Dear Nick, Brian & Charlie,
As fathers and sons we are often aware of our generational differences. You hear them often, “When I was a kid, we spent all of our time outdoors, we played stickball in the street, we played Manhunt to all hours.”
I am sure you guys laugh at our generation’s challenges with technology. A lot of the things we look back on with nostalgia are cool. Some, not so cool. The house I grew up in had only one phone, and it hung on the wall in the kitchen! We had NO privacy, and there were five people using that ONE phone. Imagine that. This piece is about something better than trying to talk to your girlfriend while your father reads the newspaper and your mom does the dishes…
Over the past few years, vinyl records, and turntables, have had a bit of a renaissance, a two-fer-Tuesday if you will. Hipsters started scooping up vinyl records at flea markets in Greenpoint Brooklyn, Austin, Texas and Telegraph Hill…As you boys know, I still have my albums in two large milk crates, and they are probably worth some cash. Yet I cling to them, the feel of them, the memories held in them, prevent me from selling them, just yet.
Access to the entire world’s music catalog on your phone is unbelievably convenient, and way cool. However, one of the things your generation misses as you download music, open up Spotify on your phone, is the act of shopping in a record store. Perusing for a record through stacks of records at a record store: Bleecker Bob’s, Tower Records, Record Explosion, Sam Goody was something to be savored, cherished. I know it’s cliche but, boys you missed out. Take a walk down to the avenue with me as we go shopping in a record store…
There were a few kinds of trips to the record store: First is the Specific Mission. Here, you know exactly what album you want, probably it just came out, and it’s big news. You go to the record store and they have a big display of “Led Zeppelin IV” or, “This Year’s Model” by Elvis Costello…Maybe a friend recommended an album that you just HAVE to get? Those were great conversations to have, and trips to take. Or you were hanging in a friend’s basement and they played an album for you? You decided to make a trip to the record store to buy that album.
Oftentimes, you heard a song on the radio, a lot, because the record company is promoting the album. You’d hear Carol Miller on WNEW, “And that was the new one from Dire Straits called….”Sultans of Swing.”
Or, you have an album, or two, by a favorite artist, and decide to dig deeper into their catalog. All of those scenarios have you heading to the record store with a goal in mind, those were great trips.
You walk in, you are greeted by the familiar musty smell of cardboard and vinyl. And a feast for your eyes, a variety of displays, posters and album covers by the artists and albums that the record companies are promoting. Usually, especially at an independent record store, they will be playing an album the staff has selected, and will have it displayed by the turntable and cash register with a little hand-written sign, white piece of paper, black block letters, “Now Playing…the debut album by, Boston.”
There was another kind of trip to the record store, this was a bit more laid back, a bit of happenstance…You and your friends are walking around the mall, or the local commercial avenue, and decide to walk into the record store, to browse. These were also great experiences, that you will never have. It’s a little bit like perusing in a Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore, only cooler, because this is music. Maybe akin to walking along Main Street Lake Placid, or Bar Harbor, and taking a trip into the toy store when you were little, so many exciting possibilities…
Once inside, you do a quick reconnaissance, to find the genre that you are looking for. The records are stacked in sections: Pop, Jazz, Classical, Rock…As you might guess, I would make a beeline to the Rock section, which was sometimes mixed in with Pop. Like a bookstore, genre sections were organized alphabetically, by artist. Starting with A, there would be a plastic divider for the letter, and then throughout the A’s there would be other plastic dividers for artists that had quite a few albums. So, in the B’s, there was a Beatles divider and about 25-30 Beatles albums. Most of the time, if you had a specific artist or album in mind, you’d gravitate to that artist’s space.
There was nothing like lightly tipping each album with your finger, just enough to peel the one you were looking at, and pull it towards you, revealing the album behind it. You could go quickly, through an artist, like the Rolling Stones, if you knew their catalog, you could rifle through them pretty quickly: Beggar’s Banquet, Emotional Rescue, Sticky Fingers…sometimes you would uncover a gem, a surprise, and you’d peel that out and pick it up, look at the front cover, look at the back cover, and if you were thinking about buying it, you’d put it in your other hand, and continue shopping. Or maybe, if the record store was not crowded, rest your potential purchases on the stack of albums next to you? By the end of the hour or so, if you were like me, you hit all your favorite artists, maybe working from A to Z, and then you’d have a stack of potential purchases.
If you went to buy a specific album, that was in the “definitely buying” pile. Depending on how much money you had, that might be it. But if you found a few other albums that were really intriguing, you’d revisit them, and make a decision on each one. Hmmm, how much money do I have? And can I afford all three of these? This one is really special, and I might never find this one again. How many albums can I listen to right now? I should put these back and I will add them to my “list of albums I want to buy.
After making your final decisions, you head to the cash register. The associate might put your albums in a nice bag, and then the fun starts. You begin the trip home with your new purchases in hand. If you were in Greenwich Village, or somewhere else in the city, that means riding the subway home with your new albums. While riding the subway home, if you have a seat, you get to take an album out of the bag, and look closer at the front cover, the back cover, the artwork, the pictures, the song titles…all things you can’t do when you are streaming or downloading. If you were walking home, from Church Avenue, or 13th Avenue in our case, albums under your arms, like you’d carry a stack of books, you’d hope for a red light so you had to stop at the corner, and you could take another look at the albums. Maybe you’d share them with your friends, looking at each other’s purchases, until you eventually get home. Then the fun really starts. You get to put the new album on your turntable.
Now for the best part, which I really feel is why vinyl has had some staying power. Finally getting the album home, using your fingers to pinch the edge of the cellophane shrink wrap around the album, remove the whole plastic sheet, toss that in the garbage, with some difficulty as it usually has static cling. Holding the album by its edges, you’d look at the album cover again, feeling it’s pristine cleanness, smelling the cardboard and the vinyl, you’d open up your turntable cover, slide the album out of the pocket, remove it from the paper sleeve, holding it, again, only by the edges, you’d review the circular sticker in the middle with the record label artwork, typeface and font. We recognized the labels for Capitol Records, Reprise Records, Swan Song Records, and those labels reminded us of all the other great albums by those artists that we had bought in the past.
Then to place the needle/stylus in the right spot while the record is spinning took a deft touch. The easiest thing to do is to start with the first song, that’s the biggest groove on the album, and let the whole album play. Easy. More than likely, you’d like to hear a certain song, or songs, the ones you had heard on the radio that sent you to the record store in the first place perhaps? So you find that song, see where it is on the album, and adroitly place the needle/stylus in the appropriate groove for your chosen song.
Wait, it keeps getting better. Most artists, if they were really singer-songwriters, really artists, included their lyrics on the inside of the album cover, or on a sheet that you could remove when you opened the album. The coolest was Neil Young because if you bought the album “Harvest” or “After the Gold Rush” the lyrics sheet was a copy of Neil’s hand-written lyrics!
It keeps getting better! Over the next few days, you will listen to the album, cueing up the songs you like quite a few times, and you will listen to the other songs on the album, oftentimes finding gems that you would have never heard had you not purchased the album. Some artists in the 60’s and 70’s, starting with Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Beach Boys Pet Sounds, many albums were just a bit deeper, artists crafted their albums around a theme, songs connected all to each other, a really “deep” experience.
So that’s the beauty of shopping in a record store. I have to end this here because I am going to set up my turntable again. Think Mom will get mad at me?
