TD and the agony of choice

Tom Donohue's store was a mess. Piles of records spilled onto the floor and crept up the walls like overgrown weeds. Shaky, unstable pillars of CDs threatened to collapse and bury unwary customers under mounds of digitally recorded rubble. When I first caught sight of this dense musical forest, I felt an odd mixture of exhilaration and dread: exhilaration, because the CD I was looking for, the perfect CD for that hour's mood, was almost certainly in that sprawling pile, if I could only hack my way through the jungle and emerge, bloodied but triumphant, with my prize; dread, because I felt that I would never find it, not if I searched until the end of my days.\nAll was not lost, however; I had a guide. My Virgil was TD, and for three years he steered me through that labyrinth of music, which he knew as if it were an extension of his own body. At the mention of a band his hand would dart automatically, as if with a mind of its own, toward a corner of the store indistinguishable to the untrained eye from any of the other hidden nooks and crannies. \nTD was my guide not only through his store, but through the whole world of modern music. In recent decades the music scene, once unified into a few genres, has been torn asunder, splintering into a myriad different dialects, most of which have lost their ability to converse with one another: rock, jazz and country have been replaced by math rock, space rock, indie rock, alt-country, slowcore, sadcore, jazztronica, latin jazz, free jazz, funk jazz, neo-traditionalist jazz, post-bop, minimalism and other names too ridiculous to mention. It is far too easy for travelers through this musical Tower of Babel to lose their way.\nTD, however, spurned this pretense-fueled labeling. Every time I was in his shop I heard eager customers ask him seemingly unanswerable questions: \n• "What other bands sound like the Magnetic Fields?"\n• "I need to find an all-xylophone rock band." \n• "Do you have any CDs of jazz played by gypsies?" \nUnflustered, TD would field their questions like a kung-fu master deftly deflecting a punch. I tried several times to stump TD -- "I've had a hankering lately for angry bebop accordion" -- but never once succeeded or even caused him to break a sweat. His store wasn't organized by genre; genres were unneeded, even unwelcome. \nTD, the ultimate music search engine, was all we needed. As Duke Ellington put it, "There are two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind." No-one was better at separating these two categories than Tom.\nWord of Tom's legendary knowledge and willingness to help musical neophytes spread. Though I never once saw an advertisement for the store, devoted music fans always somehow found their way there, often at the end of a long, fruitless search. \nHe usually could be found holed up in his shop or standing shyly in the back of a local show, and yet he was a local celebrity. Mention of his name would put a smile on the lips of random strangers all throughout town. \nThough not a professional musician, Tom was a vital part of the Bloomington music scene, running a weekly music show on WFHB and tirelessly supporting local concerts. The local music scene as it is today is built on 25 years of Tom's dedicated work. \nTom passed away Nov. 12 of complications from liver cancer, leaving a city full of devoted followers behind. The outpouring of support from the community has shown just how many lives TD touched through music-and how tight-knit a community Bloomington really is.\nWhen I step into a music store now, clutching my hard-won $30 and eyeing with suspicion endless racks of CDs of dubious quality, organized into small knots with bewildering labels, I feel the same mix of exhilaration and dread. The agony of choice haunts every consumer in a society where one can choose between 40 different varieties of pasta sauce. \nI can now, however, rely on the wisdom that Tom imparted to me, that labeling and categorizing and setting apart shrinks one's view of the musical world, that the music devotee loves and supports all forms of musical expression. In short, the choice of which musical avenue to explore should not be agonizing because there is no wrong choice. \nHe lived his life by this creed, and we would do well to follow his example.