There Is Such a Thing as Loving Music Too Much

Submitted by Sandy:

Clark and I connected over music.  We both had huge music collections and he invited me over to see his.

He didn't just have a music shelf.  Or a music bookcase.  Or a music room.  Every room on the second floor of his house was covered, wall-to-wall, with CDs, cassettes, LPs, 8-tracks... this was a music Smithsonian.

I was amazed by his collection... it beat mine several times over.  He offered to put on whatever I wanted, and I was like a kid in a candy store.  He had a couple of bean bag chairs, and we chilled out there for a while.  He showed me a Doors limited edition LP boxed set.  Squee.

At one point, after we were doing more listening than talking, he asked me if I wanted to hear something cool.  He said that over a school vacation, a couple of years back, he had taken each song he could find, several thousand of them, and managed to import them into his computer and layer them over each other to make a sort of mega-song.

I told him that it was a cool idea, but that I bet it ended up sounding like crap.  He said that it actually didn't sound too bad, but that it had to be listened to at a low volume.  He started setting it up and was really proud of it.  He said that it was like having every great performance playing at the same time, thereby making it the greatest performance ever.  Ehhh... I don't know.

He turned up a couple of knobs on his setup and turned his massive speakers on.

Some feedback, and then... holy shit... the loudest, most awful sound you could ever imagine.  The house shook, dozens of cases fell off of the shelves, I jammed my hands against my ears (didn't help), and Clark?  Did he turn the volume down?  Or did he turn his speakers off?

Clark threw his hands against his ears and made an awful face, as if he had stepped in a mound of elephant shit of an elephant who had last eaten rotten ham and thumbtacks.  He screamed something like, "YA YA YA YA YA YA!" and ran out of the room, down his stairs, and out of his house.

I ran over to the setup and turned the master volume way down.  As for Clark?  He came back a half-hour later, really upset, and blaming ME!  He said that it would take him weeks to recover.  He then asked me to leave, as he had to assess the damage.

That's the whole story, although the look that was on his face when the music blasted... that was priceless.