Friday, June 20, 2008
You'll pry my vinyls from my cold, dead hands
Ralph Berrier
Riffs, the regional music scene as heard by The Roanoke Times reporter Ralph Berrier, will appear weekly on Sundays.
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I was happy to see the saga of the lost record collection reach a happy ending last week.
You probably saw the story about the young woman whose mother inadvertently sold off her records at a yard sale. (If not, here it is.) Moms have been doing this kind of thing for generations. Baseball card collections, comic books and LPs are never safe around mothers who have spent their entire lives picking up after children and what thanks do they get? A stack of "Archies" and a box of 1977 Kellogg's 3-D cards, that's what.
What moms want, like everyone else, is cold, hard cash. So, once we're gone, out goes the clutter. That's what happened two weeks ago in Roanoke. The mom said she didn't mean to sell the records, that they had been accidentally included with the other yard sale stuff. Anyway, after a story about the lost record collection appeared in The Roanoke Times, the dude who bought it returned it (or most of it, at least).
Thus ended the story, which surely warmed the hearts of many baby boomers and Generation Xers who, after reading the first story about the lost records, went home that night and hugged their Bob Dylan and Smiths albums.
Teenagers, on the other hand, were nonplussed.
"What's a record collection?" they asked.
Yes, in a few years, there won't be any record collections at yard sales. It's a well-known fact that sales of musical "physical product" have melted like a vinyl record left in the sun. It's a digital domain these days, which means no more Cat Stevens LPs, George Jones eight-tracks or Smash Mouth CDs available for $10. What will moms do for cash?
Today, record collections are found on iPods. Come to think of it, moms could start selling those. They're much lighter than a milk crate of LPs.
Ah, milk crates! What will become of them? Once upon a time, every dorm room in America was lined with milk crates bearing stacks of albums -- alphabetized by artist, in my case, sometimes covered in protective plastic (not in my case). Now, what will people do with all the empty milk crates? Fill them with iPods? Lug milk around?
Record collections are still near and dear to the hearts of music fans who rose to musical maturity during the vinyl-sided era of classic albums.
We loved every part of an album, from the labels to the lyric sheets to the liner notes ("Wow! 'Dark Side of the Moon' was recorded in Abbey Road Studios! And Alan Parsons was an engineer!"). We even saved the stickers attached to the plastic wrap (some of us did, anyway).
I suppose record albums could be around longer than I think. They haven't made 78s in almost 60 years, but people still buy and sell them on eBay. Vinyl is experiencing a modest sales boom, as younger music fans learn about old-school technology and bands keep making limited amounts of vinyl albums. Some fans might even be starting their vinyl collections today.
This week on the CutNScratch music blog hosted by Tad Dickens and yours truly, we asked people to tell us the record they couldn't afford to lose from their collection.
We got some great responses -- "Shoot Out the Lights," by Richard and Linda Thompson, the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," "Led Zeppelin IV" (or "ZoSo" or whatever the heck you want to call it), "Tupelo Honey" by Van Morrison, and albums by the likes of Metallica, Radiohead, Faith No More, the Blues Brothers and the Waxing Poetics.
(Stevie D, formerly of Illbotz, gave a great answer when he wrote: "This question is really hard for a music snob such as myself. I could easily go with The Replacements' 'Let It Be' or Husker Du's 'New Day Rising' or even Dusty Springfield's 'Dusty In Memphis.' But by far, the album I cannot live without is: Shaquille O'Neal -- 'Shaq Fu: Da Return.' " Now, who would want to lose that?)
Some of you are thinking, "Dude, if you ever lost those albums, why wouldn't you just download 'em?"
You can't download a memory.
Tell us the record you'd hate for your mom to sell on roanoke.com/blogs.
