Vinyl Records Quotes

Our parents surround us with origin stories that create deep grooves in the vinyl records of our lives.

Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. . . . It's a magpie Christmas market.

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home." "I prefer normal music." "Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse.

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.

The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head ("If I don't find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do"), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something they don't really want.

When people would ask me what I’m addicted to, I always said ‘music.’ And while they’d laugh it off like it’s a cliché, I’m actually a complete shopaholic when it comes to records. I’d literally buy 10 albums a week for years, so when I went to that Virgin Records and it said ‘going out of business,’ my heart stopped.

I couldn't control my brain any more.  It wasn't working.  It was like a record player needle had slipped into the groove in the vinyl

The record store was a place of escape. It was a library and a clubhouse” - Cameron Crowe quoted

I can appreciate that,” says Henry. He’s adding to the list. I look over his shoulder. Sex Pistols, the Clash, Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Dead Kennedys, X, the Mekons, the Raincoats, the Dead Boys, New Order, the Smiths, Lora Logic, the Au Pairs, Big Black, Pil, the Pixies, the Breeders, Sonic Youth… Henry, they’re not going to be able to get any of that up here.” He nods, and jots the phone number and address for Vintage Vinyl at the bottom of the sheet. “You do have a record player, right?” My parents have one,” Bobby says. Henry winces. What do you really like?” I ask Jodie. I feel as though she’s fallen out of the conversation during the male bonding ritual Henry and Bobby are conducting. Prince,” she admits. Henry and I let out a big Whoo! And I start singing “1999” as loud as I can, and Henry jumps up and we’re doing a bump and grind across the kitchen. Laura hears us and runs off to put the actual record on and just like that, it’s a dance party.

Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.

This luxury of mind began with a RECORD.

a record has the human touch embedded in the grooves, the stamp of someone who once believed in it.

Tyler refused to listen to CDs, insisting that real vinyl records were the only way to go. Blair worried her brother was turning into a loser.

know what I am. I’m lace and daisies and a fiddle on my grandparents’ back porch. Dirt roads and dandelions, like Papa says. Vinyl records in a world of digital downloads.

All the men in Daddy's records sang of love with drastically imbalanced emotion. In the span of three minutes, they begged for it and kicked it to the curb. They turned to anybody, even to God, with a perpetual request: Please send me someone to love. But once they got it, love scrambled them.

It wasn’t just 1) the artwork and sleeve notes on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a hidden track, or a little message carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the quality of sound. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, “Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”) It wasn’t even 4) the ritual of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the journey. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to the next, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to get up off your arse and take part.

It may seem hard to understand why a group of white people would put this much energy into re-creating a problem that was solved 150 years ago, but remember, these are the same people who reenact the Civil War and listen to vinyl records.

So while Ingrid would excel at everything out there in the world, Britt-Marie imagined herself being really good at things inside of it. Cleaning. Making things nice. Her sister noticed this. Noticed her. Britt-Marie did her hair every morning, and her sister never forgot to say, “Thanks, you did that really well, Britt!” while she turned her head in front of the mirror to a tune from one of her vinyl records. Britt-Marie never had records. You don’t need any when you have an older sister who truly sees you.

I'm fairly tired of hipsters. They have terrible taste in music. These kids come in and say, 'You don't have anything that was released this year?' That makes me crazy. We don't need anything from this year! (Bob Diener, owner of Record Swap in Champaign, IL)

Now that I’ve owned up to being a collector, I’ll say that what really gets me off is knowing I have this personal library of everything that appeals to me, and that I can pull any of it out whenever I want to. That’s the wonderful thing, customizing the soundtrack of your life.

During our travels, we sample cultures, looking for ways to combine flavor and techniques, the way Black hip hop artists dive deep into the archives. We create our own vernacular as an offering: The record needle is the knife, the vinyl is the plateware, the speakers are the spice. Talk to us nice!

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

You ease a record from its cover. It's years since you've held one but you do this without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell.

the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

The land of the 45rpm record is the land of chaos.

Any music fan could get to know a song on a favorite 45, a bigger fan might risk playing the B-side.

I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.

There’s a vast fraternity of record collectors, and the record store was their hub. There was not a lot of information on these groups or the labels so you’d gather [there] and it would be like a library. - Lenny Kaye quoted

Even though we get a lot of people into the shop, only a small percentage of them buy anything. The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there’s nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter; this is because they have been making a list of possible purchases in their head (‘If I don’t find anything in the next five minutes, that blues compilation I saw half an hour ago will have to do’), and suddenly sicken themselves with the amount of time they have wasted looking for something that they don’t really want. I know that feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterwards, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of a newspaper, or go to see a Peter Greenaway film, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the candyfloss worthlessness clogging up your head.

National Record Mart began when Hyman Shapiro and his sons Sam and Howard opened their first music store in 1937. A tiny storefront in downtown Pittsburgh, they called it Jitterbug Records and sold used jukebox records for a dime apiece.

Kit spoke vintage vinyl in all its dialects. And he casually rubbed elbows with stars from all walks of life. Oh, and he was twenty. And drop-dead gorgeous. Kit Hemion was a very big way Aaron's Records made money with the West Side set.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Needless to say, he was the suitor that won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I've heard of these postcards - over the years, I've heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl Exile on Main Street with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

The last song of the record was followed by the hollowness of the end. Sometimes he wondered if that’s what the afterlife sounded like. Those few seconds at the end of the vinyl where there’s sound but no music, just a crackle, a warped scratch.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

I turned myself into a vinyl hawk, scouring record shops for out-of-print LPs, studying them with Talmudic intensity. The music I loved would all be dug out of studio archives and put onto CD within a few years, but then it was still scratchy and moldy and entirely my own.

The catechism of the vinyl LP involved a complex series of rituals over sleeves, sides played, needles, fluff and cloths, that were only enhanced by the scents of the record (rather waxy) and cardboard (woodlouse dampish, if anything) that mingled with the actions like incense.

After we hung up, I took the joint. If I was going to die here, in the creepy basement out of a horror movie, in an epic snowstorm that was like an icy prison, with a wife unwilling to pretend-like Bananarama to maybe save her husband's life, I should at least go out with a smile on my face.

I learned that my boom box was awesome at recording, but I didn't know my soul was also good at it and that my heart would remember all the things that would ever break it. Most recordings have a way of fading over time and losing their quality, but the moments that become the record our souls keep manage to stay so vivid.

The ring of the old telephones, the clacking of typewriters, milk in bottles, baseball without designated hitters, vinyl records, galoshes, stockings and garter belts, black-and-white movies, heavyweight champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, paperback books for thirty-five cents, the political left, Jewish dairy restaurants, double features, basketball before the three-point shot, palatial movie houses, nondigital cameras, toaster that lasted for thirty years, contempt for authority, Nash Ramblers, and wood-paneled station wagons. But there is nothing you miss more than the world as it was before smoking was banned in public places.

(A few years ago in Fushun, China, two dolphins ate strips of their tank’s vinyl lining and were saved by Bao Xishun, a 7′9″ Mongolian herdsman who appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Tallest Man.” When surgical tools failed, Xishun reached down the dolphins’ throats with his forty-two-inch arms and extracted the plastic.)

I am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be special. I think it began, the soft piano ballad of epiphanic freedom that danced in my head, when you mentioned that "Van Gogh was her thing" while I stood there in my overall dress, admiring his sunflowers at the art museum. And then again on South Street, while we thumbed through old records and I picked up Morrissey and you mentioned her name like it was stuck in your teeth. Each time, I felt a paintbrush on my cheeks, covering my skin in grey and fading me into a quiet, concealed background that hummed everything you've ever loved has been loved before, and everything you are has already been on an endless loop. It echoed in your wrists that I stared at, walking (home) in the middle of the street, and I felt like a ghost moving forward in an eternal line, waiting to haunt anyone who thought I was worth it. But no one keeps my name folded in their wallet. Only girls who are able to carve their names into paintings and vinyl live in pockets and dust bunnies and bathroom mirrors. And so be it, that I am grey and humming in the background. I am forgotten Sundays and chipped fingernail polish and borrowed sheets. I'm the song you'll get stuck in your head, but it will remind you of someone else. I am 2 in the afternoon, I am the last day of winter, I am a face on the sidewalk that won't show up in your dreams. And I am everywhere, and I am nothing at all.

No, they’re just black vinyl. Probably somebody else’s record that didn’t sell for shit and they got stuck with a bunch of leftovers. They hit it with some spray paint and stick a commemorative label on it and you’ve got your ‘Official Gold Record.’ Kind of ironic though, isn’t it…marking your success with someone else’s failure.” --Reggie Sinclair from Angela's Coven

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs. Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit. You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope! Outside

All these processes are helped along by another friend of the earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weight three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don't need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact disks and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass--even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level.

You know, the sound of a 45 rpm record being played at 33 rpm. But as soon as I remembered that this is a CD and not vinyl, I could only marvel at the fact that these guys are so gol-darned HEAVY [author’s emphasis].”25 In an interview with the now-defunct influential extreme hardcore band Lärm, a band member recalls an incident in which the band’s definition of music collided with a sound engineer’s more mainstream ditto: “The sound check of our first concert ever was funny, the PA guy kept asking us when we were actually going to play a song…we already played three, we said.He shut down the PA and left…

Thomas Edison was testing wax and sound. Edison’s phonograph was first developed using a steel needle and tinfoil to capture the audio impressions of his voice. Tin tore easily and produced a muted recording, so Edison turned to beeswax, aware of its ability to capture detailed impressions. He substituted a wax cylinder for the tinfoil and recorded tiny scratches and grooves of sound. Applying the ancient technique of lost wax, he applied a micro-thin layer of gold atop the wax so that heavier layers of metal could then be added to create a mold. When the wax was lost and vinyl was added to the mold, the permanent record of sound was gained. Wax

The music still came from the house. It was past midnight. What kind of old lady plays rock music after midnight? One who still plays old vinyl records. One who keeps a weird tombstone in her wooded backyard. One who has strange visitors in a black car with a license plate number engraved on that same weird tombstone. One who told a teenage boy that his dead father was still alive. “What’s this?” Ema asked. I snapped back to the present. “What?” “Behind here.” She was pointing to the back of the tombstone. “There’s something carved into the back.” I walked over slowly, but I knew. I just knew. And when I reached the back of the tombstone and shined the light on it, I was barely surprised. A butterfly with animal eyes on its wings. Ema gasped. The music in the house stopped. Just like that. Like someone had flicked the off switch the moment my eyes found that dang symbol. Ema looked up at my face and saw something troubling. “Mickey?” Nope, there was no surprise. Not anymore. There was rage now. I wanted answers. I was going to get them, no matter what. I wasn’t going to wait for Mr. Shaved Head with the British accent to contact me. I wasn’t going to wait for Bat Lady to fly down and leave me another cryptic clue. Heck, I wasn’t even going to wait until tomorrow. I was going to find out now. “Mickey?

I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the "Believe it or Not" song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the "Should have been somebody eeeeeelse" part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now. But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, "Let's play the fucking Misfits." Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, "Fuck yeah!" And you're feel cool by association. "Let's play the fucking Misfits," I said. John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. "Fuck yeah." Told you.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

Many people with creative genes also suffer from various neurological disorders; you can be Mozart and still be bipolar,” says Salerian. “There is a very close link between creativity and dysfunction of the nervous system—it’s part of a mood disorder package that artistic people have a higher chance of suffering from.

Not only are we digital immigrants, we are also media dinosaurs. We enjoy thumbing through glossy magazines, and maybe still subscribe to a daily newspaper. We schedule at least one evening per week around a favorite TV program, created by one of the major television or cable networks. We can name at least one local or national news anchor. And scattered around our homes and offices are veritable graveyards of physical media — old tapes, vinyl records, floppy disks, and magazines — that we insist on keeping, even though we'll probably never use them again.

Back in the days before CDs, or even cassette recordings, I would spend hours consumed with listening to rhythmic vinyl record albums, unaware that they infiltrated my subconscious with mystical religiosity.

Maybe trust is less about God being some superhero who swoops in and saves the day just as I was about to give up. Maybe trust is more like the sigh of relief I take when I get home after a long day. Maybe it is more this assurance that I have a place where I am safe and loved, even when chaos is happening outside those doors or inside my soul. That place is in God, in trusting his plans for me, his love for me, his ability to take care of me and be concerned with both the details and the big picture of my life. Maybe God wants me to trust him even when I don’t know how. Even when there are no easy answers. Even when there are no answers at all. I like my understanding. My understanding makes sense

The notion that a story should unfold over the course of two or three hundred pages was as antiquated as the idea that a band’s musical output should consist of four or five songs on one side of a piece of vinyl, and then four or five slightly more experimental and intelligent songs on the other side. Albums used to make sense; they used to hang together as a body of work, and this had something to do with the fact that vinyl records could only hold eight or ten songs. Digital music changed all that. A quote-unquote album could now hold two mp3s or two hundred.

the LP sleeve acquires the same scuffs, knocks and wrinkles as its purchaser. It engenders the same affection as the ageing groove. Reflective

So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what?" John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.

Got it!" Mike announced. The GE record player slowly whirred to life, creaky as an old carousel. "Nice," John said, raising a beer in salute. "What'd you do?" "It wasn't on," Mike said.

It's like a blueberry White Russian,' John said, now on his third spoonful. 'It tastes exactly the same,' Mike said, his teeth already bright blue. 'No, no, it tastes better,' John said. 'I feel like it's making me stronger.

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.

During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite

Yes, this was a haunted place. He had read about certain materials absorbing the sounds of their surroundings like divots in a vinyl recording, and now, as the sun started to dip below the horizon, this concept chilled him more than the creeping cold. Put a needle to the mortar of these walls and listen to the screams. His own would be among them.

Ed began explaining this Yo La Tengo thing, how he was listening to a record of theirs, on vinyl he emphasized, and he'd been thinking about a genre of music called shoegaze something about the body language of the shoegazer, the perpetual crumpling or downward slope of the gazer's neck, and then he changed the subject, abruptly, to nettle root—had I ever taken nettle root? I was in a subdued, semi-meditative state, but he repeated himself, louder—Mary, have you ever taken nettle root?—and I said, Um, no, to which he immediately began chanting.

Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser’s parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, 'Life can be other than it has been.

Down these mean crates a man must dig." page 41.

a slender vinyl attaché case; the kind carried by State Department clerks, computer salesmen, and executive trainees. This, which she opened on her lap, had proved to contain such serious businesslike material as yellow-lined legal pads, ballpoint pens, graph paper, loose-leaf filler books, a cassette recorder, sharpened yellow pencils, and a slide rule. (I have always envied people who know what a slide rule is for. It’s not even the question of how you use it, it’s more basic than that; I am convinced there have been moments in my life which would have been made easier if I had been equipped with a handy slide rule and the mastery of its operation, but I’m so ignorant I don’t even know which moments those were. Never have I said, “Oh, if only I had a slide rule!” though surely there have been times when it was the appropriate thing to say.) But not at the moment for Ms. Scott. She’d taken from the attaché case only one legal pad and one ballpoint pen, then closed

Manuel raises his eyebrows. “Interesting.” He peers down at Greyfoot. “How do you like our Festival, then? Never gotten the opinion of a local, but here we are of all places. Huh! Life is funny. So I assume you’ve been witness to Santiago de Tarragona’s Greatest Hits and Whistles. What do you think?” He waits, as if expecting an actual response. Greyfoot stares at him blankly. “That’s the name of his record,” says Marjani. “We have it on vinyl.” “His songs,” someone calls out. “On his album.” Greyfoot is not going to get through his particular interaction without some sort of answer. He sees that now. He clears his throat. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve heard it.

Ninety percent of the children who entered her classroom had never seen a record player or vinyl records.

The previous day she had been on a conference call with a younger Urban Outfitters marketing team member (the chain now sells more vinyl and turntables than anyone else in America), who asked Braun what the little lines on the records meant. “I had to tell her those are the songs,” she said.

A 2015 research report in the United Kingdom found that the main consumers of vinyl records that year were 18- to 24-year-olds, and research group MusicWatch noted that more than half of vinyl buyers were under 25. Not ageing, retro hipsters. Not crusty old dudes.

He watched God flip through a few records before pulling one. He slid the vinyl out as carefully as Day would before placing it on the turntable. Soon Day’s room was filled with the soft sounds of George Howard’s Midnight Moods. It was a smooth, sexy jazz album; definitely one for making love to. Day’s

He got up to put on a record, vinyl was his thing now. He liked the step-by-stepness of it, the process. He held the record the way people hold records, not with his fingers but with his palms. He blew on it. The music was a soft whisper, one acoustic guitar, no voices. When he came back to the table he asked me to look at his eyes. They’re seeping, he said. Like I have an infection or something. Pink eye? I asked. I don’t know, he said. They always seem to be running, just clear liquid, not pus. I lie in bed and all this liquid dribbles out the sides. Maybe I should see a doctor, or optometrist or something. You’re crying Nic. No… Yes. That’s what they call crying. But all of the time? he asked. I’m not even conscious of it then. It’s a new kind of crying, I said. For the new times. I leaned over and put my hands on his shoulders and then on the sides of his face in the same way that he’d held his record.

Apart from live performance, vinyl analog recordings were Georgiou’s favorite way to enjoy music. Rich, warm, and so eerily present—that was the enduring appeal of analog media, the bizarre magic that gave them such cachet

WGHB started as a Clearwater, Florida radio station in 1925. By 1927, its call letters changed to WFLA and it moved to 590 AM. WFLA inaugurated its broadcasting in the Tampa area on February 14, 1955. During those early years WFLA had had several music formats including middle-of-the-road and adult contemporary music before switching to news/talk in 1986. The most popular music you heard in the Tampa Bay Area was referred to as “good music” by the retirees and although big bands were at their zenith during and right after World War II, by 1947 most music critics knew that their time had passed. Although, Benny Goodman was only 46 in 1955, Tommy Dorsey was 49 and Count Basie was 51, in many quarters they were still popular and perhaps their music always will be. I for one had my Hi-Fidelity 33 1/3 rpm multi stacked record player and a stash of vinyl long play recordings shipped to West Africa. For me time stood still as I listened and entertained my friends. Some years later I actually met Harry James at the Crystal Ballroom in Disneyland. Wow, those were the days….

a record player needle had slipped into the groove in the vinyl and I couldn't get it out again.

And here I’m learning one of the secrets: that good stereo sound is a psychedelic experience. I’m not just seeing Satchmo’s horn, I’m seeing the shape of the notes and the color of the sound. When he sings, I’m looking deep down into his throat while the drums and bass push me from behind. So now I understand why a lot of record collectors don’t do drugs—when they crank that stereo up, they’re already doing one. Every vinyl junkie has a moment like this, when the sound hits you between the eyes and you’re hooked for life.

It’s funny that because a lot of old jazz is being sampled now, you are finding a lot of young kids, a lot of scenesters and clubgoers, who are getting praise, laurels and dates with women because they listen to people like Herbie Hancock. In my day, listening to Herbie Hancock would have gotten you beaten up.

Proving that styluses never go out of fashion, sales of vinyl record albums rocketed to 9.2m in America last year, the most since 1993. Although that represented only around 4% of total albums sold, the growth of vinyl is in sharp contrast to the decline in music downloaded through various online stores, as more people switch to music-streaming services. Vinyl has increased in popularity partly as a collector’s item. Fans can keep their LPs in mint condition by listening to the music on free downloads that come with the album package.

Once, in the time when musical recordings were commonly sold on vinyl, an advertising agency decided to market some product or other by way of a 45-r.p.m. single cover-mounted on a magazine. This being an advertising agency, of course, the first point of business was that they all sit around in a room and discuss what colour it should be.

To us, a party is more about the electric energy of the event. It’s about the ease of the moment. It’s about creating an environment that lets the guests feel less like guests and more like kindred spirits. It’s about less effort and more comfort. And sometimes all it takes is an old record player and your favorite vinyls to release the inner party animal.

Oh, oh Try not to think so much about The truly staggering amount Of oil that it takes to make a record All the shipping, the vinyl The cellophane lining, the high gloss The tape and the gear Try not to become too consumed With what's a criminal volume Of oil that it takes to paint a portrait The acrylic, the varnish Aluminum tubes filled with latex The solvents and dye, oh Let's just call this what it is The jealous side of mankind's death wish When it's my time to go Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose Try not to dwell so much upon How it won't be so very long From now that they laugh at us for selling A bunch of fifteen year olds made from dinosaur bones singing, "Oh yeah" Again and again Right up to the end Let's just call this what it is The jealous side of mankind's death wish When it's my time to go Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose, oh I'll just call this what it is My vanity gone wild with my crisis One day this all will repeat I sure hope they make something useful out of me

It was to be the longest flight I had ever made in my young life and one of the most interesting. Having always been interested in the magic of aviation I knew that the DC-6B, I boarded was an approximately 75 seat, trans-ocean, Pan Am Clipper. It would also be the last long distance propeller driven commercial airliner. The only difference between it and the DC-6A was that it didn’t have a large cargo door in its side, and it was also approximately 5 feet longer than the DC-6A. 1955 was a good year and people felt relatively safe with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House. “I like Ike” had been his political motto since before he assumed office on January 20, 1953, even many Democrats held him in high esteem for his military service and winning the war in Europe. Eisenhower obtained a truce in Korea and worked diligently trying to ease the tensions of the Cold War. He did however fail to win over Georgy Malenkov, or Nikolai Bulganin who succeeded him, as Premier of the Soviet Union in February of 1955. As a moderate Conservative he left America, as the strongest and most productive nation in the world, but unfortunately because of his lack of diplomacy and love of golf, failed to prevent Cuba from slipping into the communist camp. WFLA inaugurated its broadcasting in the Tampa Bay area on February 14, 1955. The most popular music was referred to as good music, and although big bands were at their zenith in 1942, by 1947 and music critics will tell you that their time had passed. However, Benny Goodman was only 46 in 1955, Tommy Dorsey was 49 and Count Basie was 51. So, in many sheltered quarters they were still in vogue and perhaps always will be. I for one had my Hi-Fidelity 33 1/3 rpm multi stacked record player and a stash of vinyl long play recordings shipped to Africa. For me time stood still as I listened and entertained my friends. Some years later I met Harry James at the Crystal Ballroom in Disneyland. Those were the days…. Big on the scene was “Rhythm in Blues,” an offshoot of widespread African-American music, that had its beginnings in the ‘40s. It would soon become the window that Rock and Roll would come crashing through.

a clergyman I had come to think of as the Digital Divine, who lived nearby in Barnes, had decided to get rid of his enormous, and wonderful, collection of rare jazz records. He

The technology involved,* given the economics of mass production, would have added no more than a few pounds to the final purchase price, so why would you not add this significant extra?* Any ‘rational’ person would have advised Morita to go with the engineers’ advice, but according to multiple accounts, Morita vetoed the recording button. This defies all conventional economic logic, but it does not defy psycho-logic. Morita thought the presence of a recording function would confuse people about what the new device was for. Was it for dictation? Should I record my vinyl record collection onto cassette? Or should I record live music? In the same way that McDonald’s omitted cutlery from its restaurants to make it obvious how you were supposed to eat its hamburgers, by removing the recording function from Walkmans, Sony produced a product that had a lower range of functionality, but a far greater potential to a change behaviour.

That one afternoon six months ago at a vinyl convention in Seattle when she’d felt like the main character. Browsing through records with Fox Thornton, king crab fisherman and a lady-killer of the highest caliber. When they’d stood shoulder to shoulder and shared a pair of AirPods, listening to “Silver Springs,” the world just kind of fading out around them.

So can we arrive at a general principle as to why e-books have flopped in developed markets while audio and video streaming have triumphed? The technology commentator and best-selling author Edward Tenner argues that there are several reasons people are sometimes reluctant to abandon an old technology in favor of a new one. The first involves the potential vulnerabilities of the new thing. For instance, the fax machine is now a museum piece, but for a while people continued to prefer it over emailing scanned documents out of security concerns. Another potential reason involves aesthetics and nostalgia. Although dwarfed by music CDs and streaming, vinyl record sales continue to grow within the niche market of music aficionados. And despite improvements in automatic transmissions, certain car lovers prefer stick shifts. Perhaps the key to understanding format resilience is that technologies rise and fall as part of ecosystems, rarely on their own or by themselves. Those ecosystems need to evolve quickly, through open innovation, in order to appeal to new generations of users, transforming the landscape in the process. E-book platforms have remained fundamentally closed to external innovators, especially on the software side. As a result, the functionality of e-books remains limited. Moreover, research indicates that reading a physical book enables the reader to absorb information more efficiently than reading the same book on an e-reader or a tablet. “The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized,” argues Abigail Sellen, a scientist and engineer at Microsoft Research Cambridge in England. “Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don’t think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book.

Largely in five or six years I think vinyl will go,' Wilson predicted. 'I welcome that. I've no reservations at all. Perhaps CD is part of the whole yuppie culture, they discovered it, but that will change because it sounds so great. I'm a CD evangelist, maybe I'm a yuppie too and as we all know, all yuppies should be shot. As a member of the middle class I've always said I don't mind going to the wall if it's absolutely necessary.

Go to a traditional folk music festival. The quality of the playing and singing will blow your mind. But like the rise in vinyl record production, house shows, and other aspects of hipster culture, it is quintessentially “analog”—the sonic equivalent of the farm-to-table movement. The great electronic musician and producer Brian Eno, who has been working in funky analog studios in West Africa, has begun to question the very raison d’être of digital recording, which, thanks to Auto-Tune (the tech tool that allows engineers to correct singers with bad pitch), makes it possible to turn a second-rate singer into a diva: “We can quantize everything now; we can quantize audio so the beat is absolutely perfect. We can sort of do and undo everything. And of course, most of the records we like, all of us, as listeners, are records where people didn’t do everything to fix them up and make them perfect.” Tech’s perfection tools do not make for human art.

all the reasons vinyl was better than CD or cassette tape. It wasn’t just 1) the ARTWORK and SLEEVE NOTES on the album sleeve. It wasn’t 2) the possibility of a HIDDEN TRACK, or a little MESSAGE carved in the final groove. It wasn’t 3) the mahogany richness of the QUALITY OF SOUND. (But CD sound was clean, the reps argued. It had no surface noise. To which Frank replied, ‘Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?’) It wasn’t even 4) the RITUAL of checking the record before carefully lowering the stylus. No, most of all it was about the JOURNEY. 5) The journey that an album made from one track to another, with a hiatus in the middle, when you had to get up and flip the record over in order to finish. With vinyl, you couldn’t just sit there like a lemon. You had to GET UP OFF YOUR ARSE and TAKE PART.

I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature's greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, pâtés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. My father would tear it into strips and we'd eat it watching television together until our jaws were sore, and I'd wash it all down with small sips from one of my mother's Coronas. Neither one of my parents graduated from college. I was not raised in a household with many books or records. I was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn't have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch. I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor---blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

spend the next fifteen minutes organizing my vinyl records and cleaning my drums. I got so much shit from my family about my human music preferences, but they could kiss my ass. Just because I didn’t want to sit around listening to the lute or whatever else they had in 1705 didn’t make me a bad vampire.

It is still possible to find astonishingly rare records at bargain prices in charity shops. Of course most of these shops have resident ‘experts’ to sift through their stock and pull out any choice items for premium pricing. In practice this means anything by the Beatles or Elvis being assigned astronomical price tags regardless of their scarcity or collectability. But the same chump who thinks a digitally remastered reissue of the King’s greatest hits on wafer-thin late 1980s vinyl is worth a small fortune might well let a British Vogue yellow label release of a Sonny Rollins Contemporary slip through for a pittance.

Together, they placed Trigger in a case all its own, clearing out the gold records that hung there. (“Gold records are bullshit,” Pete said, throwing them behind them in a pile. They clattered as they fell—not the sound of metal against metal, but the sound of garbage against garbage. “Disposable. Not even real gold. Just some cheap shit vinyl they spray-paint.”)

This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.