the (almost) daily blog

Fifteen years ago 99X became the first commercial "Alternative" station in the Atlanta market. It was announced yesterday that the station's key personnel has been let go, and that a it's signal will be taken over by a pop station. While I haven't listened to 99X in years, it is sad to see it go the way of 96Rock, which took on a modified format a few years ago.

So here are a few of my memories of the station:

• During the blizzard of 1993, not long after the station changed formats, I was sitting in the living room of my parents house with a small battery operated clock radio while in the midst of a week with no electricity. During my channel surfing, I hit upon a song that halted my surfing. I listened, waiting to find out who it was. After the song was over, the deejay called out the 99X tag line and announced the previous song was by Gene Loves Jezebel. From that point, my radio rarely left 99.7.

• The day that Kurt Cobain killed himself, I remember flipping back and forth as all the rock stations basically stopped programming to cover the details and play Nirvana songs. At the same time, talk radio host "The Kimmer" was trashing the death and got into verbal sparing with the various stations around town.
  
  
• The last broadcast of Will Pendarvis before he left for a station in DC. Among the songs he played were the back-to-back playing of RatCat's, "Getting Away (from this world)" and Planet P Project's, "Top of the World". While I'm sure few other people have heard of either of these bands, I promise you there is little more haunting that this to songs, played in the above order, back-to-back. Here's a hint, if you like "Major Tom" you'll get these songs.
  
  
• Listening to Darious Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish take over as deejay when the band was first becoming popular and thinking how cool it was he played both The Replacements AND The (English) Beat - on the radio.
  
  
• Driving back from college my first two years and being thankful to pick up the channel's signal, and knowing that it meant I'd be home in an hour or so.
  
  
• Being thrilled the once or twice each winter when I could pick up 99x in Auburn. And blasting White Town's "Your Woman" riding at night via 99X.
  
  
• Remembering the first time I heard Cake, Pavement, Flaming Lips and the Sea and Cake.
  
  
• Being a senior in high school, in advanced lab, and listening to "Steve's College of Musical Knowledge" followed by the "House of Retro Pleasure".
  
  
• Driving back to college while listening to "Resurrection Sunday" and being so happy to hear The Smiths, The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Peter Murphy, and other great '80's bands without having to play their tapes or CDs.
  
  
• Spending the summer after high school counting the number of times The Police were played during the day while noticing how different the format was from mid-day to drive to night.
  
  
• Moving back to Atlanta and hearing Dido on the radio a year before Dido was back on the radio everywhere.
  
  
• Hearing the US premier of "Acid Rain" by the Aussie band Silverchair. That song was off an EP a year or so before they hit big.
  
  
• And listening the first time they switched from Power 99 to 99X in the fall of 1992, and how that completely changed the music that people liked in high school. People went from MC Hammer to Nirvana and Pearl Jam almost overnight.

I'm sure there are more, as I typed this, I remembered the first time I heard "Yellow" by Coldplay and how "You Outta Know" was played three times back-to-back-to-back the first time the Alanis Morrisette single was played on the airwaves (and all the calls that came it wanting to hear it again and again). And I remember hearing Travis for the first time.

For everything I have described above - and more I haven't thought of yet - I know where I was each time. Music played a big role in my life, and it still does. And as I've spent 15 minutes thinking about how big of a role 99X played in my life, I've found I've got more memories of that station than I do of things that most people would deem more important.

You came in like a lion and brought with you the only exposure a kid without cable in the semi-rural South had at the time. Before the Internet, there was 99X. Before XM, there was 99X. Before the Tiger, there was 99X. And even if you were no longer relevant to me and stayed around five more years that you should have, thanks for the memories 99X.

Labels: 99X, atlanta, dido, editorial, mc hammer, nirvana, pearl jam, power 99, silverchair, the police, will pendarvis

Rather than work on my second interview with Nyles Lannon (which will be one of the best interviews to date), I decided to do something I had not done in quite a while: attempt to write an actual article.

I Believe in Consonants: My Life Without an iPod

Today, as I was looking through a six month-old issue of Paste magazine, I thought about how I never read music magazines anymore. Fifteen years ago, my dream would have been to write for one. But now, they just seem dated and constantly behind the curve - even the best ones. That's the reality of living in this digital age where your status may be dictated by which version of the iPod, or iPhone, you own.

Shocking admission number one: I do not own an iPod or an iPhone.

Shocking admission number two: I still buy compact discs.

Last weekend, on a trip to Target, my wife and I were discussing how we weren't, "iPod people." While it may be the greatest musical breakthrough since the Walkman, it seems like a waste of time and money. At least it does to me.

Believe me, I know how asinine that statement sounds. Millions upon millions of people have them. Apple reinvented itself with it. It makes taking your favorite music where ever you go as easy as carrying your wallet.

But still, the idea of spending $300 on an iPod?

It's not like I am anti-digital music. Far from it. I started downloading MP3s at college in 1997. What do you do when you have access to a T3? You use it. And when you can download 40 different remixes of The Cure's, "A Forest"? You do. When your college wipes your account and there is no way save your MP3s? You cry. When you get a real job and a dial-up internet connection and to try download MP3s? You stop.

Since I started DeadJournalist.com in March 2006, I've used it as a tool to realize my want to start a music magazine. But the music magazine is a music web site, and while I do have my fair share of readers, it doesn't exactly have the readership of Rolling Stone in 1973. But I evolved with technology just as I evolved with music.

So if I could channel my creative outlet to a technological form, what can't I take my music there?

Maybe it started when the iPod came out - just in time for Christmas 2001. It had been a rough year and I was starting over with a new company and a new career. I wanted one, but frankly, I couldn't afford an iPod. When you are living on Taco Bell and generic lasagna, investing in a MP3 player isn't the like the wisest of choices.

As the years went on, my pay increased and the iPod got bigger and better. I had bought a laptop, gotten high-speed internet, began downloading MP3s like it was 1997 all over again and even started deejaying using MP3s. One could have drawn a logical conclusion I had added an iPod to my list of depreciating assets. But I hadn't.

I could never shake the feeling that if I moved all my music to MP3 and sold my CDs, as several of my friends had done, I would somehow manage to loose my iPod and in turn, loose all of my music. But that could never happen, right? Plus, my music would be backed-up on a laptop, so what could go wrong? Sure, it sounds great in theory, but for some reason, I could never buy in to it.

So I kept doling out $10 or $15 a pop for compact discs, save when Tower Records and Blockbuster Music (or whatever it had changed its name to) had going out of business sales allowing me to spend $100 on 30 CDs. Before I knew it, a couple hundred CDs because a couple thousand CDS. It was CDs, CDs everywhere. CDs had become my tribbles.

With all the clutter, I began to think it might be time to change. I could go modern and get clean by ditching my CDs by uploading them to my laptop. I could then sell my CDs and get enough money to buy an iPod and still have a couple grand in my pocket. All I would need would be a month of weekends to uploaded music and I could be a walking television commercial for the iPod!

Shockingly enough, I kept putting it off, because it not only seemed like one helluva daunting task, but I really didn't want to commit a month of my life to music conversion. So, like many other "sounds good in theory" projects, I never got around to it.

Then September 2006 happened.

It was a Thursday night (the week after I took a Friday night off from deejaying and got a spur-of-the-moment interview with TV on the Radio). Sometime around 2AM a sharp, shrieking, metal-on-metal noise woke me and my future wife. Cue the nightmare.

It was my laptop. It was dying a long, painful death. With its death went gigabyte after gigabyte of MP3s that I had uploaded or downloaded. Despite a noble and partially successful attempt to reclaim the lost data from my sputtering hard drive by a friend in IT, much of the core collection had been lost or damage.

I was determined to recover. I bought an external hard drive and backed up my music. A catastrophe of this magnitude would not happen to me again. Famous last words. Two months later, my external drive shorted out causing me to loose my backed-up digital music collection. While I had backed-up the back-up on my new laptop, any remaining thoughts of converting my music collection to digital only gone with the wind.

So that brings us to the moral of the story. I enjoy digital music, I really do. I like the remixes, the new artists and the rare tracks that are hard, if not impossible, to find on hard copy.

But I miss the rest of the experience. The album art; the joy of holding a tangible product in my hand while walking out of one of the dwindling CD shops; or the joy of coming home and seeing a package I ordered from online and ripping into it to see the latest additions to my collection.

And most importantly, I like knowing that if and when my laptop or external hard drive decides to die again, that I have to worry about far few songs being lost because I still have the original CDs or records or tapes cluttering up the place.

While I still want to have that room or basement that guys in their early twenties dream about - a room full of old music posters, old systems, old furniture and thousands of old records and CDs from bands that only a handful of people remember - maybe at some point down the line maybe I'll have a kid that will go rummaging through my CDs looking for a band that he or she has actually heard of from 30 years ago.

Regardless, I'll be able play a song and close my eyes and be at that place and time when I heard it for the first time. Who knows, maybe I'll be listening to that song on an iPod and not on the portable CD player I got from my parents for my high school graduation almost 15 years ago. Stranger things have happened. I did reference tribbles, and I never in a million years thought I'd ever make a Star Trek reference.

ipod, chuck norton, editorial, deadjournalist.com

Labels: chuck norton, deadjournalist.com, editorial, ipod