Album of the Year on Sale at The Exchange

At lunch today, I stopped in at my local second-hand CD place. It used to be called the "Record Exchange," but now it's just called "The Exchange," because who plays records anymore? I was looking for an album (how retro) that won Album of the Year at the Grammy's on Sunday. Everytime I go to The Exchange, I'm surprised at how much their inventory of music is shrinking. Ten years ago, they still had the bins in the center of the showroom with vinyl LPs. Now most of the store's inventory is taken up with games and DVDs. And everytime I'm in there there seem to be fewer music fans; in fact, it seems like they're always the same cast of characters now, including (what seems like) the same angry mother/grandmother selling off a bunch of video games as a punishment for some kid in her household. Last time I was there, I heard the woman going off about her progeny to the diffident "alt" clerk. This time, she just had an angry look on her face while he was explaining The Exchange's negotiation policy.

I made it to the lonely jazz bin and there it was--one copy of Herbie Hancock's The Joni Letters. It was marked down to $9.00. I thought of how weird the Grammy's seemed on Sunday and how weirder they seemed now in retrospect in the Exchange. During the telecast, they tried to juxtapose the old and the new, celebrating 50 years of Grammys. My favorite was the pairing of Keely Smith and Kid Rock singing "That Old Black Magic," almost on a par for weirdness (but not on a par musically) with the pairing of Bing Crosby and David Bowie's singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?" And, for all that effort, the Grammy's got poor ratings. When I was watching the show, I felt happy for Herbie Hancock as he talked about how no jazz album had won Album of the Year for 40 years. But, as I stood there looking for what other good stuff I could get for $2.50, I felt like the parade had passed him by.