Robert Baird

I often joke that when I expire and migrate to the lower rings of hell, I'll find nothing else in my eternity than white blues bands playing "Mustang Sally" over and over and over again. But now I may have found another possibility for the soundtrack to my infernal reward.

So there I was, part of a motley crew of HE 2006 attendees and fellow travelers, groovin' with deejays Ming and FS and their four turntable assault at the Friday night rave that ended day one of HE 2006. Unfortunately, no one else was there.

Back before music fans morphed into gaming fans, before lip synching became the rage, before utter horseshit like American Idol was even a wet dream, there were thriving clubs and committed music freak club owners like Clifford Antone.

Being addicted, or even just a fan of <I>The New York Times</I> means you have to suss out the necessary assumptions and become expert at translating what's really going on there. Even overlooking the woeful sports section and regular incidents of pathetic pandering—a recent travel piece by Robert Kennedy Jr. comes to mind—the institutional psychoses and attitude, subtle as they may be, that the paper infuses, again ever so delicately, into everything is quite amazing.

As a follow-up to my last entry, I was sitting in my favorite watering hole over the weekend, listening to my favorite jukebox&#15118 tunes for 5 bucks&#150when a couple sitting at the bar next to me struck up a music conversation about what was playing: Elvis Costello, The Shins, King Sunny Ade, Lefty Frizzell, James Brown, Arctic Monkeys, you name it. At one point, talking about the cover art of an album I can’t remember now I said, being the absent-minded old man of the bunch, 'Have you ever seen that record?'

Walking along the spring streets of this crowded city, a place where you’re literally always in everyone else's business whether you like it or not, I'm often struck by the amount of serious, pounding through the songlists iPod listening that’s going on. People are eyeballing their little screens as much as they're listening.