We've Opened the Home Audio Floodgates

it's overtones, there's some kind of tone problem, of that much I'm sure. Maybe I wouldn't be right in referring to it as an "article" when it's more of a "ranting letter," but it's very chilling to realize.

The writer of this letter, Earl Chico of "Behind the Walgreens" (as the letter signed), suggests that CDs are nothing more than tiny records. I hadn't thought much of it before, but once this was brought to my attention I rifled through Ramrod Hurley's CD collection and studied each Enya and John Tesh offering closely. By God, Chico's right! They are tiny, circular, there's a hole through the middle, they're flat, and they're played through an expensive piece of stereo machinery you can purchase for high mark-up. I can't tell you how surprising and unsettling this has been to me.

I have never enjoyed recorded music, hence the live band I keep on staff at the commune offices to play my favorite tunes whenever I beckon. Some complain they interfere with the work of the staff, but when Nacutchacokov wants to pay all the bills maybe I'll start taking his big fat advice, until then I run things my way. But I stray like a wife longing for sexual satisfaction from the topic.

CDs and records are basically interchangeable—what does this mean to you? If you're like other Americans and have spent countless dinero replacing your LP collection with squat cassette tapes, then replacing those with CDs, you've been screwed. Screwed hard! "Ouch, quit screwing me!" I say to the recording industry. Not me, of course, given my distaste for recorded music I've mentioned, but you, they're screwing you. Still doing it.

The fact is "digital" technology is no more real than the time machine. Sure, it's a nice fantasy we've come up with, but until scientists conquer the quantum field theorem we're not going to have real digital technology. I could explain that further but I'm afraid it would take up several thousand columns and I don't plan on living that long. Suffice to say all we're using now is the height of analog technology.

From my research into this, which has included asking several session bass players and drum programmers, CD making merely involves recording vinyl LPs at full size and then shrinking them to CD size. The most expense involved, compared to the making of an LP, is not the shrink ray technology, which is fairly easy and inexpensive, but in painting the LPs with silver reflective paint.

Why all the trouble? It takes no elaborate imagination to explain that, readers. Money, pure, green and sexy. Why would anybody buy a 30-year-old Dylan record they kept in pristine condition if the technology never changed? With all this talk of "digital technology" and "re-mastering" and such they can sell you a copy of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band six or seven times over. Why "CD" itself stands not for "compact disc," it's all an insider joke. "Collectin' Dinero," readers, that's the truth.

It's not over yet. It'll never be over. The next logical step is selling you "Super CDs," which will again just be analog LPs in shrunken CD form they've enlarged to a giant size with Expando Ray technology, which is what they're working on now. Shrinking things is easy—restoring them to full size, aye, there's the rub, to quote Shakespeare, or Lil Duncan.

So while America continues its love affair with throwing their money down the toilet on recorded music, I clap my hands and the commune office band plays "Purple Rain" while I sit back, laugh, and point my proverbial finger. Which is basically my regular finger. Ha.

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