One day, a copy of The Who’s Tommy on LP walked into my apartment. Its presence cast a long shadow, I have to admit. I sort of squinted over at it, at all the mystique, and could almost hear, in my mind, a lot of the chatter and the din that usually surrounded this sort of thing. I thought to myself, or I pretended to say to it, “Could you really ever live up to all the hype?” In my mind, I could see the vinyl lords’ dark eyes, looks of discontentment and gestures of resentment. They sat in their mansions, in their high-rise apartments, after stepping on people, stepping on the underclass, the working class, when they should have been siphoning and funneling the incredible energy in these low, forgotten sectors, in commercial kitchens, on construction sites, in grocery store backstock freezers — realms for which The Who were really writing, when they originally crafted this Apollonian, stalwart music. I knew they weren’t content, because they needed to show ostentatious wealth with the purchase of 1,000 or more records, they need to mock and belittle my “suitcase player” (which fills up my office with sound in my one-bedroom apartment just fine, for the record), and they needed to boorishly shove their opinions at people, instead of being cordial and just enjoying the whole experience. I picked up the copy of Tommy and put it in the trash, and walked back over to my 35 LP’s sitting in the corner of my office in my apartment, next to my “suitcase player” I got for $50. And I knew the wealth of disgust, I knew the richness and magnanimity of rejecting ostentatiousness and putting a ceiling on my collection, just enjoying what I have and letting greed and gluttony fall like Autumn leaves. And I could see my 15-year-old self, in 1999, playing Tony Hawk with a CD copy of Green Day’s Nimrod in the background, giving me a hearty “Cheers!”
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