Jimmy Eat World 'Static Prevails'

I am often amazed by the amount of people that check out wheelersdog.com. When I check the site stats, I find that a lot of people come here from a search page looking for information on an album title.

Here’s the deal… I only choose one musical title to drive around with during my day. It’s usually a compact disc and sometimes if I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, I’ll pack a cassette. If I’ll be driving somewhere more than an hour away, I’ll take my Zune MP3 player that’s loaded with over 500 albums.

And I’m not sure if I ever told you how this “sickness” came about.

I’ve always been about music since turning on my first transistor radio in the early 70’s. I listened to the radio at night in the darkness. And when I wasn’t listening to the radio, I was spinning singles on a small record player. Perusing through Hot Rod Magazine and listening to 45’s from the 50’s and 60’s was one of my favorite activities. I liked giving what I saw a soundtrack.

Music was always part of my daily experience and when I didn’t have a radio around, I would provide my own soundtrack by humming tunes that I made up on the spot. And I must say, my original incidental music was pretty damn kick ass.

I would spend my preteen Saturday nights tuning an AM radio on my parent’s old console stereo until the wee hours of Sunday morning. I could hear radio stations from as far out as Ohio and Texas.

I eventually graduated to recorded music because radio started to become sterile and formulated. I preferred LP’s over cassette tapes. They sounded better and I liked the idea of making compilation tapes, first on 8-track and then to the 4-track cassette. If something happened to the tape, I still had the LP as a back-up. When compact discs came along, I transferred those to Denon cassettes to listen to in my car and Sony Walkman.

My friend Tracy Thornton did the same sort of thing… Rarely did we have a prerecorded cassette tape. He used TDK and I used Denon and Maxell. And we both went with high bias tape.

Tracy would ride around the countryside in his convertible MGB with hundreds of tapes. I only remember him carrying one case that could hold up to 120 cassettes… Until it was stolen along with his tape deck.

He lost everything. From the rare stuff that we recorded up in Jonathan Everett’s upstairs loft to a taped copy of King Kobra’s ‘Ready To Strike’. All 120 cassettes were gone. The rare stuff couldn’t be replaced, but since I had the King Kobra on LP… All we needed was the time to rerecord it.

From that moment on, Tracy only carried one or two cassettes around with him. He wasn’t about to lose anymore rarities or not-so-rare stuff. I saw the logic in that idea. I didn’t want to lose a good chunk of my collection in an accident or have it stolen out of my car. A tape deck can be replaced, but a copy of Krakkin’ live at the GYC Carnival on a TDK was irreplaceable.

When I leave the house, I will usually take one compact disc with me to listen to while driving around. If something happens, I may only lose that one CD from my collection and hopefully it’ll be something that can easily be replaced. The loss will be minimal.

When I started writing this blog, I didn’t know what to title each day’s entry. Without a thought about it, I titled that first entry with my musical choice of the day. It gave readers an idea of what I spent my day listening to. I thought it may even inspire them to check it out for themselves.

I have kept with that tradition and sometimes if I’m feeling particularly good about a musical choice of the day, I’ll say something about it. But usually, I won’t say a word about it. It’s just used as the title and I may attach a video from You Tube if I feel that it’s a worthy choice.

When I see that someone found my blog from searching out “Gwar scum dog blogspot”… I have to wonder if they were looking for an album review. Because the site stats tell me that they didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading what they searched out on Wheeler’s Dog.

I started noticing that someone in New York City was constantly checking out wheelersdog.com and spending what I thought was an obscene amount of time here. As it turned out, they found an entry from July 29th, 2007 titled with Richard Kastle’s ‘Streetwise’. That person keeps coming back to that same page over and over again.

I did a little research and found that someone linked Wheeler’s Dog to a Richard Kastle page.

That’s totally cool and I appreciate it, but it has nothing to do with Richard Kastle’s music or leather jackets. It’s about my visit to a retailer looking for a laundry basket. Here it is.