How To Avoid Norwegian Wood Splinters

When I was younger, I played music for money.

99.99 percent of the music I played, I hated. I didn’t care for the remainder, but I didn’t hate it.

We played pop music covers, mostly not current ones. We needed a lot of material. We’d attempt to figure out what people would want to hear resurrected, in advance. That’s tricky. We didn’t hang around in bars anymore –we worked in them. It was already too late to figure out what we should be doing by the time we were in there.

We’d meet in the slack winter season, once a week for a month or so. Everyone would bring in a handful of suggestions. We sort of voted  on each. It wasn’t  a popularity contest. We didn’t say: I don’t like it. I told you; I didn’t like anything. We said: It won’t get over; or it will. If it wasn’t unanimous, we didn’t bother. Unanimity didn’t guarantee success, either, but dry holes were more likely to be found in controversial drilling. That’s dreadful enough to be popular was a common assessment.

It was deuced difficult to get the source material into everyone’s hands back then. Before the Intertunnel, it was real work to lay your hands on music you didn’t like. For a while, I used to go to a store that sold 45s wholesale to people that filled jukeboxes. They’d have everything trite, so they were wonderful. But back then, I’d have to painstakingly figure out all the parts by listening to the records, and communicate it to the other fellows when we met.  It was hard work.

My son plays music all the time now. He can find anything he wants, immediately and without charge. He can get a really high-quality instructional video, too, never mind just the source material. YouTube is an enormously useful thing. The Intertunnel is an enormously useful thing.

Or not.

I have opinions. I’m a big, hairy man with big, hairy opinions. Most of what is on the Intertunnel is just opinion; ill-considered, ill-reasoned, ill-mannered opinion, and inelegantly stated. It’s useless. Services that exist simply to aggregate and direct me to various strains of this twaddle are so much less than useless, I may have to coin a term for it. Distilled twaddle. Twiddle?

The Intertunnel is the most useful thing I’ve ever seen. Because it has an editor. That editor is me. Without the editor, the Intertunnel is the most useless thing I’ve ever seen.

Good luck out there.