[gtycomb]

Similar to books, growing up in India I discovered “Western” music because of pirated music. The one and only reason I heard of bands like Yes, Jethro Tul, Roxy Music, Steely Dan, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or St. Martin in the Fields, etc. are the pirated copes moving from hand to hand among our school buddies. There was no way we could have afforded the orginal copies from the publishers.

Well the clocks ticked, I came here for graduate school and but the time I got my first job, over a period of time I had instinctively purchased all the original CDs and Box Sets of these and many other artists, about 1000 of them on my shelf. When I exchange notes with with my old buddies, some in Canada and some in England, they have more extensive collections than me. For one weak immitation of a Gibson lookalike guitar we had, we own a small stable of the real things by now :-)

The pirated copies that hooked us to the artists in the first place. I hate to steal from the artists I so much adore, but then shouldn’t there be a way to spread the music around.