A long time ago, in a newsroom far away (as far away as Austin, Texas is from you right now, anyway), a newspaper columnist sat typing blurry green letters on a black screen when he felt a presence next to him. Turning, he saw Jimmie Vaughan, one of the best guitarists in a town loaded with them, standing holding a box and what looked like earmuffs for a little child. The columnist jumped a little at the unexpected sight (he'd had too much coffee again) and Vaughan grinned and said "I didn't mean to scare you, sneakin' up on you like that, but we just finished our album, and I wanted you to hear it right away." With that, he presented me (for it was me) with the earmuffs, and I put them on my ears and he pushed the button on the box, which was a cassette player called a Sony Walkman, and the first notes of "Wait on Time" from what soon became an album called Girls Go Wild  began to play.

The album was one thing, the means of delivery another. The T-Birds had recorded the album in L.A., and there, people in the recording studios were using high-end cassettes and Walkmans to check reference recordings: the machines still hadn't penetrated to Central Texas. As I was sitting there in the newsroom, though, I realized several things about the experience I was having. First, the sound was far better than with any earphones I'd ever used. Second, the Walkman earphones obviously worked by a principle my college roommate, Jonathan Zimmerman, and I had discovered 15 years earlier: Jon had had a job at a Manhattan recording studio working with a guy named Walter Carlos (who soon became a gal named Wendy Carlos), and he'd learned a lot about microphones and tape recorders. At some point, talking about all of this, I asked if high-fidelity  headphones, which were huge clunky things with padding that seemed to have come from a sofa, couldn't be made by using microphones as the output instead of the input: I'd already heard a microphone playing a tape back when one of us had wired something wrong. I was also a devotee of the tape cassette, having used a very early Philips model to record some bands at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco in February, 1967 and gotten some very respectable results. As the Thunderbirds went into "Scratch My Back," I realized we could have invented this thing. Oh, and third: it was in stereo. Previously, the only way to hear a cassette in stereo was to have a hi-fi component. This squished it all down into one small box.

Of course, such a radically useful device couldn't remain unknown in a place like Austin very long, and soon lots of people were sporting these little puffs of foam and walking around with a tape player clipped to their belts. They became so ubiquitous that the state had to pass a law against driving with them on, although one of the things I'd noticed immediately when Jimmie stuck them on my head was that you could still hear the ambient noise in the room, which was a distinct improvement on the old Koss pillows.

There were some big problems with all of this. For one thing, once you put on a tape, you were committed to that tape and the way it was sequenced. There was no seeking out a particular track, and some songs were on one side of the tape and others on the other and that was that. Cassettes were also notably fragile, and if the tape itself got out of hand, your player wound up eating it and fatally damaging it -- and maybe damaging itself in the process. And, since the music industry didn't like you making your own cassettes, it released albums on cassettes, and they were of a notably inferior quality. Of course, you could play cassettes in your car, too, and that was cool, even if the sound did suck. At least the sound and sequencing were better than on 8-track cartridges.

Portability, as strange as it may seem at this historic distance (Girls Go Wild came out in 1979), was a major revolution in recorded music: the Walkman and car stereo caused an upswing in sales (lots of people bought an LP and a cassette of their favorite albums) and with the advent of the boom box, whereby stereo cassettes could be played at loud volume on a portable device, the places where you might encounter recorded music (not always voluntarily, of course) changed. The choice to listen to recorded music, in other words, was no longer restricted to the home, with the listener seated facing the reproduction equipment. And this brought forth another revolution: a revolution in the social utility of music itself.

Now, this is a subject that's always fascinated me, especially as a teenager discovering classical music. What on earth were all those Vivaldi violin concertos about? There seem to be hundreds of them! (Wikipedia says there are 230.) It's only after some digging that you turn up the story of the tall, red-headed priest (that'd be Mr. V), the orchestra of orphan girls at the institution where he was music master, and the fact that he played the violin himself, and therefore took the solo part. Then the utility comes into focus: the concerti were played at concerts held to benefit this home for abandoned girls and to show the Venetian public that these poor things could be redeemed by teaching them a valuable skill. In fact, formal concerts like those at which these works were performed weren't as common as we might think. The sit-there-and-listen-to-it concert is very much a product of the mid-19th century, and earlier music was danced to, eaten to, or even, as with Bach's Goldberg Variations, slept to.

Now, at the same time I was getting interested in classical music, I was also discovering folk music, and the thing that hooked me there, besides the content (and, like Bob Dylan and countless others, I got into it via Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, as idiosyncratic a survey as could have been compiled), was that there was community involved. Oh, there was community involved with classical music, and I was already inhabiting a tiny corner of that through the school band, but the skill involved there was very daunting, and I lacked it. I enjoyed playing in a big concert band, but by learning the guitar and hanging out with other folkies, I was entering a community of more modest skills and more intimate communication -- including help in improving your skills, as we taught each other guitar parts.

It was the era of the hootenanny, a term popularized by Pete Seeger which referred to a get-together where instruments would be passed around and songs and vocal and instrumental chores shared. Of course, I was around New York, so this quickly devolved into a form of show business, and hootenannies became, for all intents and purposes, concerts, with one act following another and maybe everyone singing a song at the end. Seeger remained very much a law unto himself, and his concerts were part political meeting, part revival, part singalong, part solo concert. His selflessness and invitation to community were admirable virtues, if not something you could necessarily achieve yourself. Still: nobody much was playing this stuff on the radio, and the way to discover it was through your fellow folkies, whether they were playing it on instruments or on rediscovered phonograph records. It was a mass phenomenon for some definitions of "mass," in other words.

And this has always been part of music's social utility: bringing people together to play and experience it. You may not really have known those other three people at first, but you do play viola and like 19th century chamber music, so you became part of an informal string quartet. You played drums well, and owned your own set, so every bunch of shambling guitar players in town wanted you to join their band and eventually you found one you liked. You can't play anything to save your life, but it sure is nice that that group you like has gotten a gig every Wednesday night at that club in town, and the more you go to shows there, the more you interact with the other people who are there and even if you're too shy to make new friends, you come away feeling good about having shared the evening with them. Even if you're one of 10,000 girls screaming in Shea Stadium for the Beatles, you're part of a community -- as are the Beatles themselves. One of the most important social utilities of music is uniting and sharing.

And in 30 short years, that utility has been eroded.

Okay, shocking statement, time to back it up, so let's go back to the newsroom, where I'm not noticing that the way I'm listening to Girls Go Wild is different than the way I've listened to the T-Birds in clubs and the way I'm going to listen to the record when Takoma releases it in about a month and I play it on my stereo at home. I touched on this problem last week: the imaginary venue in which the "concert" the recorded band is playing is in the center of my skull. Now, yes, that's essentially where you hear any sound, since you don't perceive it with your toenails or your gall bladder: your ears are in your head. But the sound is in the room, and unconsciously, that is where you focus your attention, even if your "band" is nothing but a vinyl disc and a pile of electronic equipment.

But "personal stereos," like Walkmans or MP3 players force the sound inside, and the musical experience they foster is similarly made far more "interior," more individual and less communal than ever before. It wasn't long after the advent of the Walkman that you began to see lots of people plugged in. If you were lucky, you wouldn't know what they were listening to. (If you weren't, you were conceivably witnessing one of the other unfortunate side-effects of this change in listening, hearing loss, which has risen alarmingly since this whole trend started). There is no doubt that musicians began creating recordings especially suited for the headphone experience, but I also think there's an extent to which they started composing music that lent itself to being recorded for the headphone experience, too.

And because a lot of people started consuming music exclusively this way after a while, a very disturbing thing happened: music lost its communality, and, to a large extent, it also lost its meaning. As people began to plug in for hours and hours each day, they not only blocked off the world around them, but lost the ability to experience any emotion the music might have conveyed to them, and, I'd go so far as to say, began to prefer music lacking in emotional depth that lent itself to being used as wallpaper. A musician who really has something to say is going to be perceived as too thorny, too disruptive, to those who are always plugged in. And to the extent that these people have experiences or reactions to this music, they have them alone.

Old people (well, you know: people my age, although I'm not one of them) complain that there's never been another Beatles. Of course there hasn't: as popular music has shattered into genres and each of these has broken down into smaller genres to the point where now we have micro-genres, the sort of consensus which started with Elvis Presley and ended with the Beatles has become impossible. It's impossible in part because there are no more communities, just individuals. Is it any wonder that instead of listening to performers, a huge number of concert-goers these days are texting and talking and taking cell-phone videos of the show? They lack the basic context to form the social unit which can take advantage of the utility being provided by the performers on the stage.

The reader will be happy to know that I'm not about to go all Cassandra on your ass at this point. I don't necessarily think we're living in the End Times, and I think that there are a few things pointing to a possible change in this situation, both on the music scene and in society at large. I'll also happily admit that I haven't thought all the way through some of the corners of this issue and welcome dialogue via the comments.

I'll be back next week with another tangent on this.