In Praise of THE SPAMP! And SPIT-COIN: A Proposal to Convert All Money to Saliva

Spoken Word with Electronics is an audio series delivering to you a two side recording of unusual stories paired with vintage modular electronic sounds

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the show. This week we sing the praises of portable headphone amplifiers, specifically The SPAMP and the ROCKMAN — This leads to a discussion on the good work of Tom Scholz, who designed and built the entire sound of the band Boston in a home studio in the basement of his apartment in Watertown MA, and the likelihood that many of you were conceived to More Than A Feeling. With grief, the sad ending of Brad Delp's life is also briefly discussed .

Tom Scholz went to MIT and was offered a good job at Polaroid right out of school. This earned him a salary that funded much of Boston's burgeoning sound. So this episode also discusses how to spend money. Lots of people are very boring about how they spend their money, and the chance that you might not be born if Tom Scholz had opted to cash out and not build a home studio is explored. Good guy, that Tom. But why did Scholz need money in the first place to pursue this great dream? Money is a problem.

Track two for this week solves money entirely. Presenting SPIT-COIN, A new economic platform based on points and saliva. You can opt to transfer your money to a shared resource for every human, or you can have your cash liquidated into saliva that you carry in your mouth perpetually, your choice. We discuss benefits of both options.

This week's show closes with two tracks from THE APARTMENT, a "Recovered Memory of Chicago, 1996". This will be a serialized short story for the next three episodes. I wrote and recorded The Apartment in 2003. It's as interesting a true story time capsule about a landlord's bad behavior as it is a parable about data storage. The original vocals were recorded to digital audio tape and backed up to zip disc. Both formats are completely obsolete now, and I wasn't able to access either until 2015, along with other files. I returned to the tracks in 2019 and mastered them this year. So this week is the first of three stories from The Apartment.

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #15: SPAMP AMPS AND SPIT COINS