Music Across the Ages

My friend George and I have started sort of a music exchange recently. A while back, he posted some information about a new album by a band called The Hold Steady. I'd never heard them, so I asked him to load some tunes up and send them to me. What I got was a flash drive with a couple of dozen albums. Really good shit, too. Mostly guitar heavy, story-teller type stuff and jam bands. I decided to return the favor so, after I loaded the music onto my hard drive and iPod, I loaded up a couple of dozen different albums and sent the flash drive back to George.

A generation ago - when I was a young man in my early twenties - having access to that much music while on a deployment would involve having boxes and boxes of cassette tapes. That simply wasn't practical when space is a premium.


I still recall packing for our U.N. deployment to Egypt in 1987. I don't recall if I purchased a new Walkman for the trip, although I probably did; but I do recall sorting through my cassette tapes to ensure that I only picked the very best of the best. Stuff I wouldn't mind listening to over and over again. 

Not to sound nostalgic, but those ancient music players had some great qualities. For example, if you dumped your Walkman in the water - like I did with my iPod when I fell into my canal a few months ago - all you lost was maybe the Walkman and maybe the one cassette that was inside. You didn't lose your entire collection of over five thousand songs, which is what almost happened to me. Luckily, I had backed my music up with an external hard drive.

Five or six of the albums George sent were unplayable my me because those cancerous jackals at iTunes blocked me out since I didn't buy the songs and, therefore, lacked the proper licensure. Guess what??? No friggin' cassette or CD ever refused to play for me because I couldn't produce a receipt form Spec's!!!

Anyway, it's good to have some new music. That becomes critical during the long and boring hours that these deployments can be made up of.