I’ll tell you the problem with the look up: we lived for a good long while without it and we managed. That sounds like an elderly thing to say. Alas, now I am getting there. I am a woman of a certain age.
But it used to be that if you wanted to know something you had to find the guy who knew the thing and ask. About music especially. I can remember my mother wanting to know who sang that song at the beginning of the film Midnight Cowboy. We had just rented the VHS and watched it together! Yes, I was still very little and this film was rated X, but to this day I don’t know exactly why it was rated X, except for the theme of him being a hustler, or because it was rigged, so that they could avoid giving Jon Voight the Oscar that year so they could instead give it to John Wayne. Jon Voight was always getting screwed out of the Oscar. I was very attached to Ratso in Midnight Cowboy because he was little and sick, and what happens to Ratso in the end, oh my God—gloom, despair, and agony. It was a little much for me.
But we liked the song, me and my mom, and we went around singing it, about how everybody is talking about someone, but he can’t hear a word that they are saying. My mother kept saying, ‘What was that song called? Who was that song by?’ My brother knew. I could tell he knew and wouldn’t tell us. He would roll his eyes when we asked. He sent us to the guy who ran the music store in Joplin. It was this one record store where they also sold sheet music and guitar strings, and my brother was already starting to play the guitar, and he was obsessed with buying strings all the time and leaving their little paper sleeves lying around the house.
So we go and we drive the forty minutes, and go into the record store and my mom sings the first few lines of the song to the bearded fellow behind the counter. He looks at us like we are idiots, since the title of the song is the same as the words we have been singing over and over and over again, and because who in the world doesn’t know that Harry Nilsson sang Everybody’s Talkin’? Anyway, my mom didn’t even buy the record, is my memory. All she wanted was to know the answer. We drive home. Later, we tell my brother and he smirks.
There must have been something important in this shaming. For one thing, we never forgot who sang it. And then there was the fact that the smug record store guy got a reason to exist. He held all the cards. You couldn’t just look it up, either you knew or you didn’t, and either you told someone or you didn’t. You got to choose, and if you were like my brother, you got to keep your secrets safe for now.
Come to think of it, I hate this type of shaming. Years and years later when I am in the cool record shop in Denver, and I am milling around in this one section trying to find just this one song by the Kingston Trio and then getting asked by the beardo shop assistant if I need help, and I do because I can’t remember the song name, but also I am not wanting to ask anyone because of not being sure that I wouldn’t be shamed out of the store by this sort of cute beardo over the Kingston Trio. It was a toss-up. And there I am standing in the bluegrass section, and I just make up a request for a Tom T. Hall album that I already have, and am led to it, with non-response from the beardo, no praise but at least no shaming, and then I purchase it, even though I have the copy that my dad bought years ago, and then I walk out of the store and I never ever go back to that record store again in the entire time I live in Denver. Everywhere I go after that, when I tell people I used to live in Denver, they ask about that really cool record store and if it is still there. It is.