chris about my defunct stereo, he laughed it off and told me that what I had been using was obsolete and I could get something small and inexpensive that would produce at least as much sound as my old stuff.  Katherine started talking about getting Bose speakers that could stream songs off our phones.

They just don't understand.  I have a long history with record players.  That's what I called them back in the day.  And all of those machines, except for the first, had amplifiers and pre-amplifiers and tuners and turntables and book shelf speakers.  I just don't think I'm emotionally ready for anything different.

When I was a kid in Estes Park, we had a Zenith console that sat in our living room playing a continuous stream of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, The Chordettes, The HiLos, with an occasional Nat King Cole thrown in for balance.  The first record I ever bought was a recording of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney singing duets.  I particularly liked their cover of "I'm Gonna Get You On A Slow Boat To China."  Later, I bought Frank Sinatra's COME DANCE WITH ME and spent hours down in our basement (I had taken it upon myself to move the Zenith downstairs closer to my room.) wearing a cheap fedora cocked stylishly to one side, sitting on a stool, and singing along, pretending I was killing in some nightclub.

My sister, Jeri, married her second (maybe it was her third) husband shortly thereafter and he had an old RCA stereo system with speakers that you could spread apart to get the full effect.  I left my Sinatra period and became a fan of folk music:  Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Kingston Trio, but mostly The Limeliters ("Have Some Madeira M'Dear).  My friend Bob even picked up the banjo and I tried to learn Travis picking on guitar.

I went to college and quickly outgrew the RCA portable system when I discovered that it just wasn't up to the demands of The Beatles, The Stones, and later, The Band.  My roommate and I were without a system, but a guy on the top floor of Carroll Hall played "Good Morning" from the SGT. PEPPER album at full blast every morning at 6.  It sounded great.  There was no way that old RCA would ever sound like that.  It was also one of the reasons I was a regular attendee at breakfast.  In fact, breakfasts at the Regis cafeteria were fuller, I bet, than breakfasts at DU or CU.  Of course, I can't attest to that.

It wasn't until I graduated and started working at Craig Hospital to fulfill my conscientious objection to the draft that I finally discovered what a great stereo could do.  We--the orderlies-- were all COs there.  We were all college grads.  Pete and I were English majors.  Tom was an architect.  There was even a guy on the graveyard shift who had his Ph.D. in philosophy.  We were all politically active and we all hung out after work, getting high on Lebanese Black hash and listening to music, mostly Creedence and Cat Stevens, at full blast.

My high school chum, Mike, lived in Denver at the time and had a great old house with three roommates on University and Kentucky, give or take a few blocks.  I loved stopping by after work or on days off just to hang out.  I could hear Cat Stevens pounding on Mike's speakers as soon as I got a block from his house.  I remember his components:  Sansui tuner and amplifier, Fisher turntable, and most important, Bose speakers.  Bose was a brand new name at that time and the volume those little speakers could churn out was flabbergasting.  Mike's living room was laid out exactly like any self-respecting hippy freak's living room.  There was a huge, wooden cable reel table sitting in front of an old, floppy, and comfy couch that Mike got out of his father's basement.  There was an antique wicker wheel chair across from the table within easy reach of an overflowing ashtray.  And, the piece de resistance, an old, still functioning dentist chair situated in exactly the right spot to get the full effect of Cat Stevens hard edged voice.  We never talked much.  The stereo was too loud.  But we somehow knew we were having a great time.

Well, Mike's system settled it.  I had to get my own.  Like all good young college grad dopers at that time, we all had our own copy of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE, so it was part of my ethos to do a little consumer research before starting out on this major purchase.  My research paid off and I quickly purchased a 120 watt Fisher tuner and amplifier, an Acoustic Research turntable, and two AR5 speakers.  I played the Fisher demo record over and over, marveling at my new toy.  I went out and bought the requisite Cat Stevens and Creedence stuff, but I also bought a lot of classical things, particularly piano and guitar, on Angel recordings and listened to the clarity of Radu Lupo's keyboard skills.  I lived in a mobile home then and my stereo made the tin walls shake.  It probably made the tin walls in all of my neighbor's trailers shake as well.

That stereo was always the first thing to be placed in any new home or apartment I moved into.  Next came paintings and posters.  Furniture was always an afterthought.

When Kathie and I moved into our home almost forty years ago, I bought a new system.  It was a Sony component thing I bought at Sears.  It even came with its own cabinet.  It was never the sonic equivalent of those AR5s with the Fisher amp.  Besides, I was getting old enough and the tinnitus was just starting up, that I really couldn't tell about fine sonic distinctions anymore.  But, until recently, it did the trick.

I write all of this because Kathie and I saw the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Fiftieth Anniversary show on PBS a couple of days ago.  I cried all the way through it.  You see, getting a great system means getting great music and Kathie and I courted each other to the Dirt Band's great album, UNCLE CHARLY AND HIS DOG TEDDY (I think that was the name.).  We also played The Band at full volume, the BOOKENDS album, TAPESTRY, and James Taylor.  Lots of James Taylor.  I loved those days.  Don't get me wrong.  I love my current days as well, but the music just isn't as good.

A short digression:  There was a lovely older lady who used to teach in the Lang Arts Department at Green Mountain.  This was right when we were beginning to get computerized.  Each teacher had just gotten his/her own computer  and we had just gotten a memo explaining to us how we were to take computerized attendance and how we were to enter computerized grades and how we could track students through their day by using the computer.  All this new technology was too much for the lady teacher, who had just recently mastered which buttons to push on her phone to get the main office, and she threw her papers in the air, stood up with tears streaming down her face, and stormed out of the room muttering something about how she couldn't take it any more.

I feel just like that lovely old lady.  I don't want to get current.  I don't want to learn how to stream unless it involves a kayak.  I'm still not completely sure about CDs.  I just want a couple of giant speakers with 12 inch woofers, an amplifier that gives off a blue glow when the lights are off, and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band spinning on the turntable.