For years my dad’s records loitered on a top shelf of his closet never whispering to me the treasures that were enclosed inside those oh so very dusty dust jackets, riches like The Beatles’ “The Beatles” and The Rolling Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.”
To me they were relics of a forgotten age of marijuana and lava lamps when Saturday Night Live skits were concise and 18-year-old boys could buy beer before dying for their country in Vietnam.
I started buying music during the advent of the compact disc’s reign in music and the fall of those dilapidation prone cassette tapes, so I certainly wanted nothing to do with those bulwarks of the Baby Boom generation’s psyche with their hulking vast blackness and groves and loops and scratches that could carry me into intoxicated, blissful musical oblivion.
Big hair and big bangs were all that and a bag of potato chips (why did VH1 have to remind people of that phrase?), and the not so pleasant screeching of Janis Ian did not possess the musical come hither like that of Hootie and the Blowfish (not ashamed), Ace of Base (still not ashamed) and Boyz II Men (because your mama is so stupid she thought it was a daycare, but still not ashamed) to make me listen.
Perhaps it was the melodious crooning of Boyz II Men that actually set me on the road to vinyl collection.
In Wayna, Nathan, Michael, and Shawn’s sophomore album, aptly titled “II,” the group covered Lennon and McCarthy’s ballad “Yesterday.”
I liked the song instantly, but the Motown infused rendition left something to be desired.
I wanted something more simplistic (i.e. no ostentatious vibratos), which led me to original Beatles’ version on the B side of the 1965 British release “Help!”
For a short while I delved in to frenzied obsession with the early Beatles, but like all the passionate loves of eros, my infatuation subsided to make way for the poetic dissonances of Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple and Dr. Dre. Through for the next cluster of years, I followed the erratic ebb and flow of frivolous dalliances of popular music.
Last year, however, I emerged from the dark abyss of mind rotting Top-100 music when friends introduced me to the cheap and incredibly enlightening practice of vinyl collection.
It never occurred to me, in my ignorance, that those albums staring me right in the face could be so wonderfully fulfilling.
This introduction into vinyl connoisseurship could not have come at a better time — that lovely period of free music, oh so much better than the hippies’ free love that I listen to being promulgated on vinyl, was coming to an end.
Now I exploit the often free warmth of vinyl climbing into the lizard infested attics of aunts to pull out true treasures in music like Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” and Babe Stovall’s “Untitled.”
If I don’t get vinyl for free, I get it for next to nothing searching through the endless numbers of Montavani and Tijuana Brass Band albums at local Goodwill’s and Salvation Army’s.
I really never know what I am going to find, which is part of the allure. It’s a true treasure hunt.
If there has been a point at all to this column it is this — vinyl is a good way to open musical horizons while filling the gap left open by the demise of free MP3s.