Steve Jobs, former CEO of my favorite technology company, died today. There are going to be a lot of people eulogizing Mr. Jobs, or Steve, as we Apple fanboys frequently called him.
Virtually any of these people are going to be far better qualified than I am to wax poetic about what he was like, or how his life mattered in ways we still don’t fully know the scope of.
I never knew Steve; never wrote to him, never even saw him from afar. I suspect that had I known him as a person, there’s a chance I might not have liked him. None of that matters right now, anyway.
I only want to tell one story about Steve, and its not really about him. It’s about me.
When I was a young man in the mid-eighties, I loved music above practically all else. It consumed me. I wanted to spend the rest of my life making it, listening to it, and sharing it with other people. I was going to be the next Geddy Lee, or John Lennon, or any one of a handful of the talented men I idolized in my early twenties. Music was, in a word, sacred to me.
Flash forward roughly twenty years. By this time I have failed at becoming a musician, in more ways than one. I had burned out on studying trumpet (a very long story), which left a music education degree unfinished. I had subsequently left that to become a bass player with my best friend. That, too, came to naught, and eventually, the part of me that used to love music was a empty, dead place. Poke it a little with a memory, or somesuch thing, and the pain of my failure would come roaring back. So mostly, I avoided music for years at a time.
What changed that feeling for me was an iPod photo, which my wife, in her infinite wisdom, encouraged me to buy when she saw how much I wanted one. And make no mistake, it was enormously expensive compared to other devices — $500, at a time when portable CD players were $100. But it gave me the ability to carry around my music collection with me wherever I went. It let me sit, still and quiet in a chair, getting lost in pieces of music I hadn’t listened to for years. The ability to access whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, was a complete game-changer for me. And before much time had passed, I was able to fall in love with music again.
Oh, not to the same level I had before; I was young, then, and full of the passions of youth. Music will never be like that for me again. But thanks to that iPod, and the ones that came after it, I was able to become excited about music again, which for me is by no means a small thing.
The company that made that iPod is named Apple. The man who oversaw the many, many people in that company who designed and built that iPod is named Steve Jobs. He died today.
A lot of people are going to remember Steve for what he built. I’m going to remember him for what he, indirectly, gave back to me. As it turns out, the iPod was just the tip of the iceberg for me — there were Macs and iPhones and iPads in my future. But I still, still feel a soft spot in my heart for the simple genius of that first iPod. And it is altogether fitting that, when I heard the news of Steve’s death, I was tinkering with the playlists on my iPhone — still enjoying the world of digital music that he helped make happen.
Rest in peace, Steve. And, from the bottom of my heart, my deepest thanks.
