Amnesiac only $1.99 on Amazon

Now RSS rules, but back in 2001 mailing lists were still going strong with music fans. I was 21 and i was subscribed to mailing lists of fans of Björk, Sonic Youth, Tricky, and of course Radiohead.

A few days before Amnesiac’s street date an email arrived with various Radiohead news and at the end it said something like this: “And what is this link doing here?? http://www.somelinkicantremember.com/~bla/foo.html”

And at that link there was the whole of Amnesiac in MP3. I still had dialup. It took maybe two or three hours to get it all.

It had Pulk/Pull and Hunting Bears and all that weirdness, and Knives Out didn’t at first sound as great as it did when they played in Tel Aviv a few months before that, so i thought that at least some of it may be fake, and when it hit the shelves, i immediately bought it in the fancy book package and i was surprised to hear that the MP3′s were real.

If you can find that email in some archive, it would be extra great.

Oh, now i recalled something else: A few days before that mailing list message i tried to get “Life in a Glasshouse” from Napster. When i finally got it, it turned out to be a Lifehouse song. It wasn’t so bad, actually, but i don’t remember which one it was.

Oh, the days of dialup.