Pixies on Your iPod?Give Me My Sony Walkman and Pixies on Magnetic Tape Wound Between Two Plastic Reels

There’s talk these days about the iPod generation who only hear their music through headphones—changing the approach to the production albums towards a loudness and mix tuned for headphones and not a perfectly balanced living room of speakers. Yet, is this that much different than the Walkman generation?

A little while ago I finally got Pixies’ Surfer Rosa back into my collection through the used CD stacks at Louisville’s tremendous Ear-x-tacy. Listening to it in the car, I felt like I was missing something. Was a speaker out? Was the EQ off? The little sounds and cues I remembered in the songs weren’t there. . .or were they?

What my car experience couldn’t reproduce was the experience of listening to Surfer Rosa over and over again through my Walkman headphones. I first bough Surfer Rosa on cassette in England as a souvenir from a high school band trip there. (I know, it’s not really a souvenir from the UK to buy an album by a band from Boston, but it was a UK pressed copy).

From the first listen while laying on a bed in a host family’s house to countless others on the school bus, at camp, and elsewhere, my main experience of Surfer Rosa was through those headphones, hearing every little detail, being cued by each detail, knowing each little grunt, strut, fret strike, or hiss.

Listening to Surfer Rosa again in the noise of a car with windows down obliterated many of those details. The album is still a classic in my Top 10 list, but I missed that all enveloping, all encompassing, being inside the music experience.

I’ll have to rip it and put it on my Palm Centro—not as cool as an iPhone but it gets the job done.

4AD – Pixies pages

The top photo is of a Retropod, a product made by John Young which is a Sony Cassette Walkman retrofitted to be an iPod holder. Despite the fact that Sony sent him a cease and desist letter, I still think it’s one of the cooler art/recycling products I’ve seen in a long time. See the Retropod page at: www.retropod.com. You can see more of what John is doing here.