At Random

 by whiteray

When you have an absurd amount of music to listen to, as I do (more than 88,000 mp3s sorted and loaded into the utility called RealPlayer), you need to find ways to sort that music into some sort of coherent patterns and selections. Otherwise, you end up with a sequence of, say, “Po’ Mourner,” a 1902 track by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, followed by the theme to the 1960s television show Branded, with that followed by, say, the first movement of Mozart’s 1788 Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, followed by 1968’s “Across the Universe” by the Beatles. 

So, I find ways to sort my music, usually by years or decades. A RealPlayer search for 1969 finds me about 4,000 tracks. Of course, I don’t know all of them, and it’s kind of fun sometimes to set the player on random and let it find me an unknown gem. But sometimes, you want familiarity, a selection of recordings that are, so to say, old friends. 

That’s where, for me, iTunes and my iPod come in. I’ve pulled about 3,000 tracks into iTunes and thus into the iPod, stuff that I truly love, or as is the case with recently released music, stuff I’m still learning about. (That newer stuff probably accounts for about ten percent of the stuff in iTunes and the iPod, including pretty much everything released up to this year by the Tedeschi Trucks Band, my current current fave.) 

So, when I’m puttering at my computer or playing tabletop baseball or washing the dishes or just whiling away time somehow, those 3,000 or so tunes keep me company. Most of the stuff is from the 1960s and 1970s because, well, that’s who I am. But I have some classical stuff, a lot of vintage blues, R&B, pop and rock, and – as I noted above – some recent stuff. I let it roll on random and only very rarely do I hear a track that I think needs to be retired from the program. 

And one of the fun things about iTunes is that it keeps track of how often each track is played. Most of the current batch of stuff in the program has been in there two years, since I got my current desktop computer, and there are still about eighty tunes that haven’t yet been served up. Here’s a list of a few of them: 

“Sweet Mary” by Wadsworth Mansion (1970)
“Betcha By Golly, Wow” by the Stylisytics (1972)
“I’ll Take You There” by the Staple Singers (1972)
“Summer Breeze” by Seals & Crofts (1972)
“I Eat Dinner” by Kate & Anna McGarrigle (1990)
“Misty Blue” by Dorothy Morrison (1976)
“Real Love” by the Beatles (1996) 

On the other hand, there are fifteen tracks that have come up fourteen times or more. A few of those are lines of dialogue from movies, like the HAL 9000 computer’s plaint “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?” from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but most are music. The most-played track is a version of “I Shall Be Released” recorded by Bob Dylan and Happy Traum in 1970 for the 1971 release, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume II. I’ve heard that one seventeen times. Those that have come up fourteen or fifteen times are: 

“Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean (1988)
“Let The Rain Come Down” by Toni Childs (1988)
“Got My Mojo Working” by Anne Cole & The Suburbans (1957)
“Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins (1982)
“New Orleans” by Gary U.S. Bonds (1960)
“Talk Memphis” by Jesse Winchester (1981)
“Dear Landlord” by Joe Cocker (1969)
“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” by Joe Cocker (1969)
“A Lover’s Concerto” by the Toys (1965) 

So, what does all this mean? Not much, I guess. It’s just a quick look at another portion of my musical life dictated by random chance. But to close, here’s one of those unplayed tracks that I’d love to have iTunes throw my way, fittingly, during these last days of August: Seals & Croft’s 1972 hit, “Summer Breeze.”