Eclectic Company: Shazam, It's My Song

The 25th Anniversary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Concerts comes in a triple DVD boxed set from TimeLife with excellent liner notes from long time Stone editor David Fricke et al, with a free Rolling Stone subscription and an invitation to visit the R&R Hall of Fame. I got mine at Sams on impulse purchase a couple of weeks ago and am just now getting around to watching and listening to it. The Who’s Who performing in pairs and groups of stars is loads of fun, from the jump out of the gate (after a tasteful intro by Tom Hanks with Brian Jones’ “Our Prayer” playing in the background) of a paired viewing of Jerry Lee Lewis venerable and Buddha-like at the piano, and Jerry Lee Lewis all floppy-haired young, standing and kicking out onscreen, both live and on Memorex playing “Great Balls of Fire.” One irreducible icon of rock and roll, natty in his elder reprobate leisure suit, setting the tone for the three discs-worth to follow.

And what a concert I missed live October 29-30, 2009! David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash singing Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” then backing up Bonnie Raitt’s version of “Love Has No Pride,” and Jackson Browne’s version of his own “The Pretender,” and James Taylor’s version of Stills’s “Love The One You’re With.” Many historical faves, and that was just part of the second act of two performances featuring many of the living heavyweights of more than 50 years of rock history represented in song and jam session, one famous group and musician after another acting as backing band for legendary vocalists and instrumentalists out front. Shazam, shazam, shazam! Big fun, even some magic, even coming out of the MacBook speakers.

And speaking of Shazam, no not Gomer Pyle’s favorite saying, but the awesome iPhone app that tells you what song you’re listening to and can’t quite locate the title or artist for in your own memory bank, I love it! My brother showed its wonders to me, and then downloaded it for me, in a Starbucks in Philthy-delphia one afternoon a year ago (he also downloaded Bucks Me! – the find-a-Starbucks app that stopped being accurate when the Bucks closed many locations and didn’t update). I don’t use Shazam often enough, but whenever I do, like I did this morning while at a stoplight, driving to the bank and idly tuned in to David Dye’s “World Cafe” show on KRVS, I’m so grateful to have it handy. Suddenly, I keyed in on a song, clearly about to be over. I fumbled for the phone and the app, but missed the last note by a hair. And then the next song came on, which I thought was cool too, and which I now know is Johnny Flynn’s “Kentucky Pill” from his Been Listening album. And then Dye back-announced the earlier tune I’d missed, Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Want To Grow Up” performed by Hayes Carll, who recorded it on his 2008 release Trouble In Mind, but it took me a little web-surfing to find it so I could download it, probably longer than it should have, because I didn’t remember the Hayes part, and couldn’t have guessed to spell the Carll with two ells, but mostly because I was constantly being charmed and so interrupted by the song pairings on the 25th Anniversary album. I was about to suspend that last sentence so I could listen and watch Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane” and Ray Davies singing “All Day and All of the Night" with Metallica backing them, but then I realized if I didn’t finish the sentence, I wouldn’t remember where I was trying to go with these thoughts randomly flitting through my head while listening and typing in the sunny, warm, Lake Charles lunch hour.

Which was here: It doesn’t matter anymore where you go to get your music; chances are it will be the same to hear it on whatever medium it comes at you, from your satellite radio, or your iPod, or youtube, or even in a format hearkening back to the almost dinosaur age: music video on broadcast or cable TV. Because it’s all digital now, baby. No more hisses and pops from vinyl imperfections, no more skips on the scratched CDs, no more random changes of speed, changes of volume and the like from stretched-out and peeling audio tape, nosiree! Whatever went into the mixer came out of the mixer one-to-one exactamundo, ever since digital was invented. Ain’t computers great?

Used to be that Phil Spector (whose wall of sound production style and ex-wife Ronnie’s performances for the Svengali will surely outlive his life sentence for shooting a starlet in his home, don’tcha think?) put his newly completed recordings into his car’s dashboard tape player to see if the sound coming out of the car speakers was true to his recorded intentions, because you’d never know whether what you slaved over in the audio-perfect studio translated to the tinny equipment in use by the masses in their convertibles. You used to lose quality too in the various steps of the manufacturing process, from single taped voices and instruments, to mixed multi-channel final recordings, to mastered discs ready for reproduction, to scribed grooved record pressing plates, to stampers that literally pressed into molten vinyl blobs turning them into finished records. I used to keep a “biscuit” of red vinyl that hadn’t yet been pressed into an LP as a paperweight, but in some house-move, I decided to toss and not store it. After all, I’ve moved on with the electronic times. Thing is, though, I’ve realized that from now on, I will always be at least a beat behind the cutting edge, because while any old 5-year-old with a Fisher Price toy can make her own videos and upload them to whatever format comes next, I can’t figure out how to copy the DVDs I just got onto my computer’s hard drive so I can leave the discs at home when I travel. Dang.