ACCIDENTAL ANNIVERSARY

A happy accident: I learned today that Pablo Honey was released on February 22, 1993. That means that I started this blog just three days after the seventeenth anniversary of Radiohead's first record's release date. It would have been better if I had started the blog three days earlier, on the actual anniversary date, but I think being off by three days is close enough.

I've been listening to Pablo Honey while I'm on the job. I work in an office on the 29th floor of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from Central Park. Radiohead probably didn't imagine that some guy would be sitting in a cubicle in an office building in New York listening to their album seventeen years later when they recorded it.

My biggest concern with this experiment is that the later Radiohead albums probably won't be good at-work music. The best songs to listen to while I'm working my job are songs that I'm already familiar with so that listening to the music doesn't distract me too much from my typing. Singles and A-Sides make for even better at-work listening, which I guess is the whole point of listening to the radio. It's a shame that radio has pretty much given up on trying to appeal to people like me. Pablo Honey suits my at-work listening purposes very well, but I'm assuming that the later albums like Kid A and Amnesiac will demand more attention. An unexpected benefit from this experiment will be that I'll return to listening to music like I did when I was fifteen: lying on the bed doing nothing other than listening to the CD playing on the stereo (and probably staring at the CD cover). I've grown lazy with music listening, doing almost all of my listening to music on my ipod while riding the subway, and before that it was listening to music in my car while I was driving.

At this point, I've listened to Creep maybe five or six times. I played that song first before I played the rest of the album for the first time, and gave it a few extra listens at work. I'm now going to put that song into semi-retirement because I'm worried that I'll wear it out and get tired of it.

Today I read the Wikipedia article on Pablo Honey. I learned who the baby on the front cover is - just the son of a friend of the band. Finding this out sort of took the fun out of it, but it's no big deal. The story that I heard about Jonny Greenwood trying to sabotage Creep was included in the Wiki article, but of course it's important to keep in mind that Wikipedia isn't necessarily the final word in what's true and what's not. I would not turn to Wikipedia for answers in matters of science or history, but I'd imagine that Wikipedia usually gets it right in matters of entertainment and pop culture, since those Wiki pages are probably going to get more visitors (and therefore more editors and contributors) than, say, pages about Russian history. Since Radiohead has many fans, and most of those fans would describe themselves as rabid fans (at least, the ones I met do), they probably take every opportunity they can to waste time on the internet reading about, blogging about (ahem), and shopping for items related to Radiohead. The article also mentioned where the band got the album name from: The Jerky Boys. Does anyone ever remember The Jerky Boys? Their whole act was making prank phone calls. If you go to You Tube, you can hear the Pablo Honey call that the album was named after. The call goes something like this: the Jerky Boys call a man and keep saying, "Pablo, honey? Come to Florida," to which the receiver of the call replies, "What? Who is this?" The conversation doesn't go much further than that. It's not very funny. I'm not offended by the ideas of prank calls, it's just a weak joke. The whole bit lasts no longer than one minute. Maybe humor has changed since 1993, and this was considered hilarious back in those days. I wonder if Radiohead liked the obscurity of the name, and they chose it for their album not predicting that there would come a time when all a curious listener had to go was type "Pablo Honey" into an internet search engine to find out where the name came from. Remember, this was before most civilian homes had personal computer, and forget about You Tube, Google, or even the most basic parts of the internet.

I thought it would be fun to see what Radiohead related items were for sale on ebay. Turns out there are currently 2,745 items listed under 'Radiohead' for sale on that site. 1,049 items are subcatergorized into 'music', and from there ebay has 737 Radiohead CD's, 232 Radiohead records or LP's, 14 cassettes, and 4 minidiscs. I didn't know what a minidisc was, so I had to look it up. Minidiscs (or MD's) were a format that came out in the mid 90's and it was meant to replace the CD. We all know how well that went. I think I remember a minidisc section of my local Best Buy when I was a teenager, right next to the also didn't-really-take-off SACD formatted discs. Someone in Japan probably lost their job as a result of MD's failure.

As for the remaining 1,696 items up for bid, you have the usual rock band memorabilia: t-shirts, decals, concert ticket stubs, posters, 8x10 glossy photos. I wanted to find something weird to list here, but the only unusual stuff I could find were wall clocks with Radiohead album covers as the clock's face and a Radiohead night-lite.

I told my friend Eric about this blog, and he gave me some encouraging words. He's been telling me to check out Radiohead for a long time, and I think he's happy that I've finally come around. He recommended that I include the EP's into my listening schedule, specifically:

My Iron Lung (released before The Bends)
Airbag/How Am I Driving? (released after OK Computer)
I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings (released after Amnesiac)
Com Lag (released after Hail To The Thief)

Today on my way home from work, I stopped off at the same Best Buy I visited earlier (the one in Union Square) with intent to pick up the My Iron Lung EP. I think that someone else raided the Radiohead selections between last Sunday, the day I bought Pablo Honey, and today because I was certain that there were more discs available earlier in the week. This time, there were three copies of OK Computer, one copy of OK Computer: Collector's Edition, one copy of Kid A: Collector's Edition (priced at $32.99! Ouch!), one copy of The Bends: Collector's Edition and a copy of the My Iron Lung EP. That CD was priced at $12.99; not cheap for an eight-song disc. But I had read a few short fan reviews of this EP before I went to the store and everyone said that the My Iron Lung EP was an important edition to any Radiohead collection. Just when I was about to pull the trigger and walk it over to the counter for purchase, I picked up The Bends: Collector's Edition and flipped it over. It turns out that The Bends: Collector's Edition includes all the tracks from My Iron Lung except for one: the acoustic version of Creep. By sheer coincidence, I had listened to this version of Creep just last night through the Rhapsody website, trying to solve the mystery of why the 'clean' version of Creep that appears as track 13 on my copy of Pablo Honey was dubbed "Creep (Acoustic Version)" by itunes when it was anything but acoustic. Apple must have gotten their Creep variations mixed up. I liked the acoustic version of Creep, but it wasn't worth buying the My Iron Lung EP just for that one track. Best Buy was selling the deluxe version of The Bends for $19.99, which means that if I had bought The Bends in its normal version for $9.99, plus My Iron Lung for $12.99, I'd be paying $22.98 to gain the acoustic version of Creep but lost the small handful of extra tracks that came with The Bends: Collectors Edition besides the My Iron Lung tracks.

It is probably silly to obsess this much over purchasing music, but I blame Radiohead themselves for making it more painfully obvious than ever that the relationship between a band, their fans, and the music industry money machine is more fragile now than ever. I also put in a search for Radiohead related articles on nytimes.com, curious when the earliest mention of Radiohead in the New York Times appeared and what it said. Of the more than 3,000 articles that came back, most appeared to be about Radiohead's decision to make their latest album, In Rainbows, a pay-what-you-will venture. I'll be discussing this more when I get further down the road.

Next up: bend, baby, bend.