Sorry, I am not of the rock part of our culture. I doubt if I've bought a dozen rock CDs in my life. Or rock records, for that matter. Except for the literally dozens of recordings by the Lemonheads, which was started by my son, Jesse, and Evan Dando. Maybe you remember the Lemonheads. Maybe you don't. My son played bass. Evan was the lead singer. Evan the star, Jesse the one who kept the group together. Until it split apart. They started out as punk and then drifted into another style. But I don't recall which. Could it have been heavy metal? At that point in our history, you could buy records and then CDs all over the place. And certainly all over Cambridge. It's all over. A few months ago, someone in the recording side of the business announced that soon no one will be selling CDs. People will make them and give them out for free. As a publicity expense, a cost of promotion. That's since, in the popular music business, the performers now make their money not from recordings but from performances and from endorsements. Like athletes. I don't really know if this formula will work for popular music. But I am certain that it doesn't and won't work for classical music and musicians. It's been all over the papers (again this week in The New York Times) that Tower Records is going bust. In Harvard Square, populated by thousands of young people, Tower used to compete with Virgin Mega Store (VMS). The latter disappeared last year. Now Tower will be gone, too. There is one place left, the Barnes & Noble that took over when the Harvard Coop expired. In Cambridge, B&N has a very spotty classical section. You will not be able to find there the complete Jussi Bjorling, the greatest tenor ever, whose every recording is by now actually or, rather, technically available. But where? My God, I remember when Sam Goody served my, your, our music needs. And where is the Schwann's monthly catalogue? There is still the VMS in Times Square and presumably in other urban hubs. Aside from the idiosyncratic shop here and there, you'll also find B&N around the country catering as much as sound business permits to the variegated musical tastes of the communities it serves, even classical music. This company is not just a book seller. Still, I fear, that with classical performances having to scrounge for audiences there'll be less and less recordings, especially of recherché work and performers. Now, of course, you can get anything on the Web. But we are losing, as with books, any sense of doing it together.