She saw the ad on television, and she had to have it. Uh, huh, I said. I looked online, and the 25th anniversary concert for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was, holy shit, THAT much?

Of the concert itself, Entertainment Weekly said "The listed headliners alone were enough to justify outrageous ticket prices for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s first 25th anniversary concert at NYC’s Madison Square Garden last night." I suppose it's reasonable that the album of the music would be outrageous, too, although it's a 4-disk set, and I suppose a couple of double-sawbucks is actually quite reasonable. And when you realize it's from Time-Life (HBO originally broadcast the concerts), it's a wonder that it doesn't cost that much every month for the next 137 years.

And you have to wonder why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Cleveland institution, is holding its celebratory concerts in New York City.

When Blondie Stopped Working

When Blondie stopped working, that took a big chunk out of our income, and I'm sure she will eventually be getting social security, hopefully before the house gets foreclosed, but in the meanwhile, money is tight. Or maybe it isn't; maybe that's not a severe enough word. But there's no real point in trying to explain that to her. She understands, but within 3 minutes, she's forgotten.

Three times a day, though, she would ask me if I'd ordered the music. I suppose I could answer one of the many Capital One ads I get in the mail, and use the card to buy things I can't pay for, for a long time, but by the time you miss 4 payments, a $40 purchase plus interest, fees, and various gougings works out to $7,000. I figured that I could download the music online for now, and pay for it once Blondie's Social Security starts flowing.

The RIAA doesn't like you doing that, but it's supposedly pretty easy to do. Just download a torrent client and the music will download in the background while you're asleep. Apparently, the client to get for Windows is Vuze, or Azureus or something like that. With any luck, I'd be able to get the music without the RIAA noticing it.

It Said I Didn't Have Java

When I tried to install it, though, it said I needed to install Java. I thought I had Java, but I went out to get it, and then I tried to figure out whether I needed the 32-bit client or the 64-bit client.

When I got my last computer, I didn't want to be limited to 4 gigs of RAM, so I got the 64-bit version of Windows. It's caused all sorts of problems. For instance, we have a color laser printer, for which there is no 64-bit driver. If I want to print something in color, I have to print to a file, then copy the file to my wife's computer, and print it from her computer, which is a big pain.

That's all right. It's a lot faster and quicker - not to mention cheaper - to print things on the black-and-white laser printer. It's a Samsung ML-4500 that I got at the QVC outlet store years ago for $99. When I moved to Windows XP, there wasn't a driver for that printer, but it turns out that the Lexmark 210 laser printer is the same printer with a different name tag on it, and there was a Windows XP driver for it.

A Poorly Ported 'Puter

But my new computer has no parallel port nor serial port on it, and you need one or the other to connect to the Samsung. I ended up hooking up Blondie's old PC to the network, and hooking the printer to the old PC, and then I print to the printer on that PC. I can't do that with the color printer on Blondie's PC, apparently because it's running Vista, but it works OK with the old PC running XP. Go figure.

So I never know whether to get 32-bit or 64-bit software. Sometimes, I just doesn't work together right. And Vista is pretty darned picky about what it allows to run. That's nice, in a way. I don't want to download something, and have it install itself without my agreeing to it. On the other hand, if I want to install something, I can't just click "install" and walk away. I may have to click two or three times on a "yes, I'm sure I want to run this program, fer criminey sake" screen.

But after downloading Java multiple times, and trying to install it several times, I don't know whether it was a 32-bit or 64-bit version that did the trick, but eventually, I got Vuze to install without giving me that damnable message telling me that I needed Java. Then I went out and got a torrent file for the music I wanted, and from there on, Vuze handled it, all by itself.

Queued. Or Maybe Not.

Or maybe it did. Every time I looked, for the next few days, it kept saying that music was "queued". Eventually, though, that message went away, and I couldn't figure out how to play the music. I would click on it, and nothing would happen. Had Vuze simply lost my request, or decided to delete it as being in the queue too long?

No. The problem was that I didn't know what to do. I eventually found a directory on my hard drive called Azureus Downloads (which doesn't make sense, since the software is now called Vuze) and it contained the 50 MP3 files that make up the music Blondie wanted. I moved the music out of that folder so that Vuze couldn't find it; if the RIAA came knocking on my door, I wanted to get nailed for the one copy I'd downloaded, not 15 million copies I'd uploaded to other people.

I started listening to the music, and the first few cuts I hit were pretty good. If you have a zillion headliners, you don't want a million different bands setting up and tearing down, so they had one band plsying for four or five different songs, typically the original artist doing the singing, and they tried to stay pretty close to the original recording. No wonder Blondie had wanted the music. There were a gazillion headliners there.

Blondie Thinks Twice - And So Do I

So this morning, when Blondie came into the office, I told her that I had the album she wanted, and she asked me to turn up the volume. After a while, she asked me to turn it down, and then she asked me if I liked the music. I had just been thinking the same thing. There had been a series of songs that were definitely second-rate covers.

Covers can be good. Eddie Murphy is not much of a singer, but when he sang "Roxanne" in "48 Hours", it was, if anything, an improvement on the original. The lyrics are plaintive, and Murphy's rendition of the song definitely gets across anguish. And Paul Simon's performance (with David Crosby and Graham Nash) of the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" is magnificent. On the other hand, these are songs we all know by heart, and when they vary from the original, we feel violated. If you had never heard Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind", you might love the version delivered at this concert, but it's not the original and it doesn't feel like the original.

A Quandary. Which Way Out?

Which puts me in a quandary. When I get my next social security check, I should be buying a copy of this music. It's a commitment I made to myself, and those are the ones that really count. I think, though, that I'm going to listen to this music once or twice more, and serious consider whether I want to own the music or not. It wouldn't be honest to keep the music if I didn't pay for it, but there's nothing dishonest about returning an unsatisfactory purchase, is there? Deleting the bits saves wear and tear on the physical copy, saves shipping costs, and saves the retailer handling costs.

There are definitely some cuts that are gems. What I may do is to buy those particular MP3s from Amazon. If you go to Amazon, they allow you to preview each of the cuts in the 4-CD set. That's probably the smart way to go.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Beatles - Billy Joel - Capital One - David Crosby - Eddie Murphy - Entertainment Weekly - Graham Nash - Java - Madison Square Garden - parallel port - Paul Simon - RIAA - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - Roxanne - Samsung - Social Security - Time-Life - torrent - Vista 64 - Vuze