The Compact Disc is 40

Friday is music. With a playlist. Today some reminscing about the CD...

Recently, the compact disc turned 40. Such birthdays don’t matter anymore. Tape recorders are 80. And the iPod was recently 20 and maybe a CD is actually more likely in a house now than an iPod, if anything. But a tape-player might be likelier still. And every man and his beard oil is there to tell you that it all sounds warmer on vinyl.

None of it means anything. But it could also mean everything. This is the beauty of such madness.

I was a late bloomer to the compact disc. I didn’t start buying them until 1993. Which means I’ll have to think about my own 30th anniversary with the format next year. My first CD was Loaded by The Velvet Underground. I might boast about how truly hipster I was back then, but I’d have to tell the full story, and that includes also buying “What Hits?!” by The Red Hot Chili Peppers that very same day. There probably will come a time when the hipsters love (the early) RHCP but there’s no cultural cache there, not right now.

I owned Pure Cult (and actually I still do – still play it too) and I also had Yanni Live at The Acropolis. It was an interesting beginning to CD collecting. I had albums by Prince and Sting and a few classic jazz records. Then, a couple of years on, I moved to Wellington, started university and really got into CD buying. Suddenly those names I’d only ever read about in magazines were in my local music stores. I could own albums by Stanley Clarke and Yehudi Menuhin. I could buy the back catalogue of Neil Young and Lou Reed. I could start buying up classic hits compilations.

Now, if this was last year then I might have predicted that CDs would have left my house entirely before the 30 year party. But then, out of nowhere, I had what I’m choosing to consider a very beige and benign and on-brand late midlife crisis. I started buying CDs again. The house was nearly done with them. One or two stragglers (Pure Cult, Pink Floyd’s Pulse, some Bob Dylan albums and a few things that local artists had signed to me; I kept them not so much because they had put their name on it, more because they’d added my name and it would seem like bad form to put those out in the world for another go-round).

So next year it’ll be 30 years of CDs in my house. Thirty years of loading up boxes and moving from flat to flat. When I moved into my first house I had about 3000 CDs. When I moved to my second house – where I am now – I had about 7000 CDs. Over the last decade I traded in as many as I could – swapping them for vinyl and for DVDs, for books, for cash; using them as a currency to buy nappies, ridding myself of bad memories from reviewing albums and gigs and having a quiet beer ruined by a bad artist or an even worse audience member.

And then I started buying up movie soundtracks. These days I look on TradeMe and order up little packages to the house. I used to get couriers here arriving nearly daily with piles of CDs, most unwanted. Now I look forward to a wee treat in the mailbox. Something I’m buying for a second time in many cases.

Before I was a CD buyer I was into tapes. That’s why I was late to the party. I was a record buyer also. And I was a tape-maker.

When CDs took over, I loved them the most. And I built up a ludicrous collection – alphabetical, chronological within that – were I’d go so deep as to have The Hits of Phil Collins played by a Royal Symphony Orchestra. I had those “Unlicensed Recording” bootlegs that announced their dubious sound-quality, but you owned them anyway for the acoustic live version of Rhinoceros or the misspelling of a Primus track on the back cover.

In the 1980s – well it was really the mid-late 80s in little ole NZ and then deeper within that in little ole Hawke’s Bay – it was Miami Wine Cooler and Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms on CD. Or it was Highlights of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was Miles Davis’ Doo-Bop album with his approximation of hip-hop and it was Woodstock-era artists from my mum and dad’s youth, bought up on cheaply made, crudely mastered digitisations with shrunken artwork because they’d sold their original LPs to buy nappies and baby food long before I’d do the same.

Santana, The Animals, Elvis Presley, The Beatles in a roll-top “bread bin” box, Deep Purple, CCR, The Doors, and Van Morrison.

I would listen to the CDs and the ones I loved I would go and buy on tape. Until my dad told me this was all stupid and I had to start buying CDs and do away with the cassettes. I was slow to fold because car stereos had tape-players. Then discmans were integrated. And eventually CD players took over. Good luck finding one of those in a car to celebrate the 40th anniversary of compact discs.

Our new car is bluetoothing our phones or our phones are bluetoothing to it – I don’t really know, but something is happening that enables music without the opening and closing of a case.

One of my fairly recent TradeMe purchases is a CD called “Moods”. A compilation of very mainstream ‘ambient’ and ‘chill’ stuff. Enya and Morricone and Enigma and things like Deep Forest and Sacred Spirit. I have always loved this compilation, right from when I first heard it. My mum bought it first. Then I had my own copy. Then I felt ‘too cool’ or something, slightly self-conscious at least. And I traded in my CD. Then I bought it again. Sold it again. And recently I saw it going for a buck online and had to have it. It arrived with its original price sticker still proudly on display. $31.99. Big lol.

CDs were cheap if they were on sale for $10. Now, most houses haven’t spent a thing on buying music in a decade at least.

You might pay up to $45 for a single CD if it was “imported”. But it usually had a special sticker saying exactly that. And that was some sort of bragging right too.

Some double CDs ran for close to $100 – which is actually just nuts, init? But it’s true.

I worked in a music store in 1997. I met Bic Runga. She signed her debut album to me, and I still have it. Darcy Clay signed a copy of his Jesus I Was Evil EP and I still have that. The Exponents all signed a copy of their last full album as a band. I didn’t keep that one…

My money from that job would go right back into the store. Some of it went over the bar down the road. But the rest propped up my staff discount. I bought Sinead O’Connor and Radiohead and Faith No More and Daft Punk. I also bought Trini Lopez and Michael Franks and John Coltrane and Les Paul & Mary Ford and Tony Bennett.

In the very early 2000s I got another music store job. This one was more serious. An actual fulltime role. I was done with uni (again). And I needed a proper bit of money, and it was barely a respectable wage but it came with the promise of staff discount (I’d be saving money!)

Within a few weeks of being there, I was managing a store within the chain.

I was also reviewing music for a few publications.

The free copies started to arrive. The staff discount still came in handy and the paycheck would now bring home albums by Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden and Air and Aim and DJ Shadow and Thievery Corporation.

Someone bought me an “Acid Jazz” compilation as a 21st birthday present. It wasn’t even a prank.

We all chipped in, a few of us, and bought one of our mates The Wallflowers on CD for his birthday. No joke.

Arriving in Wellington, in the mid-90s for uni, the first day I was here I bought the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on CD.

Last week, off TradeMe, I bought the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on CD.

My copies of Kill Bill volume 1 and 2 were in the letterbox yesterday. It’s been raining all week, and there are slips and issues with couriers and COVID-19 has us all ordering things online but also complaining somewhat about the unreliability of the delivery systems. So I had to wait a bit longer. Yes, I could play them on YouTube or Spotify. I actually own volume 2 on vinyl, as it happens.

But I’ll love hearing them on CD again – because that’s how I first heard them.

I’ll love it too because it’s just my little tribute to the CD.

Which, I guess, is what this is too. Overly long, and without really a point.

But hey, that was CDs too. Seventy plus minutes. Those hip-hop albums packed with skits. Those annoying novelty-shaped covers that didn’t fit in the toothed-gaps of your CD racks. Those thin cardboard sleeves where you couldn’t read the spine, so couldn’t file them properly. The “gatefold” carboard ones where the glue would come apart, or else it might rip. The cheapness of it all.

I reckon I have owned that instrumental Beastie Boys album a half-dozen times at least.

Same with Alice Coltrane and Tom Waits. Those were CDs I would take to bars and gift to the owner or bar manager. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing would be on that list as well.

Compact Discs are 40.

And you have aged a bit more just my making it to the end of this newsletter.

None of it means anything.

But it could also mean everything.

This is the beauty of such madness.

And nothing sounds warmer on vinyl. Unless you really want it too. And then, sure, just for you – and because you said so – it does. Why not eh.

We are up to volume 79 in our A Little Something For The Weekend playlist series. So give that a listen if you like. And I know I’m on a bit of  a theme lately around the format for music-listening. But also if you head over to Off The Tracks you’ll see I’ve been back actually reviewing a bunch of albums (and even a couple of gigs). It’s kinda cool to slowly get back in the swing of things there.

Happy weekend to you all. And happy listening, regardless of format.