Paul McCartney is my kind of driving music

At first, it offended me that young kids in America seriously wondered on Twitter who Paul McCartney was after the former Beatle had performed at the Grammys last week. “Who the hell is this Paul McCartney guy?” they asked. “His song sucks!”

The Beatlemaniac in me wanted to ridicule these teenagers. This farce should not persist, I told myself. The best I could do was some lame potshot. “Kids, listen: Paul McCartney wrote and sang all the love songs that put your parents in the mood to make sexy time. Hence, you, Paris Hilton and Justin Bieber were born.”

But then I realized: Is it really the fault of the new generation if they have no clue whatsoever about one of the greatest songwriters of all time? How are they to know someone they haven’t been exposed to? And how are they to be exposed to Paul McCartney when the sorry state of the music industry keeps foisting Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars upon them? The blame, then, must rest squarely on the shoulders of those who are supposed to enlighten them but fail to do so. Their parents, for one.

Although, in defense of parents, most kids now have very little interest in history. They’d rather play Temple Run than listen to the greatest hits of Wings. They simply want the push button, the touch screen and the voice command. Everything comes easy to them, and Paul McCartney comes from an era when people had to work for even the most basic of tasks. Young people today don’t want to be reminded of that ‘boring’ time.

So maybe now is a good time to write a little history lesson about music and cars—specifically, how folks in the past listened to their favorite tunes while driving. If the modern youth do not know who Paul McCartney is, there’s a good chance they have no idea what a vinyl record is.

Let’s begin.

I have yet to encounter a universally accepted account of how the car radio started, but perhaps the most popular one would suffice. It maintains that an inventor named William Lear was driving around with his girlfriend when she suggested to him that the moment would be more enjoyable if they could listen to music while inside the car. This was the late ’20s, and back then commercial radios hadn’t been installed in automobiles.

You could say that even then, men were very poor at holding a conversation with a romantic partner, especially in the car. (I think we invented “awkward silence.”) So the girlfriend needed something to break the ice.

Lear immediately went to work, and then sought the support of businessman Paul Galvin when he came up with a working unit. The first car radio—at least according to this particular historical account—was born in 1930, and it was called the 5T71. Looking for a brand name, they went with the trend of the time, in which radio names had the suffix “ola” (the Victrola, for example). Because their radio was for automotive use, they decided to call it Motorola (yes, the same company that would later produce mobile phones).

Thus began a profitable in-car entertainment industry.

From the ’30s to the ’50s, cars were basically equipped with just radios. This meant your grandparents didn’t have much choice with the music they listened to. They had to make do with whatever the disc jockeys were playing—not to mention they had to endure all the commercials and inane monologues.

When the ’60s rolled around, car manufacturers began offering record players as an option. RCA’s gadget, which played 45rpm records, was available as an accessory on 1960 Plymouth and DeSoto models. While 45s played just one song on each side, the RCA player featured a stacking system that allowed it to blast two hours’ worth of music.

Then came the eight-track tape in the mid-’60s. It had a magnetic tape housed in a rather bulky cartridge, most popularly a fixture on top of Philippine jeepney dashboards in the ’70s.

Of course, in an industry where weight and size are considered chief enemies of speed and fuel economy, the eight-track tape had to be supplanted by something smaller. Enter the compact cassette. It played an album’s worth of music, anywhere from 10 to 20 songs on both sides. I grew up on these, my very first ones being the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be. They were a birthday present from my mother.

The problem with cassettes was that the tape easily warped or tangled up with the player’s rollers. Sound quality also left a lot to be desired. And then, of course, there was the inadequacy of storage space to allow for continuous musical gratification. Not even such “high-tech” features as auto reverse and automatic search could save the cassette deck. The format simply had to give way to something more durable and with better audio quality and bigger storage.

So we got the compact disc. It was flat and it came in a sleek-looking jewel case. The sound was also more crisp. Like the cassette, however, a single CD only played one record album. It was fairly frustrating having to change discs while you were speeding down the highway. They had to invent the CD changer for this, so you could finish an entire road trip without needing to pop in a new album every hour or so.

Still, the CD had several flaws. One, it ate space in the glove compartment, especially if you brought along a bunch. Two, there was still the storage space limitation. Worse, you couldn’t personally handpick the songs included in every CD. Sometimes a CD would contain just two or three singles worth playing.

Good thing the iPod was created. Apple’s digital music player is the one most suitable for a long drive. Nowadays, an iPod can store up to 40,000 songs, and you are also able to include songs that you really like. Best of all, you can make different playlists for different passengers and different occasions. No car today should be without an auxiliary port that provides iPod connectivity.

The really cool cars these days even have a built-in hard drive that serves as an in-car jukebox. This eliminates the need for an iPod altogether. The most common ones have a storage space of 30 gigabytes, good for about 7,500 songs. I know the cars sold here by Dodge have this standard feature.

But not everyone has the patience to rip CDs or the money to buy them in the first place. For these individuals, the satellite radio is perfect. It’s like having cable service in your car. It’s commercial-free and available 24 hours a day. There are dozens of channels to choose from, each one dedicated to a specific music genre. A satellite radio unit even displays the title of the song being played, as well as the name of the artist who performed the track.

I don’t know what’s next in car audio. But kids too young to know who Paul McCartney is, need to appreciate just how fortunate they are just to be living through this era of state-of-the-art in-car entertainment. I hope they will learn to use each byte of their music player’s storage capacity wisely.

Ripping McCartney’s Band On The Run album would be a good start.