Facing Backwards

I don’t believe the American Motors station wagons of the early 70s were considered classics at the time, or even in hindsight – although like with every other topic, particularly 70s-related, if you look online you can find a small community of obsessives. Like them, I remember ours pretty fondly, though.

It was dark green with the mandatory faux-woodgrain paneling, and if your family had anything similar, you know what was the most cool about it: it had 3 seats, and the third one was rear-facing.

While the Council on Bubble-Wrapping Our Kids has decided that’s a no-no (like everything else we enjoyed as kids), in those days parents & kids both welcomed the opportunity for a little space between us. So the third seat (at least in memory) was my sanctuary.

In a sense it was kind of wasted on me, because on a trip of any length I was absorbed in one of two things, and didn’t notice which direction I was facing – either I had “my nose in a book”, as Mom would say, or I was rummaging through/examining/obsessively re-sorting a thick stack of baseball cards.

Baseball cards weren't yet considered a ‘collectible’ – the day when they would be considered a legitimate hobby and then an investment and then worth zero again was still far in the future – but kids of a certain age always collected them. I don’t know why they fascinated me instantly; the cards of the early 70s are considered more or less the ugliest in card history. But anytime I could lay my hands on a dime, I’d walk the block to the drugstore for a pack.

Baseball cards were in some ways the Microsoft Excel of my childhood, because a pile of cards could be sorted and resorted – alphabetically, by team, by position, by card number… this did cause one huge problem for me, however, because in order to keep the ‘team’ category current, I would cross out the team on the card and write in the new team every time a guy got traded. So a large number of my cards are in the opposite of mint condition (and yeah, I mean they are; you bet I kept ‘em all to this day).

As a guy who is (probably genetically, certainly temperamentally) predisposed to Collecting and Sorting Things, I have been very much in a state of heightened alert since I got an iPod. The iTunes library allows for easy slice-and-dicing, and it’s even easier to carry my songs with me than it was to carry my baseball cards.

Not only do I like to make lists, though, but I also like to look at other people’s lists. When I came across the Rolling Stone list of the top 500 songs of all time, I immediately copied the list and checked it against my library. As of today, I have 187 of the 500 – which is funny, because it seems like I always have about a third of any list I find.

The more I looked, though, the more I realized that the reason I didn't have more of the songs was because I didn't want them. When it comes down to it, and I've mentioned this before, I’m just not oriented toward critically-acclaimed music. I’m not really seeking out Nirvana or the Sex Pistols or Eminem.

Still, I like to collect, and I’m always on the lookout for reminders of songs that I enjoyed and would like to add, so I decided to crowdsource: using Wikipedia’s pages for the Billboard year-end top 100 charts, I was able to compile essentially the top 1000 most popular songs of the (guess which decade?) 1970s. And as of today, I have 474 of them, which I believe is a testament to (a) how much I love 70s music and (b) how exactly straight down the middle my taste is. I’m not claiming that’s good or bad, it’s just the Undisputed Truth.

Of course, the problem is that this plays into my obsessive nature and I spend much of my time trying to figure out how I can get more and more and more of these. Since our library subscribes to Freegal, I can get a few tracks free each week so I am scouring the database to see how many of them are on the list, as I had previously done for the Rolling Stone list. Also, I have a lot of secondhand vinyl & cassettes I’ve picked up along the way but not ripped yet, so I’m mentally scanning to see if there’s anything there.

So I guess I haven’t really come very far since baseball cards in the backseat; when it comes to entertaining myself, it seems I’m still facing backwards.