Family Resemblance

Both of my parents are the youngest of their siblings, by a notable margin, and I’m the youngest of my generation as well. As a result, even my cousins have 10 years or more on me; we basically were strangers until well into my adulthood.

However, the arithmetic is bringing us together in recent years – we cousins seem to encounter each other at funerals. The rest of my immediate family has fled south, so I am the uncontested Northeast Regional Funeral Representative for the family.

Despite the fact that we were virtually unknown to each other, all the cousins knew who I was pretty much instantly, because they knew my parents – and I am a walking testament to the power of heredity. I look pretty much like what you’d get if you added my mom & dad together and divided by 2.

My hands and feet are definitely my dad’s, and they said that even as a toddler I walked like his father, even though he died before I was born. My face is mostly from my mother’s side, although I think a little of the paternal side sneaks in there, and my sense of humor and much of how I think is strongly reminiscent of mom as well. I’m sure there’ll be a future guest blog entry where she refutes that in the strongest possible terms.

I’m dwelling so much on Mendelian matters because it occurred to me recently that I also inherited something from my sister – a large swath of my iPod playlist. I’m not sure that there have been any scientific studies establishing music preference (or obsession, if you prefer) as hereditary, but the evidence is pretty strong in my case.

My sister was four years ahead of me in school, so she left for college as I reached high school… and started getting interested in music. And when she left for college, she left a tiny slice of herself behind: a really cheesy, beat-up record player – maybe not even worthy of being called a “hi-fi”; more like a lo-fi – and a small stack of albums (insert obligatory self-deprecating yet somehow simultaneously condescending crack about how some of my readers won’t remember large vinyl platters).

Fast-forward mmmmppph years – OK, 35, give or take – and here I am building a music library. Anyone who’s read any of my stuff, let alone my past music-related posts, will be unsurprised to learn that a lot of my collection comes from a long time ago. The backbone of the list is all the LPs and cassettes I bought all those years back, but thanks to a number of contributing streams (yard sale LPs & cassettes, cheap CDs, my somewhat winding emusic.com odyssey, and some gift iTunes cards), I’m slowly filling in the blanks.

Let me see if I can remember what was on that record player spindle: the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today”. Gordon Lightfoot, Glen Campbell, and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Ten Years Together”. John Denver – “Poems, Prayers, and Promises”. Was the Carpenters’ “The Singles: 1969-1973” in there too? I think so, but I’m not 100% sure. I know there was an extremely warped copy of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” that made me seasick to watch when I tried to play it. She also gave me an 8-track, for you archaeologists in the crowd, of some of the earliest of what would come to be called Christian Contemporary music; I kept it, later copied it to cassette (we didn’t “rip” in those days), and still listen to it in 0/1 format even now.

Further, in my never-ending quest to haul Yesterday into Today, I’ve bought the PP&M and Carpenters albums second-hand. I grabbed a nice Gordon Lightfoot selection at emusic, and I developed an unhealthy obsession with finding the actual Glen Campbell tracks I remember in their “original” state. It looks like the album she had might have been this one, but the cuts I got from emusic are live cuts recorded much later (*cough* ripoff cough). I finally grabbed the most recent Greatest Hits, when Amazon was basically giving it away for $5; this has allowed me a kind of “ahhhh… finally” moment, although at least one of the songs has been remixed almost till you can’t recognize it any more.

I started buying James Taylor in my first batch from Columbia House, way back in the day, so although I don’t have the SBJ album, I do have 40 JT tracks in my collection. And somehow, I ended up with the original John Denver LP, so that became part of Project Digitize.

I bought the Beatles’ Revolver some time back as a second-hand cassette, thinking that was the album I’d heard so many years before. But Beatles albums are an odd commodity; the same track often shows up on multiple LPs. Eventually I did a bit of research (can you claim it as “research” if it’s really just Wikipedia?) that I discovered that the actual record was “Yesterday and Today” and that it basically contained half of “Revolver” and half of “Rubber Soul”…

… but fortunately, the arrival of the Beatles at iTunes coincided roughly with the arrival of iTunes cards in my Christmas stocking, so I was able to snatch up “Rubber Soul” digitally to finish off that dream. Although I have to admit that I’m now trying to figure out where the most significant holes are in my Beatles collection, currently numbering 66 tracks.

I can’t in good conscience blame the whole thing on her, although I may still send her an invoice – a large percentage (I’m waffling between “impressive” and “disturbing”) of my acquisitions in recent times have been focused on the time period when I didn’t have to cook my own meals or do my own laundry. At least 1200 of my songs, or over 20% of my collection, are dated before 1980.

I find that for many of the really old tracks I have a memory, or at least a “memory”, of when I heard them first – and actually many of those have sisterly associations as well, like hearing “Hey Jude” for the first time at The Tower Restaurant in Lake Pleasant, NY (where the older kids hung out), or being instantly hooked on “It’s Too Late” by Carole King when I heard it in a car one late night in downtown Troy. And don’t get me started on “Indiana Wants Me”, which to be honest I haven’t bought yet because it’s hard to find the authentic one, plus I’m still a little bit conflicted about it.

Meanwhile I continue to get Facebook friend requests from high school classmates, and I made a few purchases several months ago to get my collection of 1973 Topps baseball cards within 9 of completion. My Today often looks a lot like my Yesterday, except with more TV networks.