Homemade
Occasionally my young sons build a clubhouse in a spare bedroom. They spend a delirious half-hour gathering bed sheets, clothespins, flashlights, corn chips, yard sticks, first-aid kits, and other essentials. When the components are in place and the appropriate warning is affixed to the door (KEEP OUT or you will meet your DOOM!), things get real quiet real fast. Five minutes later, the boys are back in the public domain, announcing they’re bored and wishing there was something to do.
This sequence of events reminds me of the process of creating home-crafted music tapes, which I often did in my late teens and early twenties. It was a lot of fun to plot out the songs I’d pirate onto a cassette tape. But it was less fun to record the songs, for it involved a lot of kneeling and twisting and reaching, whereby my dorsal cleavage got bared and my skivvies ended up sideways.
And it was still less fun to listen to the end product, which usually stank. That’s because I wasn’t very good at working the needle or calculating the recording times or even getting the volume right—sometimes Jimmy Buffett sounded like he was broadcasting a golf match in Margaritaville.
I littered my homemade cassettes not with songs I liked but with songs that I thought would make me look cool. These were cuts taken from the albums my older brothers had bought, and the songs had such irresistible names as “I Hear You Been Layin’ My Ol’ Lady” and “Pissin’ in the Wind” and “Red Necks, White Sock, and Blue Ribbon Beer” and “Sangria Wine” and “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?” Indeed, they concerned subject matter that a bookish, over-cautious, urban teen like me could sink his teeth into.
In high school, I don’t think I procured a single girlfriend or friend based on the ribald and raucous nature of these home-crafted compilations, and it’s probably just as well that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, for it might have gone something like this:
I’ve been told that nowadays you needn’t get splinters and wedgies when compiling songs. Apparently you can download individual numbers willy-nilly from some ethereal server onto tiny devices—iPods or BlueTeeth or BoysenBerrys or what have you. I don’t know what kind of hocus-pocus is involved, but I do presume it’s just one more example of joyless instant gratification that I will declaim until the very minute I chisel open my wallet and buy such a device of my own.
This sequence of events reminds me of the process of creating home-crafted music tapes, which I often did in my late teens and early twenties. It was a lot of fun to plot out the songs I’d pirate onto a cassette tape. But it was less fun to record the songs, for it involved a lot of kneeling and twisting and reaching, whereby my dorsal cleavage got bared and my skivvies ended up sideways.
And it was still less fun to listen to the end product, which usually stank. That’s because I wasn’t very good at working the needle or calculating the recording times or even getting the volume right—sometimes Jimmy Buffett sounded like he was broadcasting a golf match in Margaritaville.
I littered my homemade cassettes not with songs I liked but with songs that I thought would make me look cool. These were cuts taken from the albums my older brothers had bought, and the songs had such irresistible names as “I Hear You Been Layin’ My Ol’ Lady” and “Pissin’ in the Wind” and “Red Necks, White Sock, and Blue Ribbon Beer” and “Sangria Wine” and “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother” and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?” Indeed, they concerned subject matter that a bookish, over-cautious, urban teen like me could sink his teeth into.
In high school, I don’t think I procured a single girlfriend or friend based on the ribald and raucous nature of these home-crafted compilations, and it’s probably just as well that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted, for it might have gone something like this:
“Hey, man. Yeah, you in the Dodge Dart. With the Fred Travalena hair. Hey, ain’t you in my gym class? Ain’t you the guy the retarded kid pinned in wrestling yesterday? Anyways, I gotta say that you’re listenin’ to some really kick-ass tunes over there. Songs about gettin’ a piece and drinkin’ whiskey and puffin’ on some Panama Red and kickin’ hippies’ asses. So, hey, you got room for me in there? How about we go chase down a few of my public-school friends and then we get us some weed and a bottle of Sangria and go kick some hippies’ asses and then find us a coupla’ hookers! . . . Hey, wait up! Wait up, man! . . . Come back!”
I’ve been told that nowadays you needn’t get splinters and wedgies when compiling songs. Apparently you can download individual numbers willy-nilly from some ethereal server onto tiny devices—iPods or BlueTeeth or BoysenBerrys or what have you. I don’t know what kind of hocus-pocus is involved, but I do presume it’s just one more example of joyless instant gratification that I will declaim until the very minute I chisel open my wallet and buy such a device of my own.
posted by JW at jwopks@gmail.com at 4:25 PM
