89 Cents

 Last night me and the kid (age 9) sat in our apartment and listened to the radio. Normally I control this activity, believing that I can positively influence her young mind by pumping it full of Little Steven's Underground Garage or any number of online stations featuring essential music from the last 50 years. But I had a dad moment and realized after a short while that she has her favorite station in her mother's car, one that plays current pop hits, so I switched Sirius over to the pop format she has been enthusiastically engaged with lately. 

I remember being a kid in the early 70s and poring over the Top 30 charts that you could get mailed to you by calling the AM station. I was fanatical and I'm sure my parents were annoyed with my over-the-top music mania. I had an AM radio that my father brought back from Thailand during the war, with an earplug that never came out of my head. And like my daughter now, I demanded dominion over the car radio. I sang along to every song (well, the ones I liked) and soaked in the amazing variety of early 70s radio.

As we shared the sonic space last night (no individual headphones - a rarity!) I sat through some stuff that bugged me so much with its puerile lack of effort - effort to make something sound original, soulful, real! - that I realized the almost 50 year gap in our ages carried a vast difference in understanding musicality. I am okay with this of course - it's been an emblem of inter-generational conflict since Elvis - and I refrained from criticizing these massive hits knowing that it was not my place to do so. On the other hand, I heard a few songs that I liked a lot. At one point, during a Harry Styles song, I blurted out "this is cool! I would buy this record!"

It was the old feeling, not so common in this era when we are inundated with new music every day from every direction, of having had a record pointed at you from the radio and filling you with desire to run down to the Kresge record rack to (hopefully if it's not already sold out!) spend 89 cents on something you want to hear over and over. And while you're standing there holding the paper-sleeved prize in one hand and your allowance in the other, you scan the rest of the racks for something new by a favorite artist that you might have missed, or something out of left field that just looks good.  Do you have enough for 4 records? Only just. And you get home and spend the rest of the day with your portable RCA record player.

These days I am deep in the process of publicizing my own record. The old infrastructure that allowed for the focus of a strictly curated list of songs would have denied me anything like the airplay Wellsprings Ltd. gets now - not a lot, but some - and all over the world. The hope is that someone somewhere will hear it and contact the label to purchase the thing. No Kresge. No Target (although that is where the kid got her Billie Eilish LP). And of course, the very few independent record stores that will stock copies of the LP - not yet pressed, but hopefully in July - probably will not go out of their way to put Wellsprings Ltd. above any of the others in the sea of small indie releases. Jac Holzman of Elektra famously says that the goal is to find the audience for the music. Internet makes it easy and hard at the same time.

So, will I go to Grimey's and buy the Harry Styles album right out of the bin? No. There are too many other records I would rather buy. However, if by some fantastic fluke they had a 45 single of it, in the crisp paper sleeve, I might spend some of my allowance on that. And the kid might do the same, buying songs I've never heard of by artists with oddly truncated names (some kind of trend) that she would play for me out of excitement and desire to share these things that move her. 

                                           

                                                              How I spent my allowance.