Tuning Up the WABAC Machine

I'm as prone as the next guy to get lost in reverie about The Past (which, to be honest, wasn't all that much fun when it was the present)... but recently I've been taking a series of intentional brief journeys to days gone by.

Remember how I was searching for a low-cost, low-effort way to digitize my LP collection? Well, not long ago some friends not only found the secret -- but also lent it to me.

It's called the Xitel inPort Deluxe, and it's so simple it even works with my thrift-store-level equipment. I heard about this thing, and it reminded me of some kind of Ronco gadget that promises to cut hair or julienne a squash or something, but can't really perform like the infomercial demo. But you know what -- it delivers the goods. I spent about 15 minutes installing the software on my aged PC; since then, all I do is plug one end of the device into the stereo's headphone jack, and the other end into the PC's USB port; one minute after that, I'm recording onto my hard drive. One program records, one takes out the clicks, the third splits the music into tracks... I can have an entire LP done, with great sound quality even, in an hour (of which maybe 45 minutes is just recording time when I don't even have to do anything).

See if you can guess from my first few rips what year I've been revisiting -- and/or what year I became a pop music fan:

• Billy Joel, Songs in the Attic
• Styx, The Grand Illusion
• Kansas, Point of Know Return
• Gerry Rafferty, City to City
• Steve Miller Band, Greatest Hits 1974-1978

I may have tipped my hand with the last one, but just in case, here are the release dates for those 5 albums (in the same order): 1981, 1977, 1977, 1978, 1978. In any case, I'm sure you can tell just about when I came out of my parent-abetted Easy-Listening Coma and was swept away by the tag-team of Top-40 Radio and the Columbia House Record Club. Remember 12 albums for a penny (then just buy 2 a year for the rest of your life)? I'm pretty sure that 4 of the above are from the original batch, although Billy Joel was represented by The Stranger.

Each of them also had one or more huge hits on the charts at that time -- although I can't link to the Billboard charts to prove my point without subscribing to their online archive :-(. I became an enormous Billy Joel fan -- still am -- but my favorite band was, almost instantaneously, Styx. And revisiting them led me to conclude the following:

(1) A Styx album contains more cheese than the entire state of Wisconsin

(2) They're still my favorite band.

I've made no secret that I knew from an early age that I wasn't cool, so it's not surprising that I went for a band... ah, not critically acclaimed. The irony is that at the time I was sure they were cool. I mean, c'mon, check out this picture:

The album, which is almost literally the first rock & roll album I ever listened to, is frankly a virtual catalog of all the rock album cliches:

Only 7 full-length songs? Check. Plus another song that's just a 6-line reprise? Check. A pretentious spoken-word monologue in the middle of a song? Check. Another song that refers to both angels and aliens? Check. Yet another song that refers to Greek mythology? Check. Funky, abstract cover art? Check.

As a band, they're equally good at covering all the bases, with the theater geek and the hard-rocker side-by-side.

Mozzarella, ricotta, muenster, Monterey Jack or cheddar ... cheese can be delicious as well as good for you! I think I'll go slice off another hunk of Styx.