Those of you who know me know that I'm a pretty big music fan and collector. And now those of you who DON'T know me also know that I'm a pretty big music fan and collector. As I sit here in my office (or, as my wife calls it, "Manville") typing this blog, I'm surrounded by around 700 CDs worth of live material, roughly as many cassettes, and maybe 500 DATs. About 60% of that material is Blues Traveler (my favorite band; I do some informal archiving for them), maybe 30% is Guster (my wife's favorite band, I do informal archiving for her...heh) and 10% other stuff. So while we're talking about percentages, I'd venture to say that it's a fair estimation that I have more live music than, oh, 90% of the general population. I am, however, put to complete and utter shame by what I just saw the other day.
A little bit of background: the vast majority of music that I own is legally recorded by fans like me. A growing number of bands are allowing their fans to record live performances and trade them around, with the stipulation that no money be made off the exchanges. The practice has been around for decades but really proliferated in the 60's and 70's with the popularity of the Grateful Dead, and these days, Phish and the Dave Matthews Band lead the way in terms of sheer volume traded around. I've taped some fairly well-known bands as well as some more obscure acts, and it's immensely rewarding to go home and be able to relive a show you were just at.
Anyway - like I said, I do some informal archiving for Blues Traveler, and they sent me about 50 shows from their 2001 tour to convert and distribute among their fans. For some reason, two of them wouldn't play in my DAT player, so I put out a post on a Boston-area tapers' mailing list that I'm on, in search of someone with a certain kind of deck that would play it back correctly. This guy wrote back and said he had one, and wondered how many tapes I had in the batch, because he wanted to get copies of them for himself. I told him, and he invited me over to his place, thinking we could work out some sort of trade.
The house is innocent enough when I get there...and then we descend into the basement. And if my office is "Manville" this place could best be described as Man-opolis. Shelves and shelves of CDs, cassettes, DATs...he has 14 DAT *decks* racked up in his basement (I own two), along with probably a half-dozen cassette decks and CD players. I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say he probably has more music in his basement than several smaller radio stations (as a sidebar, your humble bloghost did work at good old WRMC-FM in his college days - I did two years of news and one year of a jazz show. If you're ever in the greater Middlebury area, tune in to 91.1 on your FM dial. Actually, if you're in the SMALLER Middlebury area; I think the transmitter is powered by two gerbils running on their wheels. But I digress.)
Essentially, it was a ridiculously large amount of music. I'd estimate I have around 300 DATs of Blues Traveler material...that's a lot. He's got 300 DATs worth of several bands. Allman Brothers, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Widespread Panic - and those are just the taper-friendly bands. There are plenty of other unauthorized recordings as well - he let me sit there and root through stuff while he cranked up a James Brown show from the 60's that really smoked. It made me wish I had more time to LISTEN to my music collection instead of working on archiving it all (it's hard to listen to one show while you're concentrating on dividing another show into tracks). He even went so far as to construct custom cabinets to hold everything; they're floor-to-ceiling units; the top half is open shelving for CDs, and I'd say they're about 8 feet long. Three or four shelves of CDs, then below that is one row of drawers that hold maybe 100 DATs each - all sorts of random stuff, but all in quantities of less than 10 per band. Once he gets 10, he puts them in a box and stores them underneath, in the cabinet. The cabinets hold three rows deep of DAT boxes stacked five high, and again, are 8 feet long. At ten DATs per box, that's 50 in each stack, 150 in each row - and DATs are just over 3 inches wide. Take eight feet of that, and even giving four inches a box, that's 450 DATs per foot, or 3600 DATs. Oh yeah - there's two shelves' worth of these, and two cabinets (the other two are for his regular cassettes). Everything's organized in a database that he runs on a computer down there, and he needs it. Just for fun I entered a random date of a show I was looking for - July 11th, 1992. He's got four shows by four bands in four different places on that ONE day over ten years ago. Is your mind fully boggled yet?
The good thing about this is, it makes my wife realize that maybe I'm not quite as obsessive about this stuff as I could be. I like that.
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