I mean, I can remember my friends and I crowded into my bedroom listening to one album after another - Babe Ruth, T-Rex, Mott the Hoople, early Bowie - and about 400 other superb pieces of vinyl (which now reside in my basement).
It was a chance for us to talk about school and life, who made the cover of the latest Cream or Circus magazine, and album reviews we'd heard or seen. It was nothing if not intensely social.
Now, I spot kids hiding between their earbuds in just about every imaginable circumstance. One evening I pointed this out to my 18-year-old along with the observation that his generation is more solitary than social when it comes to music consumption.
"I don't know," said my big guy. "We still listen to CD's when we're all in the car together." He then pointed out that if someone is listening to something good, they'll share a pair of earbuds. "We bring our iPods, mp3 players, USB drives - even our hard drives - to our friends' houses to share music," he said. "Plus, we still go to concerts together."
So it made me think.
My generation didn't have the chance to consume our music absolutely anywhere we felt like it. But if it had, would we have been more solitary or more social about music than kids today?
