For more than twenty five years I’ve carted around boxes of old LPs. It’s been at least 12 years since I’ve listened to the crackle and hiss of a tune played on a turntable. Yet, I continued to move boxes of this dead weight around from province to province, city to city, house to house.
I learned to appreciate this music format more than 30 years ago. My older brother, Gary, went to Alberta to work in the oilfields and brought back several albums… Aldo Nova, Meatloaf, Supertramp, Greg Kihn, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller. He took good care of his albums and I adopted his approach. The more carefully you handled the vinyl the purer the sound remained. Somehow when my brother moved on again I inherited his record collection. Soon, I began to add to that collection with my own additions. Eventually, my collection grew to more than 300 albums. I skipped the cassette format altogether and vowed not to purchase CDs until you could record onto them. When it became clear that you would never be able to record onto CDs, I caved and started collecting CDs instead of LPs. Even though I duplicated much of my collection, I still kept the old faithful LPs. My turntable became orphaned from my stereo and started gathering dust on a shelf. Eventually, my CD collection fell out of date and fell in preference behind MP3s. Assorted tapes and CDs (yes… news flash. You can record onto CDs now!!!) have taken second place to MP3 players and FM transmitters.
Still, I kept my record collection. I didn’t know exactly why though. I never had any grand illusions that my Prince albums would fund my retirement. I mean, Raspberry Beret is a pretty good song, but… Then this past weekend I answered an ad from someone looking to buy old LPs. They guy came out to my house and quickly looked through my collection. Of the 300 albums he said he was only interested in 30 of them and he’d give me $60 whether or not I gave him just the 30 or all 300. Apparently Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister are marketable, but Randy Travis and Roy Clarke are not. I talked him up to 75 bucks and then realized that I had this sick feeling in my stomach. My music collection was a very personal thing… it had sentimental value. If the guy had given me $500 I would have felt the same way. Yet… I purged the vinyl out of my basement and pocketed the 75 smackers and swallowed the feeling that I had somehow let an important part of my youth disappear into the back of a minivan headed for the nearest flea market.
There’s no real point to this post other than to blab about how much these LPs meant to me. I hadn’t even realized it, but they were mementos of my musical past, a chronicle of my youth and transition into adulthood. And I pawned it off for 75 bucks!
Don’t worry Mom. I kept the Elvis picture disk along with the other Elvis albums and Nan’s Slim Whitman and Liberace albums. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
