Record Store Day
As much as I am into music, I have never participated in record store day. One reason is that I don't currently own a record player. Another would be the fact that I'm from the cassette generation. I understood the move from cassettes to CDs but it took me a while to understand how we circled back to vinyl.
I have a pretty solid collection of LPs, not as many as my brothers, but respectable. Back in the day, if my local record store only had vinyl, I would buy it and make a cassette copy for my boom box, and later when I turned 16, for my car. Cassettes were tough, tradable, and portable. Sound quality and album artwork was always secondary to the ability to take my music to the beach, in the backyard, or anywhere I wanted to go. Combined with the advent of the Sony Walkman, the choice was easy.
Records are cool to be sure, but the romaniticized notion that the albums were all works of art with gatefold covers and sleeves packed with liner notes is not accurate. For every Wish You Were Here cover featuring amazing imagery, lyric sheets, and stickers for your dorm room wall, there were a hundred other artists with flimsy cardboard covers with nothing but a crinkly plastic jacket and record on the inside. Records skipped, got scratched, broken, smudged, or warped. They would crackle and pop when you played them and seemed positively old school to me. The fact that the record player I had in my room was a hand-me-down from my Grandpa that would deliver a tingling electrical charge into my hand if I touched the metal ON switch the wrong way, only reinforced this as an antiquated way to listen to music.
Records are back in a big way now. My two older sons love to buy big shiny long-players with blinged-out covers and limited edition colored vinyl. They are quite expensive now, easily going for $30 a pop, but I think it's worth it. Now bands make sure that the buyer gets the full experience with quality extras and a beefier, higher-quality disc. Plus, they include a download code to give you the ability to take the music with you wherever you go.
So, this year I finally attended a Record Store Day at our super-groovy local music store. It was just like I remember it being back in the eighties. I saw a dude walking around with one of my all-time favorite albums by Crowded House. I was going to strike up a conversation with him but I got shy. I did, however, have a talk with the old dude at the counter who was responsible for the mix that was playing over the store sound system. He played a song from The Housemartins. I have never heard anyone play The Housemartins. My son bought a couple albums and we left with the smell of incense embedded in our hair and hoodies.
Here is a brief description of my local childhood record store, The Music Warehouse. We started with a different one called The Flip Side, but eventually settled on the Warehouse because it had a great selection and was within bike-riding distance. They had awesome promotional posters on the walls that they would sometimes let you take home, they had an "underground" section full of what would later be called "alternative", and they even had a small rack of cassettes on the wall exclusively featuring 4AD recording artists, such as Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Clan of Xymox, Pixies, etc.
I'm nostalgic and sentimental about music, not the means by which I get it. That all seemed to change, however, when today I found a K-Tel record from the early seventies called Dynamic Sound - 22 Original Hits, 22 Original Stars. I think we had this album! It was kind of a thrill to actually hold this artifact. I guess I sort of fell under the spell of the record store after all, or maybe it was just the incense.
