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Reducing the Clutter: CDs & Concert T's (WWJD...What Would Jerry Do?)
Recently I wrote a post, a Part II actually: The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collector's Items (what to do with my 1,000+ CDs). Not only was it a savvy use of the word 'conundrum' in a post title, the resulting conversation proved to be a cathartic exercise well worth taking.
The post was really about two things: my changing music consumption habits and my desire to jettison my physical CD collection. There were a number of comments from faithful 6149'ers on how their own consumption habits are changing (streaming versus buying music is a polarizing topic to say the least). There was also a lot of discussion on what role the physical CD plays now and, if there is a want to shed them, what the hell to do with them all?
The latter subject is the one I want to talk about. It fits in well with a subject I am thinking a lot about right now: "reducing the clutter". What the hell am I talking about here? Reducing the clutter has been a central theme of my life as of late. My efforts to reduce the clutter has been a success from the big philosophical things to the little bullshit-y things. I'm focusing on what what I am most passionate about and interested in, eliminating unnecessary variables from choice and decisions, changing patterns and getting stuck into the new work I am involved in. That is the big picture stuff. I am cutting a swath through the little bullshit, too...like my CD collection.
The (pending) elimination of my CD collection is not the only physical clutter I am trying to reduce. I have a ridiculous collection of concert T-shirts, too. I haven't worn some of them in years. Between my moves from Boston to Florida to Sydney, Australia and to London...that is 8+ years of lugging plastic and cloth all over this big ol' globe. Now that I have potentially solved my CD conundrum, I had to make a move on the T's. I didn't want to throw them away...I just couldn't. Instead, I found a way to, as they say, re-purpose them.
I found this service called UBlanket. You send them 20 of your fave T's and they turn them into a blanket for you. I looked at a number of other similar services and this seemed to be the best. The cool thing is that you send them the shirts and they take pictures and post them online. You get to crop the design to your satisfaction and then you click and drag your "panel" into the frame and decide the layout of your T's / blanket.
I was their first international order. Once we sorted out some logistics, my fave Ts were in the mail headed for the chop shop. Once they were posted online, I designed my masterpiece. It should be here within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, here is a pic of the design I came up with:
If you are like me and have an unhealthy emotional attachment to Rock & Roll schwag, like concert T's, that marked seminal moments in your life (and who doesn't, right?)...Ublanket may be a good option for you.
Funny, as I type this I am wondering if I actually reduced clutter or if I just consolidated it.
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Let's step into the way-back machine, circa 1987. I was in high school. I had a VHS copy of "Rolling Stone Magazine 20th Anniversary" special (yes, VHS...this was the 80's). The video was chock-full of interviews with people from the heyday of the mag back in the 60's, straight up to the video darlings of the mid 80's. One of the interviewees was Jerry Garcia. There was one thing Jerry said that struck sparks in my young mind (I am paraphrasing): "we all want to live a clutter free life". That had an impact on me back then as it does now.
I didn't know it at the time, but Jerry was revisiting a comment he made many moons ago when Haight Ashbury was alive and well with the Hippie ideal and the freewheeling fever of Fillmore gigs, free will and fucking. He and the rest of the Dead were being interviewed by Harry Reasoner, of CBS...the straight press. Funny...when you watch this, who looks like the real freak? The interviewer or the interviewee? Truly...one man's normal is another man's strange.
Here is that video: Harry Reasoner's The Hippie Temptation. If you haven't seen it, it is worth the viewing. The Jerry/clutter comment I am referring to happens at 1:20.
Reducing clutter...it makes me think of a song from one of my fave rave albums of the year, 'Brothers', by The Black Keys. The name of the song is, "Tighten Up". Reducing, tightening...yeah, that sounds right. It is a song so fixated in the now, but leans so heavily on influences of the past. It has a deep, sticky, dewey groove with a buzz & fuzz vibe layered on top. I love it. I love the whole damn album. Here is a double-whammy for you: the official video for the track and a live performance on Letterman.
If you have this album and downloaded it...you fucked up. Bite the bullet and go buy it on vinyl. The difference is staggering. If you don't have it already...and don't own a record player...don't be a fuck-up. Bite the barrel and invest in a turntable. Get with it...this is 2010, for Keith's sake!
PART 2: The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collectors Items (What to do with my 1,000+ CDs?!?)
Back in November of 2009 I wrote a post about what to do with all of the CDs I own. In that post I talked about why I needed a solution and what the possible ideas were. You can have a read of that post here:
Part One of The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collectors Items (What the hell should I do with my 1,000+ CDs?!?)
Since then, my physical CDs purchases have been next to nil. I am buying primarily downloads, save for my now growing vinyl collection (which is my fave format). I'm not sure I will ever buy another physical CD again (sorry my old friend, liner notes...I'll just have to rely on websites and PDFs when they are available).
I just found this picture today. This is my music collection circa 2002. This is the first apartment my wife and I lived in together. I had to fight to steal this closet space (still paying for it today).
CDs are just dead. Shit, I don't even have a CD player anymore. I bought a killer Yamaha tuner a while back and when I did, I decided that the CD player was not needed. My thinking then (and now) was that I would just rip the CDs to my hard-drive and stream it via Air Tunes throughout the house. If I had a house that I owned today rather than all of this global transient apartment living, I would trick that casa out with the top of the line audio with all the super geeky tech stuff. I digress...
In a recent post, The Rise of the Streamers, I questioned the notion of streaming versus owning your music. There was some healthy debate on the topic. I did miss the mark on taking a deeper look at another angle: still owning your music (CDs) and transferring it al into the cloud. This tangent is more in line with my first post on this subject, what to do with the music...all those damn CDs...that I now own.
I have come to a decision on what I will do with all of my CDs.
When I replaced all of my cassettes with CDs I threw the tapes away. We were talking about two different beasts then. There was no relationship between the two. CDs and digital files are another matter. I can turn water in to wine with these.
My music collection, Judd's Juke Joint, totals 1,515 albums. The collection is comprised of 1,065 CD (box sets included) and 450 downloads. Whew...that's a lot of plastic and paper. I also have 107 pieces of vinyl...but they aren't going anywhere.
So this is the plan:
- This winter I will rip the rest of my collection to external hard-drives. I have over 25,000 songs dumped into iTunes as of today. That is not my entire collection, but it is a larger portion of it.
- Once I have my entire collection in bits & bytes, I will make a few back-ups of the hard-drives with one master that I can add to as I buy new stuff. Each month I will clone it over to my back-ups.
- I am going to find a cloud storage service to put the entire thing in. Dropbox, Google Docs...not sure what yet. If there was an option that had a player that I could use/stream with or take my own songs and embed playlists with or share to social sites, etc...I would prefer that. Not sure what the cloud solution is yet, but will research it heavily.
- @dopeburger and I were talking about uploading to the cloud in Part One of this post-series. We were envisioning a 'bandwidth-bar' or someplace you could go to rent screeching-fast upload speeds to upload mass file-age. Uploading 1,500+ albums to the cloud is going to be costly. I want to do it right once, make it as inexpensive as possible and simple. Very simple. I think that I brought up a retail chain, like Costco, that would sell a wide pipe and warp speeds on the cheap to make this happen. Cool idea.
- I'm going to dismantle my entire CD collection...separate the CD & liner nots from the pastic.
- I will buy some simple storage solution to catalog all of the CDs in. I think I can get that down to a couple/few boxes. If anything, this makes me feel better knowing that at least 70% of my collection is backed up by "hard copies".
Once I get this done, I will invest in the latest and greatest technology to trick out my flat or house so that my music is always ready to play anytime and in any room. I also want to be able to play my stuff anywhere...the cloud service I end up using will be key here.
For the past eight months I have only been buying downloads and vinyl. That is the way forward. With downloads, where possible, I will buy higher quality files (as I did with Arcade Fire's new album & offerings...they nailed that execution...and their interactive album is cool, too).
I will continue to buy vinyl...old and new. I will carefully curate my collection so that I focus on top vinyl-album-experiences (Layla, Pet Sounds, etc.). the new vinyl will be in two forms...new albums on high quality vinyl (i.e. 180 grams) and special re-releases of killer classic albums. The new albums refers to new shit such as The Black Keys, "Brothers" (love this album) and Tom Petty & The Ass-Kickers, "Mojo". If new release albums come with download codes...all the better.
The Old-New releases come in flavors such as the limited edition Neil Young 4 album set and the re-release of the Stones, "Exile on Main St.". The Neil set is fucking bow-down. He has plans to release more classic and lost album on the black beauties and I will buy them all.
OK...sounds like a good plan. I have a few months still before I kick out the jams on this project. Am I missing something? Anyone have any suggestions on how I can improve my master plan?
The CD Conundrum: Coasters or Collectors Items (What the hell should I do with my 1,000+ CDs?!?)
Images of me unpacking and resorting my CD collection in my new London flat.
For those of you who do not know, I have been on my own World Tour of sorts as of late. In 1996 I lived in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1998 I moved up to Boston, where I met my wife (at a Tom Petty concert: find out how here). In 2002 we moved from Boston to Ft. Lauderdale, FL. In 2005, we made the big move around the globe to Sydney, Australia. This past September we relocated to London; ironically we now live on Sydney Street.
There are two things I have always traveled with no matter where I have rambled: my wife and my music collection. Arguably these are the two most important things in my life; I couldn't do without either. Funny though, I have had a longer relationship with my music collection than my wife (she and I have been together over 10 years). My wife is not the jealous type, nor should ever have reason to be: I am an extremely loyal and dedicated man. Which is why she shouldn't be surprised at my resistance to want to shed my vast collection of CDs.
My collection is 1,419 albums and box sets strong, consisting of both CDs and downloads. Recently I have converted back to vinyl (75 albums and growing) after decades of turning a deaf ear on their sonic brilliance. You can read through it all here in a live-list I created in a Google Doc: Judd's Juke Joint. I update this whenever I add to it. There is also a tab for my music related DVD material as well.
Before I go any further, let me say this: as far as I am concerned my collection is 99% fat free. While I do think that size matters, quality is of most importance.
As you can see in the spreadsheet I am in the process of highlighting which albums are physical CDs and which are downloaded bits and bytes. In my rough estimate, just under 1,110 of my collection is in CD format (including box sets). That is a quite a load to haul around the world with me. I am thinking of making a move that scares the shit out of me: junking all of my physical CDs.
I am entertaining this thought for a few reasons:
- The sheer volume of CDs is cumbersome to move (around the world or otherwise)
- The majority of the CDs are on my two Macbooks. One of which is dedicated to just play music wirelessly around my flat.
- Because of #2, I hardly ever go to pull a CD off the racks to play it...I do only if I haven't already ripped it to my laptop
- My taste for vinyl.
Why am I keeping all of these CDs? I don't know, really. Part of it is that it is tangible. I love seeing this tower of CDs everyday. A lot of work and play (and $$$) went into amassing this collection. Yes, I am emotionally attached to all of that polycarbonate plastic.
Conversely, I LOVE sifting through my vinyl collection and physically playing and flipping records...which is not easier nor is it more convenient. This of course, is because the sound and the experience from vinyl is worth the effort. The CD experience in comparison is shit. Having to get up and move across the floor to flip the record is exciting...I am actively participating in the music. Yes, I am now emotionally attached to all of that beautiful black lacquer.
So, what is poor music fan to do, 'cept to play some ol' rock and roll bands...899.html">heh heh.
Here is what I am thinking about doing if I decide to do anything at all:
- Rip my entire physical CD collection to hard drives. I would put as much on my Macbooks as I can and the rest, in its combined CD and download glory, would be stored on external drives. I would back it up to as many as necessary until I feel secure. I could keep two on hand, get a safe deposit book for one and send one to my parents in New Hampshire for extra safe keeping. And If all fails, I can bury one under a rock in Buxton, Maine for Red to dig up when he gets out of prison.
- I would then take all of the CD inserts/liner notes from each case and store them in a photo-album or something similar. This way I can have the info if I ever need it (this sounds like madness, doesn't it...).
- I could hook up my external drive to the computer and play everything and anything through my wireless network set up throughout my flat. This is also very convenient for mobile-music
- I would find some young, deserving music fans and donate my CD collection to them. I would divvy it up into assorted chunks so that the recipients would get a good mix of blues, soul, country, etc. If I do this, I might have to forgo keeping the CD inserts.
This would leave me with all digital files, vinyl and box sets (I would keep those in physical form). I think...think...I could live with that. But how would I buy music?
Let's use the last Bob Dylan album, "Together Through Life", as a test case. I bought that on vinyl and it came with a CD of the tunes sans CD packaging fanfare. This is best of both worlds: my preferred vinyl in 180 gram goodness and a CD to rip to my digital collection...and I get to give the CD to a deserving music fan/friend. If the album had come with a code for download that would have been just as good.
Anyhow, this is where I am at with my collection. I am not in a hurry to decide. All I know is that my collection will only grow. While I LOVE the thought that it will get out of hand, it could get physically unmanageable as I move from place to place.
Are any of you in the same situation? What are your thoughts? How have you/would you act on this...if at all? How do you buy your music? What are the holes in my potential plan?
Tune Tags
I chose "Sparks" by The Who as the tune tag for this post. This was the song playing in the movie Almost Famous when a young William Miller was flipping through the vinyl collection left to him (...to liberate him!) by his sister.
- Posted from Kensington, United Kingdom
