My earliest personal choice in music was thanks to a kid named Art of all things, the only Punk Rock kid in all of Klamath Falls, Oregon when we moved to that city for some unfathomable reason (the Old Man never did explain it to me) back in like 1983. Art opened my ears to a number of music styles, and I settled into mostly New Wave with an appreciation for Punk and college radio.

Once we moved back from K-Falls and left Art and the College behind, my musical choices became more restricted, but we still had a decent Rock radio station for those times when I was away from my tape collection. (Shout out to KBOY and Dan Cheek, one half of the morning show duo I can remember – he somehow got stuck DJ-ing a dance at my middle school when I was in 8th grade, the poor bastard.) It was still the early 80’s, so the Rock of the 70’s wasn’t quite “classic” yet, and would be sprinkled liberally through the new Hair-Metal Top 40 acts.

For my birthday in ’85 or ’86, the Old Man got me one of those mini shelf systems with turntable, radio, and dual(!) cassette decks with a cheesy particle-board cabinet and 3-foot tall speakers. I had also moved back in with Mom and had a bedroom to myself, so this was a life-saver. I spent my high school career copying tapes borrowed from friends and even dipped a toe into the Columbia Record Club for a brief time. I made a LOT of mix tapes.

I moved to Ashland after graduating high school, and while it is a college town, I really don’t remember listening to the radio much – just endless repeats of Rush’s Working Man and Finding My Way on my knock-off Walkman cassette deck while walking to the coffee shop almost every night.

After Ashland, it was off to Portland without a fair chunk of my worldly possessions because I was living in a 1-bedroom apartment with between 3 and 5 other people, so it was headphones if anything. KGON kept me in touch with Rock radio – especially when I broke out into my own apartment and had literally no furniture other than a way-too-thin mattress on the floor and a clock radio.

When I hit Las Vegas, I hit the mother lode: KEDG, an honest to Gods full-time Alternative Rock radio station! I would buy a few more albums along the way and dip my toes into CDs, but mostly it was just radio for new music and playing my tapes from high school – until of course, the Napster Revolution. My roommate at the time was truly obsessed and didn’t’ really sleep, so the digital collection grew quickly.

In 2000 I picked up sticks once again and moved back to Portland. I was very digital by this point, only owned about 30 CDs and just played MP3s in Winamp from the computer. When I was out in the car, it was either the CD equivalent of mix tapes or the local Alt Radio station KNRK.

Over the years, terrestrial radio began to truly suck. Between the conglomeration of stations, proliferation of ad space, and just general downturn of the quality of new music, I stopped listening to radio altogether and just played CDs – and eventually MP3 CDs. Then finally I got a deck installed that played direct off a USB drive and I just copied the whole damn collection into the car and the computer both, and just played one huge playlist on random.

When we moved to a much smaller space in 2015, I got rid of what small CD collection I had and didn’t bother with a stereo anymore.

After hearing the same old collection every day for a few years, I realized I needed a way to get new music. My roomie Greyduck fed me some new stuff here and there (he introduced me to the Cowboy Bebop soundtracks, thank goodness), but I wasn’t getting any news of the new acts coming out. So, I eventually ended up getting into Pandora, and eventually Spotify. These became the new normal for me.

Pandora would mix in new artists for me, but it was usually crap without a way to say “don’t play this artist anymore” so I tried Spotify and I’ve found some good stuff there – but I have also found that not everything I want is available. They don’t have my old eclectic 3-Day Napster Binge core, and like we’ve discovered with all streaming media, there’s no guarantee it won’t disappear if a media deal fries. And like everyone else, I’m getting really fed up with subscription prices that increase while medial offerings decrease.

So, those of you have have followed along in my history lesson at this point are probably wondering where this is all going, and it is back to the early 2000s: I asked my lovely wife for a CD stereo system for Xmas this year, and she came through with that and a stack of CDs to go with it. Yesterday I dropped probably too much money at a local record shop picking out some must-haves from back in the day, and I’m currently spinning The Very Best of Billy Idol.

I also took a few minutes the other day to set up a media server on my network storage device so I can stream the old collection from anywhere in the house now, which will take care of the office. I’m wondering if I can get the TV to do something with that, too. The car still has the ability to play off USB if I ever take the jump to cancel Spotify, but I’ll have to curate some playlists rather than playing 10GB of MP3s on shuffle.

As for new music, I’m going to have to go old-school, and just go talk to the crew at the record store every now and again.