Vinyl

A few days ago a friend's son, who is 17, showed me something. It was a vinyl edition of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He has a record player and loves older music. I looked it over and remembered the vinyl version I had, purchased some 40-plus years ago. I told him it was cool, and I could see he was proud of it.

I've always loved music, though I can't play an instrument or carry a tune. And since I've been spending my own money I've been buying it. When I was growing up, there was only vinyl (there were also cassettes and 8-track, but I never bought those). I got a record player for Christmas one year, I think it was 1973, and I also got Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Ah, memories.

The first record I ever bought with my own money was the soundtrack to Diamonds Are Forever, because I was a James Bond freak. My mother, who was with me at the store, wondered at my decision, telling me that wasn't great music. Maybe not, but I played the hell out of it. At that time, my parents had a record player, not one of those TV consoles, but it was like a piece of furniture, looking like a rolltop desk, and you lifted the top to get to the turntable. My dad had a few records, mostly jazz, but I listened to kid records. I remember one called Songs for a Rainy Day, and another one we got for a buck at Gulf Oil that featured a bunch of songs from Disney movies, like "The Bare Necessities." We also got the soundtrack for Oliver!, and I played the hell out of that, too. I think I can still remember all the lyrics.

Once I became a teenager I started buying singles, or 45s, which most kids don't know about today. I used to go to a department store in Dearborn, Michigan called Crowley's. They had a small record section, and the first 45 I ever bought was Paul McCartney and Wings' "Band on the Run." They used to have the top 40 printed on a slip paper than you could take home (it was generated by CKLW, the radio station I listened to, out of Windsor, Ontario). I studied this list and decided what I was going to buy next.

Then I started buying albums. My grandfather couldn't cut his own grass anymore so he paid me to do it, four dollars a week. I thought I was rich. I bought Beatles' albums, mostly, and listened to them in my room after school.

As I grew older and got more sophisticated, I began shopping at Dearborn Music, on Michigan Avenue in downtown Dearborn. This was where the big kids shopped. I remember they had album covers on the walls, and I was in a new world, away from novelty songs like "The Night Chicago Died" and where what we today call classic rock ruled. I remember buying a David Bowie album and feeling very daring. Then I bought Alice Cooper Goes to Hell, which made me feel real cool.

After moving to New Jersey I had to take the bus to get to a record store, it might have been Sam Goody or some other chain. I didn't buy as much music then, but I listened to WPLJ out of New York, and then WNEW, and was determined to study the old stuff, and buy records from the '60s. It wasn't until The Police and Talking Heads that I got into more contemporary stuff.. When I started working at Penthouse I was right above Tower Records. I dropped a lot of money in that store. I started buying stuff I hadn't even heard before, just on reputation. Some of it I liked, some of it I didn't, but I never thought I was wasting my money.

In the early '90s, like some kind of magic, Tower Records went from vinyl to exclusively CD. I went with the trend, and hardly ever played my records any more. Eventually I realized my turntable didn't even work. When I moved to Vegas the whole vinyl collection went by the wayside (I did sell a few, for about twenty bucks). Record chains like Sam Goody and Tower Records are defunct now. The ironic thing is that this brought back indie record stores. There was the Princeton Record Exchange, and there's a few good ones here in Vegas, notably Zia. What goes around comes around.

I'm not going to sit here and say vinyl was better. I don't have good enough ears to tell the difference between it and any other media. You couldn't listen to it in the car or walking--that was where making tapes came in. I'd buy lots of blank tapes, and tape songs off the radio. When I got a stereo with a tape deck, I'd make my own tapes. This was the era of mix tapes, where guys might make them to give to a girl to impress. Do guys still think that way, that their taste in music might impress a girl? It was probably never so.

But vinyl records do have a cache of nostalgia. I'd buy one, take it home, and listen to it while turning the cover around and over. They'd have the lyrics on the back, or in the middle, or on the paper sleeve. You'd have to turn it over, of course. But then again you could stack them, and make your own playlist. On the down side, they could get scratched easily.

People my age have many nice memories of records and record stores. Now I buy all my music from Amazon, but there was a time you'd go to a record store and just flip through the records, looking for something to grab you. The new released would be on a table out front. I distinctly remember Queen's A Night at the Opera, just waiting to be purchased.

I don't have a turntable anymore, and I don't think I need one, because almost all the music I listen to is in my car, so CD is the best format for me. But I kind of like that it's making a comeback, and kids like my friend are enjoying it all over again.