My friend, James, and I were talking yesterday, and we began stumbling over the dates of production for Brian Eno's work with music and sound.

It apparently put us into enough doubt that we both went to the web within hours to find the answers. We were both right, and wrong, but James was more right - and I was the one, not him, alive and buying music on vinyl as it premiered in my local music stores!

How can that be? Well, first there's the memory issue, but trust me here, I'm still good at attaching the arrival of an object into my life to a time and place, and I'm seldom wrong. So, how is it my dates could be off by as much as 3 - 4 - 5 YEARS??? The following is what we had in the 60's and 70's:

- if you heard about an album, it was because you made the effort to go to a specialist magazine store, and constantly leaf through them for information leading to music you would otherwise NEVER find.

no Web.

- an album wasn't "out" until it reached your local music store. There was no other source for your acquiring music. Nor could you "burn" yourself a copy from someone else. Even 8 track "burn" tapes could only be made by selecting cuts off your vinyl... and it was so tedious, you didn't do it.

no Web.

- if you were interested in obscure and/or foreign import music, your local music store options were trimmed down to one or none, even in the largest of cities.

no Web.

- there were very few "alternative" radio stations (though FM was better then than now), but nothing like Brian Eno was going to be heard on the airwaves.

no Web.

So... music came to you when it was delivered to you - in small doses - from small sources - to small store owners who were risking their business by not going "pop" - and if you didn't support them, and keep going back to them, they didn't have a commercial chance in hell of surviving.

YOU were deeply interwoven with the "mom/pop" specialist stores, and everyone did what they could to keep things moving and vital.

But, music arrived when it got there, and the sort of music I'm talking about was the last to arrive, especially from foreign shores and small music companies... which explains MY sense of timing compared to James' dates. An album may have been created in 1973, but it didn't arrive to MY venues until 1976, etc.

NO WEB, NO IMMEDIACY... BUT certainly more personal involvement. I LOVED the magic of something finally arriving at a small store in which I had a stake. I LOVED going to a music store with fellow enthusiasts and having a another fellow enthusiast behind the counter say "The new Eno is IN". Life got no better than that.

P.S. - The man's name was Dave, he was about my age, his business was called "Budget Tapes and Records", and it was near the corner of Hampden and Broadway in Englewood, CO.. His counter was on the left as you walked in. There were perhaps 3 twenty foot double sided album aisles in his little store. It held the best music he could offer in a small space with the highest monthly rent he could afford. It was a joy to walk through his door, and he was glad to see us too. I remember all these details even 35 years later..

THAT'S what I'm talking about.

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It is Saturday.

Pat, my wife, and I watched a Double Feature of mediocre, early Jimmy Stewart films last night: "Made for Each Other" and "Pot O' Gold". One, a rough attempt at making a "serious" statement (M.F.E.O. - NOT by Frank Capra), one, a MUSICAL (P.O.G.). Jimmy in a musical? 'Fraid so. The redeeming factors in both (1939, 1941) were the decor, fashions, cars, etc.. Naturally, I poked fun at the musical and its ridiculous scenarios. What IS WITH those dopey things anyhow? Sorry. I'm NOT a fan of the musical.

My involvement in design helps me interpret visual cues in older films. The cues would've been completely clear to a contemporary 1939 movie audience (for example), yet those same cues are lost to most of us now.

Examples:

If you know nothing about old cars, you can't understand that the car X person is driving was chosen by the set decorators to define the character, for example, as conservative and wealthy.

If you know nothing about lighting design, you might not understand that a particular night club would have been easily understood as posh and expensive.

If you know nothing about ocean liner history, you probably wouldn't know that someone was taking a trip on the most expensive and glamorous ship in the world at that time, and, because they drove a modest, older car, this trip was a symbol of serious outlay of money, desire, and dreams.

It's the sort of thing we take for granted in film, t.v., etc. set in our own time, but the Time will come - as it always does - when only a few viewers can make instantaneous connections between what they're seeing and what it is meant to represent.

I think that's interesting.