spin the black circle

the joy of records

[i wrote a version of this for forbes ten years ago. it’s been edited and updated and reworked, but the sentiment remains the same]

It seems every week there’s yet another article written about the resurgence of vinyl records. This has been going on for years and each subsequent article gives boost to the idea that not only do old school vinyl enthusiasts still want to “spin the black circle,” but there’s a crop of younger, excited music lovers who are buying records.

Every time I read one of these articles and start to get hyped up about generations after mine embracing vinyl, I have to explain to someone (for instance my 30 and 33 year old children) why I have such a vested interest in this, why I am emotionally attached to not just records themselves, but the intangible things that come with them.

My first “record” wasn’t vinyl at all, but an Archies record that I punched out of the back of a cereal box.  No one would let me play it on their stereo. Not my parents, not my cousins, not even the next door neighbor. No one would dare let their precious needle touch a piece of cardboard pretending to be a record. I suspect now that it wasn’t so much the cardboard as it was the Archies themselves. I ended up listening to it on a Fisher-Price record player.

I was given real records after that – the Partridge Family and Bobby Sherman collections and a few children’s albums, but they were just novelties. My real love affair with vinyl began when I was nine, when an older cousin introduced me to The Who’s Tommy. I remember pulling the record out of its sleeve as my cousin showed me how to properly handle a album.  He placed my hands around the edge of the record, explaining about fingerprints and dust and grooves.  He showed me how to drop the record on the turntable. Until then, I had been using the Fisher Price system and was a bit haphazard about how I handled my cardboard records. My cousin was almost reverent about teaching me how to do it, holding the edges with his palm, placing the album gently on the turntable, dropping the needle on the groove by hand because he didn’t trust the automatic arm to do it right.

He turned the volume up. The unmistakable crackle and hiss of needle upon record filled the room.

My love for vinyl was born at that moment.

I’ve been through all the phases of music storage since – 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, digital – and none of those storage mediums have the character of records.

I’m not an audiophile by any means. When I say vinyl is the best form of music, it has nothing to do with how clean or pure the sound is; it’s about my sensory relationship with albums. The way a record feels in my hands, the symmetry and pattern of the grooves, even the imperfections  – the scratches and skips – are part of what makes vinyl matter so much to me and what makes each individual album unique to its owner.

It’s the way my copy of Led Zeppelin IV had a little pop at the start and that pop became the intro to the song, the thing I always wait to hear right before Robert Plant’s Hey, hey mama.

It’s the way it feels to lift the arm and put the needle down on the record.

It’s in the watching of the vinyl spin around, each revolution a precise, timed piece of machinery pouring out sound.

my favorite used records store in sacramento

It’s the way my mother’s copy of Sgt. Pepper had a scratch in it and to this day I can’t hear “A Day in the Life” without singing found my way up…found my way up…found my way upstairs, which was not a flaw so much as part of the charm of the record.

It’s going to a used record store (shout out Looney Tunes) and flipping through the rows and rows of albums in their plastic sleeves, pulling the vinyl out to study its condition, knowing that every worn groove tells a story. Vinyl is handled like no other medium, flipped and turned and gazed upon as one attempts to place the needle at the exact spot to start the song you want to hear. There’s no fast forward, no skip. It’s all manual, each record leaving the presence of its previous owner on its surface, leaving the album awash in personal history.

It’s in the cover art, large enough to frame and in the liner notes, read like fact sheets full of mystery and the familiar, read over and over again until memorized.

It’s searching out color variants on discogs, it’s picture discs you’ll never play but need to have, it’s cataloging your records, completing artist collections, buying anniversary remasters.

a prized possession

Can CDs or digital music offer you the artistry of records? Album covers framed and hung on the wall like pictures at an exhibition. Colored vinyl and picture discs turning your music into a work of art.  In 1980, I bought True Colors by Split Enz and was endlessly entranced by the laser etching in the vinyl that made it seem full of colorful prisms.  Later, I would work in a record store and spend my entire paycheck each week on seven inch imports, a reminder of my days of collecting 45s.  Each record I owned had its own character, a specific memory attached to it – memories that were made of more than just sound. There’s the feel of the record, the sight of it, things so ingrained in the experience of listening to vinyl that just walking into a record store is like opening up a time machine.

I’ve never met a digital purchase that made me fall in love with it like a record. I’ll still love the music, but an mp3 is just a container for that music, streaming is just storage, where a record is part of the entire music experience.

It’s good to see that records have made a comeback. More and more bands are including album versions in their new releases. Turntables are selling again. A new generation is learning to embrace vinyl.

I hope they appreciate the imperfections that make records so, well, perfect.