THE FUTURE
Hello again. Thank you for your patience. Today’s topic is the future. We at Mango Pudding Blues saw the future a few months ago in New York City. Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side. In the basement, a music area that featured, every six feet or so, a set of headphones and a little barcode scanner. You could take any record and pass its barcode under the scanner and the headphones would start playin’ it. We are not kidding. It was like heaven.
Some records appeared to be available in their entirety for your listening pleasure, while others had only a minute or so of each track, as a sample. We only found one that didn’t work. A Bobby Womak album. We listened the hell outta some old Philip Glass stuff and some Duke Ellington. What we bought, though, were two records that we’d had our eye out for for ages: Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation and a Bob Marley compilation from the early 60s.
