My seventeen year old bought him-self a record player. This has sparked a revolution in our house. It is hard to describe what happens when a person hears analogue recorded sound for the first time.
I grew up with analogue sound. I fought against switching to CDs for longer than most of the people I knew. I loved my records. It has been years since I listened to them on a record player. I nodded my head in agreement when Neil Young stated that the youth today were getting robbed of a whole spectrum of sound. He attempted to make better headphones to achieve that spectrum. And yet, by the time he said this I had almost forgotten what analogue really sounded like. I have been living in a digital only world for so long.
Watching the look on my son’s face when he put an album onto his record player for the first time reminded me exactly what most kids are missing. The sound that came out was bigger and deeper and more physical than any recording he had heard before. He literally danced around the room in glee. He went back into his room and started pulling out the few remaining albums I had saved from the thousands I had previously owned. It dawned on him that I had picked good ones. Recordings that felt good on the body when you listened to them. Sounds that required the extra tones removed from a digitized cleaned up version: Harry Nilsson, Jim Croce, Mother Earth, The Rolling Stones, albums with tonal nuance in the vocals, and layered rough drone sounds between the feedback and the guitar.
After an entire day of listening to real records on a real turntable--not even with a great speaker, just the small one attached to the system—he turned to me and said, “I get it now.” And then he informed me he needed to watch the movie High Fidelity again. He shared that he had been hearing all these old Gen-Xers talk about sound like it was a religion, but he didn’t believe them. Now he understood a whole new part of the conversation.
Three days later I received a text from him, “I found a used record store you have to see.” He made me go with him to this hole in the wall. And I have to say; it felt good to walk into the place. The guy at the back of the room was just old enough to have grey hair. He had that perfect clerk quality, half way between cool and geek. You knew that if he approved your choices, even if he didn’t say anything you would get better service. The bins of albums, organized by genre and alphabet, randomly priced for value, quality, desirability, but also for a new type of rarity. Some of these albums were priced higher just because they existed. The shift from basic commodity to collectible was everywhere in there. The used record stores that were, had been these vast shops with all the same major sets of albums, easily acquired, and then the occasional first print of a Zappa, or a rare Coltrane. Here, every album was in essence rare. It was like a golden age comic shop, or collectible baseball cards. We have moved so far from the analogue era, these albums stacked in bins felt like the survivors of a shipwreck. These are the lucky few items that had managed to wash up on the shore. And, beggars can’t be choosers. Not everything in here would even have passed for desirable in the height of the analogue music age. Some of the sections had five obscure albums of a band I had never heard of, obviously all from someone’s collection, in really good condition and clearly in the style of Big Brother and the Holding Company. But who knows if they are any good. The albums so obscure you wouldn’t find them on a streaming app. Perhaps given our location and proximity to Los Angeles, these were copies of albums from one of the guys in the band. And now here they are. Likely survived because played less often, so they are still in pristine condition and can be sold for a whopping ten dollars each.
The records that make the wall are the albums that once upon a time would have had so many copies in the bins I might not have even bothered to look at them. Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, The Stranger by Billy Joel, Escape by Journey. Some of them so clichéd I still roll my eyes seeing them on the wall, but then pause and wonder, how many of them have actually survived? Will there be any analogue recordings of Cat Stevens for example? Between the over played copies, and those burned en masse after Yusuf failed to give a crap about American politics and said stuff people didn’t like. Will his albums actually have survived the shift? Is Rumors now a rare commodity? I imagine a clean copy, not rerecorded through digital technology, that hasn’t been scratched up by somebody’s kid or drunken friend back in the early 80s, might be hard to get a hold of.
My son bought one album, and I bought one album. These are no longer fifty-cent purchases. And I think about my vast collection of albums. At one point I was still collecting when everyone else was getting rid of their albums. So they gave them to me. I had thousands of them. Boxes of them, each time we moved. All these clay-like disks, folded between cardboard, heavy and fragile. One day a dear friend was distraught, telling us about how all of his tools had been stolen. He was a sculptor, and art teacher, and his tools were his livelihood. He had no money to replace them. We offered him some tools we knew we could part with. And we also told him to take all the records and sell them to get some money for tools. I had weeded out the few I would need to keep, but we loaded all the rest into the back of his vehicle, and said goodbye.
My son texted me yesterday to share that a good friend of his was inheriting his uncle’s entire record collection, because his uncle was moving and couldn’t bring them all. It was bitter sweet. I was thrilled that my kid has fallen in love with sound. I have taught him to appreciate the nuances of music, and to begin to weave together the larger story of musical inheritance. And at the same time he comes to it late in my life. I no longer have a record collection to offer him. All of those albums have been returned to the wild, and maybe have not survived long enough for him to find them again. I have a fantasy that some day he will be at a record store and come across an album with a name neatly written in the corner in my mother’s hand-writing, and he will know it is ours and he will bring it home.
