The Way We Listened

The Hunt: When Finding the Music Was Half the Fun

There was a time when listening to a song required a campaign.

You heard the song.

You wanted the song.

That did not mean you now possessed the song.

Oh no.

There was a quest ahead of you.

First, you had to identify the song. This alone could prove challenging. There was no phone to hold up and magically ask what was playing. Maybe you caught the DJ announcing the title. Maybe your friend knew it. Maybe you remembered enough of the lyrics to ask around.

Eventually, you had a name.

Now you needed the music.

Gather your party.

Someone had a few dollars. Someone knew which store might have it. Someone needed permission to go. Someone's mother might provide transportation. If not, there were buses, BART, bicycles and whatever other means our little band of adventurers could assemble.

Then we were off.

The Campaign Begins

Objective: Acquire music.

Party: Assorted teenagers.

Inventory: A few crumpled bills, loose change, transportation money and dangerously high expectations.

Destination: The record store.

Possible obstacles: Parents. Transportation. Limited funds. Out-of-stock albums. Hunger. That one friend who takes FOREVER to make a decision.

Final Boss: You can only afford one record.

Choose wisely, young adventurer.

You may not have enough money for another one anytime soon.

Today, of course, the experience is completely different.

I can think of a song while I'm sitting at my desk, open an app, type a few words and be listening to it before I've finished whatever thought made me remember it in the first place.

That's extraordinary.

Seriously.

I love living in a world where almost the entire soundtrack of my life is sitting inside a little device I carry around in my pocket.

But there was something about the hunt.

And for me, one of the greatest places to undertake that hunt had a name.

Tower Records.

Enter the Temple

Tower Records wasn't simply where we purchased music.

You went to Tower Records.

There is a difference.

The record store itself was part of the experience.

You walked through those doors and entered a world of album covers, posters, new releases, music playing overhead and row after row of possibilities.

And you didn't have to know exactly what you wanted.

Browsing was part of the point.

You flipped through the albums one at a time.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Then...

Wait.

What is THAT?

Pull it out.

Look at the cover.

Turn it over.

Read the track listing. The liner notes.

Who's on it? What songs are there? Who produced it? Do I recognize anything? Why does this cover look so freaking cool?

Maybe you'd heard something about the artist.

Maybe a friend had mentioned them.

Maybe you knew absolutely nothing about them.

But now you were curious.

There was no algorithm saying, Because you listened to this, we think you might like that.

Sometimes you discovered music simply because you happened to reach into the right bin.

Roll for Perception

I talked in my first Rock ’n’ Roll Angel article about becoming obsessed with Queen after my brother David introduced me to News of the World.

Once that happened, I wanted everything.

And I mean everything.

The famous albums weren't enough. I wanted older records. Singles. EPs. Anything I could find.

So I hunted.

Tower Records became one of the places where I could dig through the Queen section, hoping something would appear that I hadn't seen before.

Remember, I couldn't search an online catalog from home.

I had to physically go look.

Walk into the store.

Find the section.

Q.

Start flipping.

Queen.

Queen.

Queen.

Wait...

What the hell is THIS?

And when you found some release you didn't have, especially one you didn't know existed?

Oh, that was treasure.

CRITICAL HIT.

The only problem was that finding treasure and being able to purchase treasure were two very different things.

Count Your Gold, Adventurer

Money mattered.

When you're young and scraping together whatever you have, you don't walk into a record store thinking:

I'll take all three.

HAHAHAHA.

No.

You might have enough for one.

Which meant standing there holding several albums and making what felt like a life-altering financial decision.

This one has the song I know I love.

But I've been looking for that one forever.

But THIS one has more songs.

But what if I put this one back and it isn't here next time?

There was no digital wish list waiting safely in the cloud.

Sometimes you physically put something back into the rack and hoped it would still be there when you returned with more money.

And when you finally made your choice?

That record mattered.

Not because music meant more to our generation than it means to anyone else. Every generation finds its own relationship with music.

It mattered because we had invested something in getting it.

Time.

Money.

Travel.

Anticipation.

The hunt.

By the time that Tower Records bag was in your hand, the experience had already begun.

You hadn't even heard the album yet.

Gather Your Tribe

There was another part of record-store culture that I miss.

We did it together.

The hunt could become a social event.

You gathered your friends and went looking.

And while you were there, everybody's musical world started bumping into everybody else's.

“Have you heard this?”

“You've NEVER heard them?”

“Don't get that one. Get this one.”

“Oh my God, look what I found!”

And, inevitably:

“Trust me.”

Those two words could lead to one of the greatest musical discoveries of your young life.

They could also lead to you wasting your very limited record money and reconsidering the entire friendship.

Such were the risks of the campaign.

But your friends influenced what you heard.

The people working in record stores influenced what you heard.

The music playing inside the store influenced what you heard.

The posters influenced you.

The album covers influenced you.

The stranger standing three feet away who got ridiculously excited about the record you were holding might influence you.

Discovery was happening everywhere.

We Wandered Into Music

My musical taste has never fit particularly well inside one box.

I grew up listening to everything from Three Dog Night to Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees, then wandered happily into Queen, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, ELO and whatever else caught my ear.

That kind of wandering was part of the fun.

You could walk into a record store intending to visit one section and somehow find yourself somewhere completely different.

There was no personalized feed trying to become increasingly accurate about who you were.

You were still figuring out who you were.

Sometimes music helped.

That's something I think about when I remember Tower Records.

Record stores weren't merely places where we found music we already knew.

They were places where we found music we didn't know we were looking for.

And sometimes those discoveries became part of us.

The Journey Home

Then came one of the best parts.

You had your record.

Your money was gone.

Your party had survived.

Now you had to get home.

That Tower Records bag sitting beside you on BART or in the car wasn't just a shopping bag.

There was anticipation inside it.

You couldn't listen to the album yet.

You had to wait.

Imagine that.

WAIT.

I know. Horrifying.

You had to travel all the way home carrying music you desperately wanted to hear.

Then you finally got there.

Into the room.

Record out.

Handle it carefully.

Put it on the turntable.

Needle down.

That tiny crackle.

And then...

Music.

Quest complete.

What We Lost and What We Gained

I don't want to pretend everything about that experience was better.

It wasn't.

Music today is astonishingly accessible.

Artists can reach listeners without needing physical distribution. We can discover musicians from around the world without leaving home. I can hear a song from my childhood whenever the mood strikes me instead of spending six months trying to remember who sang the damn thing.

I love that.

But convenience changed our relationship with getting the music.

The distance between I want to hear that and I'm listening to that has almost disappeared.

For us, there was often a whole adventure living inside that distance.

We planned.

We saved.

We gathered our tribe.

We traveled.

We searched.

Sometimes we failed.

Sometimes we came home with exactly what we'd gone looking for.

And sometimes we walked into Tower Records looking for one thing and came out carrying something we'd never heard of before.

That was the magic of the hunt.

We went looking for records.

Sometimes we found pieces of ourselves.

And the funny thing is, getting the music home was only the beginning.

Because then we had another decision to make.

Vinyl or cassette?

Oh yes.

There were choices.

But that's another campaign.

Next in The Way We Listened: The Choice — Album or Cassette?

**

Thanks for taking this trip back with me.

What do you remember? Did you have a Tower Records, or was there another record store that became your musical hunting ground? Tell me about the album you searched forever to find, the discovery you never expected, or the record you still regret putting back.

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Until next time...

Keep the memories alive.Keep the stories coming.And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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