Sometimes, you just get sick of the kids with their privileged access to all things art. Sometimes, you can kinda pity them for it. Case in point: over the weekend, I was chatting with some friends and their kids about the first CDs we ever bought and how hard it was to choose, especially knowing your choice would be judged by your friends as a personal statement. Everyone over a certain age agreed.

Of course, the kids didn’t get that.

In 1988, just discovering music could be expensive. I was in college making $3.50/hr plus tips. I loved music. My dorm was a melting pot of people from all over the country, written like an overthought John Hughes film. There was a goth kid up the hall who was listening to The Smiths, the hipster three doors down was the jazz nut, the upperclassman across the hall was into deep-cut 60s psychedelia, the guy next door was a synth player with a big collection of prog and new wave, etc. I was the guy who just grew out of metal and had pivoted to Chicago and Texas blues.

Yes, this is how I became the way I am with music.

Tape trading/dubbing was very common on our floor. Taping CDs (the newfangled thing) was even better since it was first-generation quality. The problem was that discovering new music on your own was still expensive. I preferred that to having someone else’s tastes curated and handed to me, but every discovery cost me $15 to $20 bucks. We didn’t have Spotify or YouTube. There was barely an Internet where you could look up a band’s discography. Mostly, you just looked in the bins and were surprised to find an album by one of your bands you didn’t know existed. Better still, without Internet reviews, unless you knew someone familiar with the album, you probably didn’t know if it was any good unless you popped $15 on the counter for it. Every time you did that, it represented $15 you couldn’t spend on something else you wanted to hear for the first time, or improve on the quality of your 3rd-generation cassette copy.

This is why it took me more than twenty years to actually learn the full history of my favorite song.

In 1988, I was a newborn jazz fan, thanks to the guy up the hall who saw my DX-7 and said, “You play a Yamaha? You’ll love Chick Corea Elektric Band,” and threw a cassette at me. Shortly thereafter, now in love with this music, another guy walked by and asked if I was listening to Branford Marsalis. Well, no, but wait—there’s another guy who plays music like this?! I immediately hit the record store and bought the newest Branford Marsalis album.

Spoiler: It didn’t sound remotely like Chick Corea, but it did have a track called “The Peacocks,” featuring special guest Herbie Hancock on piano. Seriously, here’s where I was: I knew Branford Marsalis as the sax player for Sting. I didn’t know the guy who did that cheesy “Rockit” song played jazz at all. I had to go to the library to figure out that the “Rowles” guy who had the song credit was Jimmy Rowles, a composer and pianist. I hadn’t taken music theory yet, so I didn’t know this song was using a voice-leading, half-diminished “iv(ish)-iiø-V-i” jazz pattern, but chromatically altering the dominants so that, sneakily, the chord progression feels right, but never actually resolves, and keeps bouncing in a circle. I didn’t know this was why the song feels like the musical equivalent of “I want something. I have no idea what it is, but I’m really yearning for it.”

Basically, if Zappa really said, “You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream,” then Jimmy Rowles is the guy who would reply, “Frank, hold my beer and check this one out…”

Finding Jimmy Rowles’ original version of the song wasn’t a matter of typing his name into a search field. I would have to find it in a record store at the mall, hear it on the radio, find somebody who owned it, or drop at least $30 to special-order something I’ve never heard from a catalog… and all this because one line of tiny print in the liner notes of a cassette suggested I might like it?

For a college student, that last option mattered. Buying one semi-obscure jazz CD meant not buying something else, and I was into a lot of new music at that point. Today I can audition fifty versions of a song while making dinner. Which is what happened decades later.

I didn’t actually hear a second version of “The Peacocks” song for two years when I stumbled upon the ‘Round Midnight soundtrack by Herbie Hancock, this time with sax handled by Wayne Shorter. This was a completely different take on the song, very noir, very sultry, even though it was the same structure, with different chord voicings, mood, and tempo. Now, if two versions of a song could exist and be this different, I had to hear the original version just to know which was more accurate.

So, I whipped out a week’s budget to get the original Jimmy Rowles/Stan Getz album.

I thought I was done.

Today I have 216 versions, and counting, on a Spotify playlist—half of which have vocals and the new, alternate title of “A Timeless Place” (Norma Winstone did this in the early 90s when I wasn’t paying attention. I’ve come to accept it, even if it contradicts my interpretation of the instrumental version). Two hundred versions of a song sounds obsessive, and perhaps we shouldn’t rule that diagnosis out entirely. On the other hand, that sort of works with jazz. It’s not 200 copies of the same recording. It’s 200 musicians interpreting a melody, a chord structure, and a mood differently. It’s like seeing Hamlet.  You don’t skip the Olivier version just because you’ve already seen Mel Gibson play it, sheesh.

I’m not romanticizing the old days of being broke and paying way too much for music… really, that sucked. To this day, there are artists whom I only ever knew as names in liner notes because I couldn’t find their other material or had to prioritize purchasing another artist instead. There were a few I was really curious about, but not enough to drop $15 bucks on. Streaming didn’t spark my curiosity about music and my love of deep-dive rabbit holes; it just removed the friction that was holding me back. It turned “I have three versions of this song, all different. It will be fun to hear other takes on it someday,” into “I think that’s all of them, nope, looks like Noël Akchoté has a French avant-garde guitar version of it I’m missing.”

What you lose is the waiting. It was almost two years before I heard a second version of the song. It meant something because I had a version that sat with me. It doesn’t work quite the same when I listen to my Peacocks playlist and hear a new version every five minutes. You can’t produce the meticulous process of discovery when the algorithm takes you through the discovery rabbit hole before you’ve finished your coffee.

On the other hand, for those types of music where you follow style more than individual people, that methodology does come in handy. I certainly wasn’t about to buy a bunch of shoegaze, DnB, vaporwave, or lo-fi jazz-hop releases when I found those genres. That music is pretty homogeneous, so it’s more about chasing that “vibe” than it is about taking the rabbit hole of a band, one member’s solo album, a sideman on that solo album, that sideman’s other band, etc. So, I’m not about to surrender the convenience of having almost every recording at my disposal just because I miss the authenticity of trawling three different record stores and eventually dropping $15 bucks on something I don’t even know if I’ll like. They’re just different ways of wandering. It’s probably just as well it took me twenty years to finish discovering “The Peacocks.” I don’t think it would have had the same impact if I’d done it in an afternoon.