The other night I was up late, surfing the digital aisles of iTunes, looking for music to download.

Searching for a wide variety of groups and genres, the search opened up almost every time to  different branches and different ideas. Such is the joy of iTunes or any other download or digital service.

It makes it easy to find the music you want, download and start listening to it almost immediately. It’s one of the many wonders of this technological world around us.

Naturally though, as I was looking for new tunes, I started thinking back to how I got my hands on music back in my day.

Yes this is one of those “back in my day” columns.

Don’t roll your eyes.

Getting your hands on music when I was in school could be labor intensive and generally fell to one of three methods.

Buy it on tape and CD, borrow from a friend and record your own copy/make a mix tape or listen to the radio for hours and record your favorite song when it came on.

I have to go to a store?

This is an obvious one. You could buy music at most every establishment you came upon from Kmart to truck stops.

The size of the displays ranged from small rotating racks of cassettes and CDs at the counter to larger displays in electronics stores to full blown music stores.

Of course there were also pawn shops that held copies of cassettes and CDs in various states of use or decay, but that was always tricky because you were putting a lot of trust in the owners of these establishments to sell you these products without tangles of tape and grooved CD surfaces. Though I have to admit the two CDs that started out my collection came from a pawn shop. Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” and Megadeth’s “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying.” Both of which are classics today. You’re just going to have to trust me on this.

On the other hand, there was something magical about going to a music store. Even into my early 20s, I loved just wandering into the music store. In some stores you could even listen to snippets of recently released music.

It was the best of times, but rare these days. I can’t tell you the last time that I saw one of those rotating racks at the counter filled with Dan Fogelberg and John Denver tapes.

“Sunshine, on my shoulder … makes me happyyyyy.”

Hey, mind if I borrow that?

Cruising with your friends was a great way to hear new music. Hop in the car, pull out onto the road and throw in the Holy Bible of music — the mixed tape.

That was our iTunes.

“Wait, dude.” [It was the 80s. We used the word dude a lot. I still do. Don’t judge].

“Wait, dude. Who was that? Back that up.”

Once that song played, the next step was asking where they got it, which could have come from the artist’s CD. If you discovered it did come from the artist, then the next logical step was, “Hey, mind if I borrow that?”

Once you got your hands on the CD then you had to go about the lengthy process of recording it.

It was all a very arduous process that took much longer than iTunes asking if you want to download it. But you had your own mixed tape to make with your own record names like, “Rad Rock Mix,” “Broken Hearts, Broken Road,” or some such silliness embraced by teen angst. Or that’s what I’ve heard anyway.

Ahem.

STOP TALKING!

The third way of getting the music you wanted was recording directly from the radio, which required a lot of hours in front of a boom box, waiting for the song to start and the DJ to stop talking.

This was the most labor intensive because it required you to dedicate hours of your afternoon waiting, readying the boom box with three buttons primed: Record-play and pause.

I’m not sure why play also had to be pressed, but I didn’t have time for such questions. I was waiting for Bon Jovi’s “Born to Be My Baby.”

Getting a clean recording required expert timing and a little luck with no small amount of patience.

First, you prepared your boom box with the recordable tape. You pressed the record and play buttons down and then pause. The musical gun was now locked and loaded.

The game was afoot.

Primed with a comic book, book or video game on the Nintendo, I would patiently wait, listening closely to the DJ, looking for any hint a good song was coming. Often times they would say, “Bon Jovi, up after this break.” Sometimes it was a little more subtle. “The boys from New Jersey, with a song from their latest album, around the corner.”

Once those words came out, you hovered your finger over the pause button, waiting for the commercial for Ed’s Plumbing to end and the DJ to stop talking.

For me, I’ll use the example of that Bon Jovi song, because I remember that wait being a long one.

I was waiting for the DJ to cease his yammering and that magical kick-start to the song, Jon Bon Jovi yelling out, “Two, three, four,” and then a vault into a string of “nah, nah, nah’s.”

It’s a great song off a great album.

Ultimately, after a couple false starts, I captured the song, striking pause so hard I almost broke the button, which would have been devastating.

The problem with this method was often times you would get snippets of the DJ babbling and talking, telling some small story about the band you really didn’t care about.

I just wanted the “nah, nah, nah, nah.”

Unfortunately, kids will never know the pain and effort it took to track down music in the years of big everything: big shoelaces, big hair, big coats.

It was a process that made you appreciate the songs even more. It made you fear that spine-scraping feeling of the tape suddenly slowing and then the voices warping as you heard the boom box slowly and steadily eat the tape, often times to the end of never getting it back again and having to wait for the DJ to stop talking again.

It was a process and it could often test the patience of any teen who … holy … it’s my song. Hit pause, HIT PAUSE!