The Big Steal

Stolen Music and the Broken Promises of Columbia House

But you are leaving:

Some months ago I got an offer

From Columbia Tape Club, Terre

Haute, Ind., where I could buy one

Tape and get another free.  I accept-

Ed the deal, paid for one tape and

Repeatedly billed for my free tape.

I’ve written them several times but

Can’t straighten it out—would you

Try?

This devastating finale to John Ashbery’s “Litany” describes an eternal problem in a very 1979 way. For those of you old enough to remember, there was a time when recorded music was monetized, and even Ashbery, a classical pianist and avant-garde connoisseur, was lured by this giveth and taketh away entity called Columbia House. When we make our pact, we never realize that there is no free here. There is pay later, pay forever, and rueing your hubris. Did Ashbery stop nickeling and diming his music collection after getting the MacArthur? Maybe not. He was a colossus among the poets, but he also wrote about things that were, as my Zoomer students would say, relatable.

Columbia House had all that money for all those ads. They sent us flyers offering us all the music we wanted. Where did that come from? Amnesty International? The have-nots want music, too. Maybe even more so. Life is hard. Buy one get one free, right? Of course not. A free album was like Michael Douglas having that tryst with Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Did he really think that was going to be the end of it?

In May of 1995, Columbia House was having its final hurrah, and like John Ashbery at the end of “Litany,” I thought I could call their bluff. I saw their flyer, and a game of chicken followed. The CD arrived on graduation day, a day so exhausting—packing, strutting the stage, and moving from the bucolic campus to a room in Hell’s Kitchen—a free CD could take the edge off. My address was college, and I was moving on to a witness protection program for music consumers. My betrothed and I were so exhausted, but in the pictures we looked like what we were—just kids. We were filling our heads with books, and we thought the carousel would last forever.

The gratis CD was Evgeny Kissin with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Sergei Prokofiev’s First and Third Piano Concerti. I was class of ‘95, and I got my diploma before I sent my first successful email. This was when the secrets of music were behind glass or under plastic wrap. There was never enough money to feed the beast. The bucket list was endless. But here was music to capture all that. Prokofiev’s first piano concerto was demanding, passionate, kind of insane, but with a grandeur that rose to the occasion. It did not take you up the hill just to push you back down. Life would do that sooner or later. Here, Sisyphus smiles. Camus tells us this at the end of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” and managed to persuade many people, but I would have been offended by this summation if I was Sisyphus. Nothing to smile about here, I thought. And I am Sisyphus, and so are the rest of you. But in music—in this music—Sisyphus smiles because this is not reality, and he is at the top of a mountain. He will get knocked down eventually—that is non-negotiable—but first he is imagining all the things he can do while he’s up there. This music has never been out of my life, but it always makes me think of graduating, and not just from college. 1911, when Prokofiev wrote this crazy thing, was a time when one could do that while making it new. He wrote this at 20—-20!—even younger than my graduation day, an age when we both still had hair.