Carter: Away from the smoke

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Away from the smoke

Richard Carter

Rocketboys at the Pub last Friday

Lazy rainy wintery days can be some of the best days to just get away from it all and discover some great new (old) music online.

In older days, the best way to find music–that you had not heard before–was to either listen to FM radio (of course, back then the only way to get KZEW was at night on the parking garage of the Sears building downtown). Nowadays, I would not recommend that, and besides KZEW is long gone. Now we have Internet radio, if you want to pay for it, and there’s really no reason to get out of the house.

The other place to go (back then) was the record store. I could wax prosaically about the joys of discovering cool new bands on LP at the great old record stores in town. But the days of Ripoff and (the original) Disc Records are long gone, as are a lot of the people who worked there. Fellow haunters also seem displaced, which is sort of sad.

More recently, during my Dallas days, there were plenty of places to go as late as the early ‘90s. But alas all of those places are gone as well. The days of the record store have all but ended. During the last years of the CD Warehouse in town, I tried to play a mix of interesting new tunes, such as Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and Liars, but even that was limited.

So, with record stores near the end of a downward spiral, I think your best bet is Internet radio but what (to me) is better and cheaper is Youtube.com. I have mentioned this Internet site in the past, but the better that you get to know Youtube and how to browse through it, the more interesting stuff you are going to find.

The majority of that interesting (new) stuff seems to be from the past. I have always prioritized live music over recorded music, but over time I have begun to more fully appreciate the joys of older music that never made the charts or heavy rotation (not that that business concept existed back then on the FM). There is some great music from the 50’s through the ‘70s that didn’t get promoted properly and as a result has been relegated to the bin.

Let me back up for a minute. We live in a town that very much emphasizes live bands covering other bands’  music. That’s part of the area entertainment economy. For one, it’s easier to learn a good song and play it as opposed to actually writing a good song. And, two, I’m not sure (having been to a ton of area clubs over the past 10 years or so) that all that many people are really there in clubs for the live music.

I would like to see more area bands, who choose to cover other people’s music, actually change that music up more. I think the Jason Brown Band does a great job of rearranging songs. But what I would also love to see would be for cover bands to discover some of really underground old gems that most nobody has ever heard before.

The point I am trying to make is that there is some perfectly great music from back in the day to be discovered on Youtube.com, and some really interesting websites and subscribers are doing a great job digging this stuff up and promoting it.

And on those cold days when it doesn’t seem prudent to get out of the house, and the notion of watching infomercials hardly seems appealing, it’s time to dig up some old music and check out some great stuff.

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