Wednesday, June 11, 2008

I Made You A Tape...


    This guy has been helping me paint this week. Really nice guy, a decent painter and he is also a pretty good piano player... jazz. I feign a bit of interest and talk about the only three jazz players I know anything about (which isn't much), Miles Davis ( I actually don't mind Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain and Doo Bop), Sonny Rollins ( Saxophone Colossus is a pretty good album and I think he played the sax solo on the Stones "Waiting on a Friend") and John Coltrane ( Love Supreme is supposed to be his love letter to God but to me it sounds like a screeching, wailing, fingernails on the blackboard mess but because it is supposed to be such a classic I've tried a few times to "get it", all to know avail. I wonder what God thinks).
   We  chat a bit about music and it turns out that he is quite a knowledgeable music fan... open to many forms but prefers to play jazz. I hit him with, "Jazz is for musicians who don't know how to write songs." He laughs and we talk a little more- I asked him if he has ever heard Jeff Buckley's Grace album. He hadn't- the reason I brought that one up is people rave about it but I found it to be an acquired taste... I hated it at first but the more I played it the more I grew to like it. I told him I'd burn him a copy and he'd do the same for me with some jazz.


 
    Now to the point... there is something cold and heartless about just "burning a disc." While iTunes is brilliant and it's easy to simply drag songs from your library into a playlist, it doesn't pack the same punch as actually taking the time to make somebody a tape like back in the day (not that I'd ever want to). Carefully picking out each song for that person (you needed to take the time to get a sense of their taste, unless they just wanted to hear some of yours) trying to get the timing right after each one and making sure you filled the whole side of the tape with music (if there wasn't much tape left I could always squeeze in a Ramones song). Carefully handwriting the song and band names on the cardboard insert and maybe adding a few of your own artistic touches (making sure to let the ink dry or it'll smudge when you stick it in the case). It meant something to give one and it meant even more to receive one... and if we were dating and I made you a tape that meant I was ready to take it to the next level. While it's appreciated, now all you ever get is one of these...



     Here you go... thanks. I find that I rarely even play these and never cherish them like the tapes of yesteryear... not that I ever saved any but now I wish I would have. Who knows, maybe somebody is listening to one of my mixed classics right now.... probably not. 

2 comments:

B. Diederich said...

I have some of those Sharpie-marked CD's.
But a guy down the street made me some headbanger cd's and an old rock and roll one and at least he takes the time to make a graphic for his.
I can't just put a naked cd in a pictureless case-- the cover design is the fascinating and fun part!

I sometimes wish I would have had the guts to move to a REAL city and maybe I would have become a great graphic designer/artist...Kind of limited in this area... Some of your older blogs often have caused me to reflect on the 'what ifs' of life!

Dan Johnson said...

Brenda you appear to be a very talented person... you've done more with your artistic abilities than I ever have. Aahh the old 'what ifs'... Like I may have said before, it seemed as hard as I tried in certain areas of my life (artistic, relationshipenol (?) and otherwise) it felt destined to go in ways I had no control over... maybe that's a cop out, I don't know ( I know, "I don't know" isn't an answer). The quote under my blog title says,"It's never too late to become who you might have been." While I like the sound of that, I don't feel it to be true for me but it could be for you...

On a lighter note on the Mac you can print album graphics onto these sticky things (for lack of a better word) that you can apply to the cd and jewel case. Pretty exciting stuff... Dan.

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