Classic Rock Musings, Rants & Raves

Someone on the message board I frequent posed a rather curious question this week: How many CDs do you have in your collection? Well, if I was young and dumb and cared about such things, I could probably tell you. As it is, I’m old and dumb and can’t balance my checkbook, let alone my CD collection. The truth is, I don’t know. I get four or five CDs a week to review. I burn another four or five a week. I’ve been doing this for a good 10 years. I routinely bought one or two a week, be it records, CDs, cassettes, for a solid 25 years previous. You do the math.

If I had to guess, I’d say I have at least 5,000 CDs and I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s mostly what everyone else has, as far as the garden variety classic rock collection. There’s dozens of CDs by newer artists and of different styles — world music, jazz, classical, soundtracks, avant-garde, comedy.

Then there’s the bootleg CDs. Of those, I have at least 10 or more by each of the following artists in no particular order: Jethro Tull, Yes, Grateful Dead, Beatles, CCR, Humble Pie, Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Genesis, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Queen, Black Crowes, Allman Brothers, ELP, Radiohead, Beck, Paul McCartney, CSNY, Deep Purple, Van Halen, King Crimson, Roger Waters, The Who, Phish, Govt. Mule, Robert Plant, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, U2, Tom Waits, Robin Trower, Grand Funk Railroad, Tool, Frank Zappa, Rush and Miles Davis.

I have all the official albums by the artists above, so I don’t feel bad about having the boots. I apologize to anyone I may have forgotten.

I have a lot of music. I need a lot of music. It fills up the space in my life when silence and noise compete for my attention. Silence is golden, but I need to filter the noise out. Music comes in handy for that. If you ever listen to the soundtrack for The Dark Knight while driving to the supermarket, imagine you’re a covert spy for the CIA, running for your life and forgetting to pay for the tooth paste. Now, that’s good stuff.

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