Still Spinning

“You sound like a broken record.”  It’s been awhile since that made any literal sense to me, but this morning, I heard Bob Dylan sing, “No direc-, no direc-, no direc-, no direc-.”  I’ve had my new turntable for a week and I can’t stop playing records.  Cleared a shelf for them.  Bought speaker wire.  It’s gotten serious.

I’ll say right away: I didn’t do it for the superior sound quality of vinyl.  Far from hi-fi, mine is just equipment that fits.  Someday, a sharper stylus, better boom, but for now, I simply want to play the records that I’ve been keeping for years in boxes that Hester keeps shredding. 

So a week ago on Record Store Day, I went to all three shops in my neighborhood and at the last one, found a cheap enough deck.  Walked it home, hooked it up and started sorting and spinning, getting reacquainted with my collection.  Outkast on vinyl?  Ice-cold! Kings of Leon, see-through 10”, beautiful.  “Sticky Fingers” –one of those albums you must play straight through.  It started to rain and the sound through the open window blended with the static of old jazz records, which sound the best so far, perhaps because they’ve always sounded that way.  I laid the needle down on Judy Garland’s “I Get the Blues When It Rains”.

Dragging a box of records around makes the impracticality of the media clear.  They’re heavy and they’re dirty.  I’d gotten the dust fits at the record stores and I found that most of my own discs needed cleaning.  Some are really too scratched to enjoy; every few seconds, and quickening with the needle’s trip, you hear a sound like electric Velcro.  I’m afraid that’s the case for Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough”, but I can’t throw it away, not when I look into those piercing blue eyes on the album cover (set off by her large, chestnut hair).  Plus, the colorful Decca label on the album itself screams craft project.

In the week since I’ve had the turntable, I’ve spent fewer of my free hours in front of a screen and more handling records.  Surely part of the format’s appeal is that all five senses are involved in the listening experience, starting with the tactile.  You can’t run your fingertip gently across the grooves of an mp3.  (Granted, you can hold a CD, but I just rip mine to the hard drive, then wait for a minor scratch to render them unplayable.  Rumor has it that major labels may soon abandon the format altogether.)  What does a cassette tape smell like?  Records smell like cardboard and must, sometimes smoke, sometimes truly wax.  Taste, well that’s a stretch, but when you sit and listen to records as an activity, you get a hankerin’ for a cold one.  All these classic rock albums have put me in the mood for some of that old-fashioned swill – maybe a High Life. [1]

This heady blend of aesthetic appeal and nostalgia has now-apparent economic implications.  While CD sales have tanked, vinyl sales continue to rise annually; according to the BBC, they’re at a six-year high.  Yet, I can’t transfer my habits as a digital consumer to the record store.  I have around 11,000 songs in my digital collection, and I’m listening for more every day.  How much would those weigh in vinyl?  How much would it cost to duplicate the digital collection, considering I get most digital albums at a fraction of the cost I used to pay for a bullshit CD.  John Cheese, in a column on Cracked.com, claims that “creating the idea that entertainment has no monetary value” is one of “5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation”.  He argues that piracy in the digital age, even as backlash against big-label greed, ultimately devalued music and other arts/entertainment, making it harder for the little guy to make any money.  Clearly, new technology economically devalued the industry’s dominant format.  But Cheese (think that’s his real name?) ignores the fact that the same technology enabled world-wide access to artists and their works, and that translates into economic value, too.  Profit is simply distributed beyond corporate confines and into local markets.  It’s narrow to discuss music in solely economic terms; still, it seems like the social values held dear by those who kept their local record stores open through 30 (40?) years of new-tech are being (re)commodified.  Billboard calls this year’s Record Store Day sales “explosive”.

I’ve been playing records all week and I’m running out.  I’ve been back to Joe’s with a wishlist, looking for albums that I can’t find because they’re too rare by now, or they were never put on wax, or I can get it digitally for so much less (so I already have it).  I’d love to have all the White Stripes’ albums brand new on vinyl, but I’m not some kind of millionaire.  The big grab is on again, and that’s okay, but when new albums cost $30, the full aesthetic experience that keeps us listening to records becomes exclusive.  I don’t want to pay a dear $30 for a record; to me, other values are compromised by that transaction. 

Luckily, there’s no end to the backlog of supply.  Record stores are back in business.  There’s the stash in your parents’ basement.  You’re in the corner of an antique shop flipping through a stack, looking for nothing in particular and suddenly – Neil Diamond.  His shirt is open; his earnest gaze pleads, “Play Me”.  You laugh out loud, thinking, “Someone bought this once and enjoyed it,” and that snicker alone is worth 50 cents, you suppose; now that person is you.  What a small step it is from irony to sentimentalism, sucker!

But you’ll remember the how and the when.  Where were you when you bought your last 5,000 mp3s?

I was once in Quebec City in early June when the days were long and the sunset, rosy gold.  Loose on chambourcin, I picked up a couple of records someone had thrown out with the trash, and I stuffed them into the trunk of my car.  One of them was the Judy Garland album I played last week when it rained.

My nephew gave me The Black Keys “Attack and Release” for Christmas in Boston, and we spent the holiday listening to his albums on a portable record player from the 50s, the kind you might have found in a public school’s AV closet.

I was really of the cassette-tape generation, but we always had a turntable in the house, so naturally a few of my parents’ and siblings’ albums made their way into my collection.  When my grandparents died and my uncle Paul came to live with us, his extensive collection came too.  You may be thinking, “Mary, are you saying you stole from a disabled man?”  Listen, Uncle Paul and I are tight.  He’d understand that if anyone should have Bonnie Tyler’s “Faster than the Speed of Night” on vinyl, it should be someone who can appreciate the Wagnerian excesses of a Jim Steinman song,  someone such as myself, his beloved niece. 

My first favorite song was Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” which my sister and brother had on 45, orange label.  I was a toddler and I marveled at the idea that someone might actually play funky music until they died.  Luckily, the song ends well with the protagonist “funking out in every way.” 

Then, when I was 7, I went insane for “Stray Cat Strut”.  My sister was in high school and by that time, I knew she’d be leaving home soon.  Her friend came by to pick her up and that friend gave me the Stray Cats’ “Built for Speed”.  It was my first, very-own album.  It’s got some crackle and warp these days, but I think it still cooks.

Records will never match the ease and diversity of my digital collection; nor will that ever be the point of collecting them, listening to them, Side A and Side B.   Records become memories.  They’re imprints of time, place and identity.  Last week, I bought a cheap turntable in Silver Spring, MD.  I brought it home and out came so much great music that I hadn’t heard in years, if ever before.  But I was also thinking about work, and I was reading about Paris, and I was wondering whether I should fix a drink.  It started to rain.  We’d been needing the rain.  I put on that Judy Garland song, and it was perfect.

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[1] Vertical Integration Idea for Dogfish Head Brewing Company:  Buy the rights to Miles Davis and Robert Johnson albums; re-release them on vinyl as a “Dogfish Head Presents” series to be sold with (or separately from) Bitches Brew and Hellhound on My Ale.  Imagine the cover art.  And the t-shirt sales!