Greek to Me

Everybody tells me I need to check out Pandora. Well, not everybody. My parents, for instance, I’m sure associate Pandora solely with a perilous object from Greek mythology. They feel, in fact, that for them ever to purchase a computer would unwisely “open Pandora’s box” to all manner of expenses and aggravations they’d just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil without ever having had to experience. They’re quite content to get their entertainment and edification from reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show and the pages of their ever-thinning print magazines. (Which they get at killer subscription rates because my dad successfully has maintained for 35 years now that I’m still a college student living in their home—one who presumably is far too distracted by the profundity and wit of Reader’s Digest ever to have graduated.)

Anyway, Pandora, as I suppose you know, is an Internet site that Wikipedia succinctly describes as an “automated music recommendation service.” I don’t know exactly how it works, because I’ve literally never gone there. But the idea is, Pandora somehow suggests musical artists you might like, based on what you tell it about your tastes and who’s already on your iPod or PC or CD player. In that, it strikes me as being sort of like Match.com without all the lying and the abject terror upon being presented with what you thought you’d asked for.

People tell me I should use Pandora because I dig indie rock. I’ve become a fan in the past five to 10 years of bands like The Decemberists, The New Pornographers, Wye Oak, The Strokes, Wilco and Vampire Weekend, having discovered them by such old-school means as newspaper reviews, NPR radio segments and the recommendations of friends (who may have found these bands on Pandora for all I know). But I know there are many, many acts—quirky, talented, intriguing, but slightly off the mainstream map—that I’m missing. Pandora, friends tell me, could be my invaluable muse and arbiter.

I imagine it could be. But the thing is, as much as I like a lot of artists who weren’t recording or perhaps weren’t yet born when I first started listening to my transistor radio back in the 1960s, as determined as I am not to musically calcify, and as thrilled as I am when my Gen X friend Meghan likes some current band to which Eric the Geezer Hipster has introduced her, there only are so many hours in the day. And there’s so much “old” music I still love to hear, or that I’ve rediscovered, or that’s been intriguingly re-imagined, or that isn’t old at all but is being recorded by artists of my youth who still are going strong.

This morning was a perfect example of this. I was sitting in a lounge area outside the Starbucks on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, sipping iced coffee and reading the Washington Post after a run. The sound system started playing a succession of songs from Rave On Buddy Holly, a recently released tribute compilation. As I listened to Fiona Apple’s touchingly sweet and faithful rendition of "Everyday," then Florence and The Machine’s hard-edged version of "Not Fade Away," I was filled with renewed respect and nostalgia for the west Texas musical genius who died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in an Iowa plane crash in February 1959, when I was about six months old. As I walked to my car I sang part of "True Love Ways" to myself. I own and like the new tribute CD and would have played it in the car, except that I lent it to Meghan last week in hopes of turning on someone born in the 1980s to the music of a forever-22-year-old rocker from the Eisenhower era.

Once in the car, I popped into the CD player The Zombies’ phenomenal 1968 LP Odessey [sic] & Oracle. The Zombies were one of those short-lived British bands of the mid-to-late 1960s that had a couple of huge singles, then rancorously disbanded over egos, contracts, bad weed, bad vibes, acting gigs in experimental Andy Warhol films, all-summer parties at Roman Polanski’s house, whatever. The Zombies, in fact, no longer were together when Odessey & Oracle came out. (Perhaps if they had been, one of the guys might’ve caught that spelling error, made by a member of their promotional team.) Still, the LP yielded the monster hit "Time of the Season," which would join "Tell Her No" as ever-after staples of classic rock radio.

Few people even my age know a single Zombies deep cut, but for some reason I’d bought Odessey & Oracle in the 1970s and quickly came to love it. It was simply a great British pop-rock disc of the era—well-written, -performed and -produced. Unlike many recordings of its time, the songs were neither treacly nor overblown, with the slight exception of one about carnage during World War I that the band apparently had fancied would be a big anti-war hit. (The problem there was that as far as the protest movement was concerned, Vietnam and Verdun shared little more than the letter “V.”)

Somewhere along the way, I shelved Odessey & Oracle in favor of other bands, other sounds. (The LP, in fact, may or may not have survived several moves only to be moldering in a cardboard box in the crawl space underneath our basement steps. I’ve frankly been afraid to look.) But then, rather weirdly and wonderfully, a few months ago I was driving through the North Carolina mountains, listening to a fiercely idiosyncratic radio station out of the town of Spindale, when I gradually came to identify a bouncy tune I was certain I recognized from somewhere. I listened closely to the unlikely storyline—a man’s joy that his girlfriend or wife is about to be released from prison. “Kiss and make up, and it will be so nice,” the happy singer swooned. (Had she been sent up the river for assaulting him with a pickax, then? Unclear. But the guy certainly isn’t judging, just pining.)

Suddenly I realized, “That’s from Odessey & Oracle! Something about … cell number … something.” The too-cool-for-commercial radio DJ soon confirmed in a matter-of-fact tone—as if who wouldn’t know that—that the track he’d just played was The Zombies’ "Care of Cell 44." Well, long story short, a few days later I ordered the CD from Amazon, and by the following weekend it was a mainstay of my automotive tuneage.

Obviously, my Subaru Legacy sedan holds only so many CDs in its door and center-panel spaces, But to keep any more music that than on hand in the car, perhaps stored in the trunk, strikes me as untidy, and perhaps too stressfully much of a good thing. So I frequently rotate CDs between home and vehicle. For whatever reason I tend not to listen to music while in the house, other than on the radio when I’m getting dressed or am in the shower. This means that my in-car music has to be personal best of the best—the stuff that most satisfies, energizes and/or moves me when I’m motoring.

(I’ll pause here to acknowledge that, yes, I realize there are portable devices one can plug into an automobile’s electrical system that can hold, like, a million songs and could keep one in tunes from here to China should anyone ever gets around to building that trans-Pacific bridge. To which my reply is this: I’m old, I pretty much drained my adaptability reservoir during that 8-track-to-cassette-to CD transition, and, well, furthermore, I'd really appreciate it if you'd just shut up.)

So, you may be interested to know which CDs are sitting in my car right now. (You may not, but it’s my blog and I’m going to tell you anyway.) In addition to the Zombies CD, and two by the aforementioned Strokes, there are one or more recordings by all the artists I mentioned in paragraph three, as well as by such blasts from the past as The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Rod Stewart (early stuff) and The Band. There’s also 70-year-old Paul Simon’s outstanding new CD, So Beautiful or So What, illustrative of my earlier point that some icons of the 1960s still are recording great music. In fact, two of my favorite CDs of recent years—past and future car fare—are by the former Band drummer Levon Helm, who’s older than Simon and is a throat cancer survivor.

The point I’m trying to make, getting back to Pandora, is that musically, I already feel like I’m a very wealthy man. To use Pandora to seek additional bounty strikes me as needless, if not greedy. What my well-meaning friends see as simply a trade-name means to an entertaining end seems to me to have more in common with the mythological box. Opening it might prove overwhelming. For the foreseeable future at least, I’d just as soon keep it shut.