Dan Verner
Published: May 11, 2008

When I was in high school, I thought Albert Camus was the coolest thing since hot buttered toast. Except for Kurt Vonnegut, of course, but that’s another story. My friends and I all read The Stranger (or, as we called it, L’Etranger since it was simple enough for us to read in our high-school French). We sat around and discussed it ad infinitum although we didn’t have the faintest idea of what we were talking about or of what the book meant. That never slowed us down. It was probably the influence of one too many black and white nouvelle vague films at the Circle Theater downtown, but we styled ourselves as existential heroes, and probably would have sat around a café for hours smoking Gauloises and drinking aperitifs if we could have found a café in Fairfax or were old enough to order drinks.
We thought it properly existential that Camus himself had died when the car in which he was riding slammed into one of those poplar trees that line the roads in France, and just a few years before.

In college, I was introduced to Camus’ The Rebel, a sort of existential manifesto in which Camus basically said that we define ourselves by what we refuse to do (I think). “Thus far and no further,” says who we are and what we will tolerate. I suspected he wasn’t talking about refusing to cut the grass at my parents’ house, but rather a significant choice that has deep meaning. Well, I have been looking for that choice and that refusal and I am happy to report that nearly forty years after college I have found it. I refuse to change the electronic format of the music I listen to. I have been through records, cassettes and now have amassed a CD collection. I will not go any further into digital downloads, MP3’s, iPods or whatever else there is or might be in technoland. Enough is enough. Here I stand.

I was born about the time that LP’s became popular, although I do remember Little Golden Records which were 78’s (note to the young people: 78’s were records which played at 78 revolutions per minute. They skipped a lot, didn’t hold much and were horrible at reproducing sound. Other than that, they were great.) LP’s played at 33 1/3 rpm and came in foot-square cardboard album covers, some of which were works of art in and of themselves. CD cases often require a magnifying glass to see what the cover has on it, if anything. But I digress. LP’s held much more content, although you had to flip them over and they were prone to scratching and skipping. They had to be kept meticulously clean. And they (and the needle used to play them) eventually wore out.

These LP’s were mono, one source of sound, and high-fidelity with the right equipment, but somewhere in the late ‘50’s, various schemes were developed to give us stereo sound. One was a two-headed tone arm which basically played two mono tracks at the same time: one left, one right. It didn’t go very far on the market. Eventually, engineers settled on a microgroove process in which one side of the groove held the right channel and the other side the left. Now we could hear music more or less as it sounded live.

Our first stereo was incredibly cheap, and I set out on a quest to someday own an expensive component system like that of our neighbor who worked for an airline. He had state-of-the art amps and preamps and tuners and turntables and speakers and when he allowed me to play one of my records on his system, it sounded glorious. He didn’t do this too often — he said my records were too dirty and scratched up.

With my first paycheck from my first teaching job I bought a modest component system from Lafayette. The records sounded great, and I continued to amass a collection during the years that followed.
Marriage meant not only the joining of two lives, it entailed the combining of two record collections — my folk and soft rock with her show tunes and classical. Altogether we had about 300 albums when the transition occurred.

I noticed sometime in the late ‘70’s that albums were becoming cheaper and harder to come by. They were being replaced by cassette tapes, which had the advantage of being portable and easy to use, although their dynamic response seemed somewhat less than records. It might have been the boomboxes we played them on — I never did get around to buying a cassette deck since we were knee deep in expenses for children at that point.  But after a while, we had a collection of about 300 cassettes. (I am happy to say that I never owned an eight-track player or tape — it was an awful medium whose only advantage was portability. It frequently cut songs in half to make them fit the format. The horror!)

Then came CD’s. A much better medium, better response and nearly indestructible, although I have worn out Gord’s Gold, Volume II on CD by playing and replaying it. Now the cassettes are packed in boxes in the basement with the LP’s (in case either format has a resurgence) and we have about 300 CD’s. But that’s it. I refuse to go any further. The kids can have their digital downloads. 

I’m too old to listen to music with ear buds, and yes, I do know what an iPod dock is, but I don’t want one. I’ll stop at CD’s and keep listening to them. I suppose if I have to I can convert them to digital files and listen to them on the computer. At least it has components.

Dan Verner is a Manassas resident. He will be contributing his thoughts and stories to the Perspective page on the second and last Sunday of every month.