Welcome to Forgotonia

I never thought I would do it.

But a couple of years ago, I finally started making the switch over to digital music. And now I’m hooked. It stopped occurring to me to miss cover art and liner notes right around the time I realized I could get things like The Suburbs for less than a gallon of gas.

Not that long ago, I considered the shift to digital–and to actually never “owning” music–as blasphemy.

But now that I can type into a search field anything I want to hear, (and, almost always find what I’m after–are your ears burning, Black Keys?), will I every pay for music again? (Especially now that, as I’ve mentioned lately, I’m trying to rid myself of practically all of my possessions?)

Spotify My Love

I’d been hearing about this new service called Spotify from my favorite radio show, Sound Opinions. But I didn’t jump onto the bandwagon until around the same time everyone else and their dog was suddenly “…listening to such-and-such on Spotify,” according to their Facebook feeds.

And while I still haven’t figured out how to make the most of it as a social medium, (connecting with friends and sharing playlists with them), I have figured out the part that, at least for now, matters most: hearing and discovering good music.

I realized I had reached a possible no-turning-back moment the other night when I logged in to my 50-item Amazon wish list–which had consisted of CDs and MP3 albums I’d wishlisted over the last couple of years and planned to check out–and turned it into a playlist on Spotify.

How can I not take advantage of free access to music? I asked myself. Even with Amazon charging $5 or less for certain CDs–which in itself has simultaneously caused me guilt and glee, as I’ve mentioned before–purchasing everything on that would still have cost me more than $250.

When I declared to my husband, in the process of creating that list, that I might just use Spotify forever and never buy albums again, he surprised me (clutter policeman that he is) by saying he didn’t like the service. “The ads are annoying,” he said.

But to me it’s a trade-off.

I could upgrade to the paid service, of course, and skip the ads altogether. But, having grown up waiting through what felt like hours of commercials for “Garlique” brand garlic tabs and Hooked on Phonics for The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 to come back on, I can live with them.

See Me, Hear Me, Feel Me…But Not Touch Me

I do have to ask myself, though, as a lifelong music enthusiast–one who still hasn’t been able to part with the cassingles she still owns–am I abandoning an important part of the musical experience that I’ll eventually miss?

After all, I still refuse to convert to a Kindle, because, as I’ve discussed before, BOOKS MUST BE SMELL-ABLE and I will never change my mind on that.

Google Image result for "messy CD pile"

But the truth is, since I took the leap and ordered my first “album” digitally from Amazon, I don’t particularly miss having broken jewel cases all over the house. Or discovering that one of my favorite albums of all time now skips. Or paying $15-$20 for something that probably cost 3 cents to make.

So really my only remaining concern is that in a couple of months or years, something will come along that makes even Spotify seem clunky and hard to use, or some competitor will clobber it and I’ll have to start re-making all of my playlists.

Or at least that seems to be the pattern in this this fickle social media world.

Players Only Love You When They’re Playin’

Just in the time between 2006 (when bullet number one, below, occurred), I went from:

• listening to my first-ever online radio station, WOXY.com, which was really cool but apparently went broke and closed up shop, to
• subscribing to La La.com, which was a pretty nifty service but ended up getting pooped on/obliterated by iTunes, to
• Last FM, which I tried because I heard lots of other people make reference to it, but which eventually annoyed me for reasons I don’t really remember but seemed to have to do with annoying navigation and/or freezing up my computer, to
• Slacker Radio, which C-Nor recommended and which I still like, (but which I’m betting will probably also fold, now that Spotify is stomping across the nation like a giant thing from Ghostbusters), to
• the Amazon Cloud Player, (for saving all the MP3s I had been purchasing), because it launched just at the time I really needed it–i.e., moving from one house and job to another and discovering just how many files I had stored in different places (and couldn’t access–shame on you, iTunes), to
• the aforementioned Marshmallow-Man-huge service.

So, tell me, has the web revolution caused you any musical moral conundrums?

Do you use Amazon Cloud, the new Google music storage system, or something else entirely? Or are you still buying 8-tracks at garage sales on your block, (as well as copies of microwave cookbooks)?

Please tell me about your own musical-ownership evolution–and what on earth I should do with those cassingles–below.

(Or: You know you’re a nerd when)

1. You start listening to Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on NPR.
2. You start scheduling housecleaning around the 10 a.m. Saturday airing of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on your local station.
3. You start missing several weekends’ worth of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! because you are traveling on weekends (and also because, to be honest, you really don’t clean), and: you actually find yourself fretting about it.
4. You begin downloading podcasts of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, and you have genuine feelings of joy and delight at being able to catch up on missed episodes.
5. You walk laps on the track with Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! playing on your iPod, and when one of the panelists says something funn, you laugh out loud (in front of other people). Yes, you have become that person.
6. You begin conversations with friends and family like this: “This past weekend? On Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! ? They were talking about how….”
7. You are asked something about your what kind of a career you’d like later in life, and you actually struggle to keep from saying “panelist on, and/or writer for, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!*

*and also “Sound Opinions.” For all thee above.

Chapter One

The one and only time I ever agreed to help, I was on edge every time I heard a car slowing down on the highway.

The sound of the bell on the door—which I could hear from the living room on the other side of a cubicle wall—put me in a panic. Please don’t be a customer please don’t be a customer.

My older sister, the cool-headed one of the two of us, usually watched the front office of the motel, and babysat my cousins at the same time, on weekends when my aunt and uncle went out of town or out with friends on a Saturday night. But she was about to graduate, and now that I was in high school, I could perhaps be her replacement, was the thinking.

The babysitting part on this Saturday night just meant hanging out with my three younger cousins. The scary part was that these cousins’ home—a living room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms—was in the “living quarters” of a motel. The motel entrance, a small office from which to book customers, rent rooms, and distribute keys, just happened to be behind a small partition in their living room.

Chapter Two

My aunt and uncle ran the Prairie Winds motel, a one-story brick business on Highway 136 on the edge of town, about 15 miles east of the Mississippi River. I wouldn’t know until many years later that I had had legitimate reason to be freaked about facing whoever it was that might come in and cause the bell to jingle. Growing up, I had no idea that the motel’s original proprietors—my grandparents—had once been robbed there in the middle of the night.

No, what had me trembling that night was not man, but machine: if any of the travelers who stopped in for the night paid with a credit card, I was going to be in trouble. My aunt had tried, patiently, to show me how to swipe the card through the little box with the keypad on it and complete the complicated transaction. But after the third time, (as I am still guilty of doing when it comes to anything with numbers), I nodded and pretended to get it. “Oh there, I see,” I said, smacking my forehead. “You guys go ahead and go to your dance, don’t miss it on account of me!”

As soon as they left, my cousins got out a board game and I said a secret prayer. Dear God, please don’t let there be any customers and if there are please let them write a check.

Chapter Three

Luckily, the few times someone did come through the door over the course of that Saturday evening, it was just a friend of the family stopping by to say hi, or maybe a deliveryman for the ice machine. I never had to use the credit card machine. But the next few times my aunt and uncle asked me to babysit the kids and the office, I was relieved to have legitimate excuses to be unavailable on a Saturday night: pep band, marching band, or play practice. (Oh and yes, um, dates.)

In today’s Google-map era, there is perhaps little reason to worry late at night about how much further down the road the next gas station or motel might be. But back then, the Prairie Winds was the only place to stay–with maybe one or two sketchy exceptions–in the area, with the next option 30 miles to the east, or across the Mississippi into Keokuk, Iowa to the west.

So it actually a pretty genius idea when my grandpa, a farmer, decided to go into business for himself, (in addition to farming), and build a motel on the edge of Carthage, just near his home and farm. If I’m remembering correctly, Grandpa built the place himself. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering that this is the same man who, today, at 89, is still farming. And the same man who, as a teenager, left school to take over his family’s farm after his father went blind. My grandma would spend many years helping run and clean the place. She was the one who chose the romantic name.

I never heard either of my grandparents mention the story of the robbery; as is perhaps typical of their generation, they saw no need to talk about it. But I eventually learned from my dad that my grandparents suffered a harrowing, nightmarish experience one night when what seemed like just another traveler coming off the highway turned out to be a man who would hold them up at gunpoint and leave them bound and gagged. They lived, thankfully, but apparently not “to tell the tale.”

Chapter Four

By the time my cousins were in their teen years, at some point in the 90s, my family sold the motel to an Indian family from Chicago, and it has been sold again at least once since then. The place is a bit of a lighthearted Carthage joke now; if you’re back for a wedding or a reunion, you might hear, “Where you crashing tonight, the Prairie Winds?”

And the sight of the place in its current state, along an off-interstate stretch of the Midwest, was enough of a story-in-itself to capture a noted photographer’s attention. In August, the New York Times photography blog, Lens, highlighted a series of photos from rural Illinois called Prairieland by Dave Jordano.  There, in the collection of sad places that have seen better days, was the Prairie Winds. (You can read more about that in my initial post here.)

Screen shot of Prairie Winds photo by Dave Jordano

Even though I’m now aware of what happened to my grandparents on that terrible  night, the motel still conjures pleasant memories for me,  not just of spending time with with my cousins in their home in the living quarters, but also of eating Sunday dinners at the buffet when there was still a family restaurant attached.

It might not be much more than a sign of another era now–another symbol of the left-behind feel of west central Illinois. But because I know who built it, it will always be a symbol of two other things to me:  my Depression-surviving grandparents’ sense of industriousness, and their strength.

Postlude: That car in the picture is very much like the kind I used to cruise around in when I was a high schooler– a blue 1985 Crown Vic, to be exact. As you can imagine, this also played a role in the status of my Saturday nights.