The Soundtrack

K-Os said we need to listen to a complete boxed set of something. We talked about it. He has several complete boxed sets, including all the works of Franz Liszt which, really, takes up a box of boxed sets. There’s also Beethoven’s complete anything: sonatas,  string quartets, symphonies . . . again boxes of boxed sets, enough music to get us to California, let alone South Dakota. Dr. Data has a lot of these, as does K-Os. I said all I have to completion is Mahler, which I figured would be a joke because everyone has heard too much about Mahler from me. Back in the early ’90’s I was buying all the Mahler symphonies and living in a mildewy basement. K-Os lived upstairs and could hear me blasting them. To this day, when I think about Mahler’s 3rd, I think of my little paperboard underground room and my giant stereo in it, my little orchestra-in-a-bunker.

I said, “what about Shostakovich?” ‘Cause I only know, like, his fifth and ninth symphonies, and he wrote about fifteen.

K-Os said he thought Mahler would provide a little more shake-up for the trip. Shostakovich is always dark.

Dr. Data said, “It’s like he’s trying to depress you.”

I said, “Oh yeah, he did say all his symphonies are tombstones.”

Dr. Data said he wouldn’t mind Mahler. And K-Os said he wouldn’t either. I said that what would suck would be all the soft parts buried in road noise. But they said it’s a road trip — that’s how it plays.

Well, I said, if it’s to be Mahler, I’ve got it covered. I’ve got all the CD’s. I made the shape of the set of CD’s with my hands on the table. “It’s about this big.”

K-Os didn’t want me to bring the CDs. That would take too much space. “I’ll download it to my iTunes,” he said.

“But you’ll get all the wrong orchstras,” I said.

“You’ll tell me what orchestras to get,” he said.

“No — I’ve paid for all that music already. We should use it,” I said. So we agreed that I would reduce all my Mahler CD’s to two mp3 CD’s. K-Os said his jeep system would play it.

So, so much for the nostalgic music of the 80’s that normal people our age would be listening to. So much for whatever mass-audience appeal the screenplay of our trip might have had. Our road trip soundtrack will begin with Mahler. Figure on that getting us to Chicago. Then, maybe we can lighten it up a little.

My work is cut out for me, and our 5am departure on Friday is my deadline. Whenever I wake up, or before I go to bed, I swap out a Mahler CD in my computer for it to import as an mp3. And when they’re all in, I have to put them in order in a playlist and burn them out again.