Greetings Internetians, welcome to Kaffred's Zune, a site where I hope to entertain with happenings from my life and 30+ years in the printed circuit board industry. I've worked at 15 PCB shops in the Chicago area, only 5 of which remain in business. I've come to think of myself as the Typhoid Harry of the industry.
My wife Lynn and I have a six year old and an 18 month old, and I'd like to document my life a little bit for them, since my dad died at 56, his father in his mid-50s, and my mom's dad had his first heart attack in his 50s. At 57, I'm 6'5", 300 lbs, I'm pushing it, so I want to get some of my experiences recorded, and maybe act as the Ambien you need to get to sleep.
I've taken my Zune, that great mp3 player that Microsoft stopped producing a few months ago, and put my Kaffred playlist (Kaffred being a baroque spelling of my last name that came to me on mail I received at Dynacircuits in the mid-1990s, and remains a nickname for a few people I still communicate with from back then) on shuffle and written down the 123 songs that are contained therein.
It's sort of typical that I would choose the Zune over the ipod, then have it go away. When it came out, it was the only player with a built-in FM tuner, plus I figured Bill Gates would support it, come hell or high water. I was off on both counts. The tuner only works if you're standing at the base of the transmitter tower, I think, and Billy G. dumped the Zune in favor of the WIndows phone.
Anyway, as I play each song on the list, I intend on explaining how it got on the playlist and the memories it evokes. I think a playlist can tell you quite a bit about the person who is playing it.
Most of the 123 songs on the playlist were downloaded back in the days when Grokster was available. I was working at Sonic, a PCB shop about 2 miles from our house that had opened up in the building of Mosaic Printed Circuits, where I had worked for 2 years until it closed the week before Thanksgiving 2001. It was the first time, but not the last, that a place went belly up when I was there. I came back from lunch at home to find everyone in the front office, kind of milling about. In my usual clueless state, I did not see that everyone seemed to be in shock. In fact, the bank that owned us had come in and shut us down. We had ceased to exist, ("...bereft of life it rests in peace, it's gone on to join the bleeding choir invisible!"...)to the point where we lost all accrued vacation days and there would be no Cobra Insurance available. I was handed a box and was escorted to my desk to clean it out, then to my car to leave.
I was lucky, I found a job within 3 weeks, but it was about an hour's drive away in Elmhurst. I stayed there, at Alpha Circuits, about 4-5 months, when Mosaic opened back up as Sonic (under new ownership) and I went back there. The folks at Alpha were not happy, since they had paid a headhunter a fee to find me in the first place. I felt a little bad about that, but the owner had had me written up, the first time in my work career, for helping out a friend at Sonic. This was when Sonic opened up in Mosaic's building and they did not have an experienced crew in place yet, so they asked for my help to operate the microscope camera. I said yes. Little did I know that the owners were not friends and my helping one pissed off the other, so he had me written up for unprofessionalism. It made my decision to go back there easier, along with reducing my commute from an hour each way to 5 minutes each way.
Things were a little slow at Sonic so I had some time to goof around online. One day, an Engineer named Steve S. told me about Grokster, where I found and downloaded pretty much any song I could think of, without having to digitize my albums for the 1 or 2 songs I really wanted to hear. These songs make up the bulk of Kaffred's Zune playlist (though I have since bought a great software called Spin it Again and have replaced my Grokster songs with songs from my digitized albums and from the Zune Marketplace..
On the Monday after Thanksgiving 2002, I came in to work and found the Plant Manager from the main facility in Rolling Meadows, the IT manager, the Production Supervisor, of the Rolling meadows facility, and the owner, standing in the middle of an empty front office. We almost never saw these guys in our plant, and never all at once. With my usual keen sense of what was going on, I said "Good morning" and walked into my office where i found Steve S's and my computer unplugged and disconnected. Then it dawned on me, "Not again!".
Yep, they closed us down and about 25 people lost their jobs, but I was lucky again, they need help in Quality at the Rolling Meadows plant, about 45 minutes away, working for an old friend from Dynacircuits, and later Tingstol, Rich M.
Anyway, I downloaded all y songs onto 100mb data disks, and my first playlist was born, which I played, sans shuffle on my desktop at home.
In 2007 I bought a Zune and burned my data disks onto it, supplemented with songs from my 150+ CDs, to the Kaffred playlist.
As I look at the list, a couple things jump out at me. My musical taste seems to come from the 60s and 70s (54% of the list is from there). Music meant so much more to me in the 70s and even into the 80s a bit, there were a few artists for whom the next album (or movie) was highly anticipated. Number one on my list was Cat Stevens. I was exposed to him in 1971, in high school by Steve S. (not the same as the Sonic Steve S.) who had the 8 track of Mona Bone Jakon, which was the soundtrack, in my mind at least, to our post-basketball game nights ( I rode the bench for 3 years at Irving Crown, now Dundee-Crown High School). Driving around Carpentersville/Dundee, Illinois in Steve's 1967 Camaro, singing along to "Trouble" and "Fill My Eyes" was a high point of my high school days. I also remember one night when Doug B. had Steve tune in KAAY in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the first song I heard was "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" by The Allman Brothers. It seemed spooky and was so different from the white bread stuff I listened to at the time, Mason Williams, Paul Muriat, and Chicago.
Back to Cat Stevens. As you will notice, there are a lot of Cat Stevens' songs on the Kaffred playlist, I count 18 of the 123, from all the different eras of his career, up to and including several songs as Yusuf Islam. More than any other singer/songwriter of the late 60s and early 70s (and I listened to and collected the albums of Paul Simon, Al Stewart, David Ackles, James Taylor, Don McLean, Jimmy Webb, Harry Chapin, and Randy Newman, and you will see most of them represented on the list, but none with as many as Cat Stevens) his songs continue to resonate with me, 30+ years later.
Another of my faves (there's a term you don't hear much any more, not since Tiger Beat anyway), you'll see a lot of his work on the playlist, is guitarist Leo Kottke. For many years I could not recall what had possessed me to buy "Dreams and All That Stuff" in 1974. I remember looking at it in the bin of records at Skipper's Music, wondering what the hell is going on with that guy in the mask next to Leo? (Looking at it now, Leo looks like a kid, he was 30 at the time). I brought it home, put it on the Garrard turntable ("What's a turntable, daddy?"), put the needle on cut one, "Mona Ray" and was blown away by his fluidity. It's still my favorite Kottke song. When I went to play the song again, I dropped the tone arm and scratched the record. I made a cassette tape right away (as I always did with new albums), but that scratch was part of the song until I bought the CD 15 years later. When I listen now, I still hear the scratch, even though it's not really there.
In the late 1990s I was going through some Stereo Review articles from the early 70s and ran across a feature article on Cat Stevens by Noel Coppage, and in an interview he was asked about his influences. There it was ..."Leo Kottke". Of course, his recommendation would send me scurrying to Skipper's to buy a record of someone I'd never heard of or listened to.
Almost every song on this list evokes some memory. Of where I was or who I was with or just the general feeling it created in me when I hear it. And in some cases what was going on in my life at the time has some bearing and I'll bring in one of my (hopefully, he said) not too boring stories.
Enjoy...or tolerate (in the case of my kids).
