Music, Music Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink

This Bill Wyman piece from Slate last week struck a nerve.

Wyman (no, not that one) discusses the sheer abundance of music currently available on torrent sites, hubs and other nether-regions of the internet. And he muses on the current predicament of latter-day rock snob collectors who no longer hold a monopoly on rare recordings. These days, rarity is more of a state of mind. Almost nothing is difficult to obtain with some searching, the right software and enough cheap storage.

Ever since I got my first cable modem eight years ago, I've been feeding a bottomless habit for bootlegs. There are guys with every single Dead show or every recording from Neil Young's 1976 tour. All for the taking with a click.

In the days I discovered my musical tastes as a teenager, life was different. I can remember scrambling for blank tapes after coming across someone with a decent low-generation collection and painstakingly dubbing them at 2x speed and then -- before I got a cable modem and a computer with a burner -- paying some asshole $75 for a 3 CD Springsteen show.

(The sites I frequent follow strict rules about what people share and how they share it. You can't post anything commercially available. Only stuff that the artists haven't officially released, so you aren't really taking money out of their pockets. And selling stuff that you should be sharing is complete crap. The whole idea is to let the free music flow like water.)

Now, I don't really want it all. Like Wyman writes, Lester Bangs' fantasy of having the worlds' music stacked in his basement makes little sense in 2011. But I do want the best of it all. Complete with artwork and CD cases, which leaves my wife wondering forlornly if every wall of our home will eventually be covered with shelves for music and DVDs. Perhaps.

I can't help myself. Just last year has produced stuff like: pristine Elvis Costello and U2 shows, both evenings of Eric Clapton's 1973 Rainbow Concerts with Pete Townsend, Ronnie Wood and Steve Winwood, an embarrassment of Springsteen material from his earliest forays with Child and Steel Mill to the sick full-album shows that finished up the last tour, Fleetwood Mac from the Rumours tour, Warren Zevon all over the place, Elton John solo and drunk but in full command in Scotland in 1973, Little Feat, REM, The Beatles acoustic demos for the White Album, lots of Lou Reed, even more Van Morrison, just about every worthwhile recording by The Band (including their complete set at Woodstock), Dylan from the earliest folk scene solo gigs to his fervent born-again phase (a lot more interesting than I ever thought it would be) to his grizzled musical rebirth in the late 90s), The Clash, Elvis, Wilco, and so much more I can't remember off the top of my head.

So yeah. Music life is good. And our next place might need a bigger basement.