Alvin Toffler, John Coltrane and Kenny G
By David Steffen
“Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making plans”. John Lennon used this idea in one of his songs. The fact is the quote probably originated a decade earlier with cartoonist Allen Saunders. Nevertheless I’ve learned over the years that there is an abbreviated version that most all of us have, at some point, acknowledged (if not vocalized): “Shit happens."
While in college I was introduced to the work of Alvin Toffler. His landmark 1970 book “Future Shock” attempted to address change from the context of his mid-twentieth century view. In various ways Toffler presented imagery that enabled the reader to comprehend the compression of time, the accelerated pace of change, and the numbing effect that both compression and change can bring to the human experience. In those pre-internet days, Toffler was confirming, essentially, that shit does happen, and it happens with greater regularity as time passes.
Many of our readers know that I spent more than 25 years in the music industry. I had numerous titles over the years but I started out as a local promotion rep. That’s someone who visited and spoke with program directors at radio stations, columnists at newspapers and owners of record stores. I was there to promote them, to talk to them about how great our records were and just why they should care. It didn’t pay as well as most of the good union jobs in blue-collar Milwaukee, but it was a lot more fun.
For example, in my travels around Wisconsin I’d explain to the top-40 radio station just why this new Guess Who (45-rpm vinyl) single “American Woman” should be played by their disc-jockeys. I’d tell the album stations just why they should play “American Woman” and other tracks from the Guess Who’s album (“No Time”, “No Sugar Tonight”/“New Mother Nature”). In short, I told them “Your audience will love it!”. I’d explain to the newspaper reviewers just why they should be writing about the Guess Who’s new album. “Your readers will love it!”. And then I’d tell the record store just why the new vinyl single and album should be featured in their store: “Hey, the local radio stations are playing it, and there’s going to be a review in Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal. Your customers will want it!”.
I was explaining this job of mine in a conversation with my sister-in-law back in Milwaukee in the early 1970s. She paused, looked at me and asked, incredulously, “You mean someone pays you to do that?” which is a variation of “is that really a job?”. In short, yes they did and yes it was. Over the next 25 years the music changed, technology evolved, but the general approach wasn’t much different.
Last week our daughter Caitie drove up from the East Bay to visit. We’re always happy to see her and inevitably we engage in interesting conversations. One of this week’s topics was about music. Well, actually it was about how and where we listen. Caitie’s a millennial, born in the late ‘80s. She knew about 45-rpm singles mainly from the jukebox we had in our Connecticut home. She owned and played cassettes, shifted to CDs and transferred some of those digital recordings to iTunes on her computer. Things have changed. She no longer collects CDs. She’ll occasionally go through my vinyl collection to see if there’s something—usually Jazz—that she’d like to take home and play on her retro-record turntable. But for the vast majority of her music, Caitie subscribes to Spotify which, in effect, becomes her record collection and her radio station. Vinyl and CD collections are, as the saying from a 1990s film and record declared, “So Yesterday”.
Looking back through the history of recorded music, at least the post-World War II music industry, one can see that music and technology evolved at an ever-increasing rate. At the end of the war, the 78 RPM disc was king. It was quickly dethroned by the 33 1/3 RPM vinyl album, and the 7” vinyl single. By the 1960s the music industry added cassettes and 8-track tapes for consumers who wanted portability. In the mid-1970s we listened to Quadraphonic (4-channel recordings), and in 1979 digital recording became a reality. Ry Cooder had one of the first digital albums, and Herb Alpert roared back on the charts with the first hit single recorded digitally: “Rise”. That same year, Miles Copeland (who managed the band Police) stopped in my office on his return from Japan, and took time to impress me with a hot new electronic item he purchased while in Tokyo. The Sony Walkman personal cassette player created real, personal music portability. What could be better? A couple of years later the compact disc was introduced and by the end of the 80s, the cassette began to disappear.
When I was teaching grad students at New York University, I was able to show them that the pace of change is, at times, breathtaking and suggested they compare that to the pace of change in their own lives. Those radio stations I walked into in the 1970s and the program directors and disc jockeys I spoke with are rarely found today. The vast majority of those humans have been replaced by computer algorithms with a simple binary mission. If I select a song to listen to on Apple Music or Spotify, the calculations their algorithms make are simply algorithm-guesses about what I want to hear next. No cultural history or genre cross-pollination is likely to be found in those computer-generated sets of music. Perhaps we don’t all need that but, having been infused with a love for music and having worked with music and musicians most of my adult life, I believe those people and their music have instilled in me an appreciation for the human touch.
Technology has its place and change is not all bad. But there’s something about the radio stations and the humans sitting in the studio, continuing to put their programs together that sounds so good to me. While we still can, check out the music programs at local stations like KZYX or KTDE. Or late-nighters can try the syndicated program “Undercurrents” on KGUA. (And KVMR in Grass Valley is worth a listen as well). Trust me. The human music programmers at these stations are playing music for your ears. Meaning no disrespect, those programmers and you already know the difference between the music of John Coltrane and that of Kenny G. Computer algorithms don’t. And probably never will.
