Geoff from Music History
I had a conversation with my neighbor Peter the other day in which he mentioned how much he likes vinyl records. “People are into them now,” he told me, and I said I wanted to get rid of all mine, and would he like to take some? He would.
But he didn’t want to take advantage of my naïveté. He said he’d take a quick look and give me a rough idea what they’re worth so I wouldn’t get taken to the cleaners. Well, it’s an amazing thing. Every one of those LPs cost me about three bucks and it was my one non-pizza indulgence for quite a few of my low-earning years. And now they’re all textured with evidence of my former devotion; they have that patina of love; in other words, they’re thrashed.
It’s not like the Antiques Road Show. Crapping out your records does not make them more valuable. Still, my neighbor took far more than a quick look. He liked my taste. He found lots of stuff he wanted. “This one,” he said, holding up my Velvet Underground with Nico album, “is probably worth hundreds. Twice that, if you still had the peel-off yellow banana skin on the cover.”
“I had no idea!” I warbled.
Peter made arrangements for our local used-record merchant Geoff to drop by and get serious, or as serious as the young man could get when Peter and I were bellowing Captain Beefheart songs in the background.
I was aware that vinyl was popular again but I’m still unclear why. I thought CDs solved everything, all that music in a tidy little package, no having to get up every twenty minutes to flip the record. But I have been assured that there are more joys for the trained ear with vinyl than with anything else. Depth. Texture. Sonic perspicacity. The sound of someone dropping his guitar pick in the background, the bass player’s cigarette wheeze. I don’t know. I did buy nice speakers and a good turntable but as loud as I played some of this stuff I’m not sure I could have made any of those distinctions. And now I have tinnitus, so.
“You have no interest in these at all? How do you listen to your music?” Peter wanted to know.
Um. I had to think about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I mostly tell Alexa to funnel my Pandora stations through an Echo Dot. He would have staged an intervention and bundled me off to Acoustics Rehab.
But the truth is, I don’t listen to music much anymore, except what I play myself on the piano. It’s odd. When I was young, every time I moved into a new apartment the stereo would be the last thing to go from the old place and the first thing hooked up in the new. Somewhere along the line it evolved that I prefer coming into a quiet house. I need that after a hectic morning chasing kids off my lawn.
My friend Walter would have been appalled at the condition of my collection. As I recall, he used to buy a new album, play it once and record it to tape, direct a team of butterflies to ease it into a new sleeve and back in the cover, place it in a Plexiglass cube in a dark ISO-1 cleanroom and put it back in circulation only after the initial infatuation with the tape had worn off. My friend Walter keeps dermal gloves in his glovebox to wear when pumping gas. My friend Walter is tidy. You could eat off him. People have.
If my friend Walter had had custody of my record collection, I could be trekking in Patagonia by now. As it is, I have five hundred dollars and a priceless amount of space in my cabinet. The Velvet Underground was indeed worth $200. The second-most valuable record was by Betty Davis, at $75. Betty Davis was worth it. Although from the cover it looks like she might have been giving it away for free.
In my youth, I wasn’t into music at all. Then in my 20s, I discovered Alternative Rock, which I enjoyed. Green Day… The Cure… Weezer… The Bravery… REM… Foo Fighters, many of which I saw in concert in Philly. Then another period where I wasn’t into music.
Since I like to leave music on for my parrots when we go out, I tried different streams for them. Birdsong Radio, they didn’t much care for. Alternative Rock, nup. Classical? Meh. But then the local classical station switched over to jazz at night, and they LOVED jazz! There was much vocalizing and bell-ringing to accompany many jazz songs. I started leaving it on even when I was home. So my birds turned me on to jazz! Louis Armstrong… Ella… Mel… Blossom Dearie… Tony Bennett. I frequently thank them for leading me to discover jazz!
Nobody doesn’t like Louis Armstrong. Nobody I want to know, at least.
“I see trees of green…red roses too…”
Yes, music does indeed make it a wonderful world! My tastes in music are pretty wide ranging. I like jazz, classical, rock, folk, bluegrass, movie soundtracks, even musicals. Have to admit I’m not a fan of hip hop, rap and most country music. Like most of us, I have the old vinyl collection, then cassette tapes, then a bushel of CDs–many of them duplicating the vinyl albums. I did buy a good turntable again a few years ago so that I could play some of the vinyl but I have to admit that it hardly ever happens. I still get CDs every year when I go to the annual “international guitar night” concert that comes to town. Lots of great acoustic musicians. I do love Spotify where I can just decide which Beatles album I want to hear and it’s playing with one tap of the finger. Great to hear that you recovered some pizza money Murr!
Right–I traded in my entire record collection for two hours of a plumber’s time.
The banana peeled off? Maybe I got mine used or something, because I never was aware there was a sticker. I gave away my collection, including that one, and the Blind Faith with the “controversial” sleeve, and lots of other good stuff. But the person I gave them all to had supplied me with an outboard engine he wouldn’t take payment for so now we’re even.
You can see the banana peel in mint condition right over Geoff’s head, there.
I don’t remember the album sleeve–but I sure remember the cover with the little girl, and I didn’t even own that album.
Yeah I don’t understand the attraction vinyl, any more than I do with kids wanting to use a film camera and darkroom. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Aww, now you’ve got me thinking about helping Daddy in the darkroom.
My uncle Eddy was a photographer as a side hustle, and had a huge darkroom in his attic. It was like magic the way he could put what looked like a plain sheet of paper into a basin of some sort of chemical and a picture would slowly appear.
I got to rock the hypo. That’s all I know.
Having a killer stereo system was a must at MIT; Amar Bose was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and founder of Bose Corporation. A local slang; to impress someone was ‘to Bose them out’.
Gee, all we had was Robert H. Goddard, and no one gave a good goddard about that.
I have a few vinyl albums but I don’t think they’d be worth much, not in mint condition but surprisingly not as battered as they might have been. i have a double album set, Rolled Gold by the Rolling Stones and another double by Paul McCartney and I have the Abbey Road album which might be worth a few dollars, but I’m not planning on selling and everything else I’ve got isn’t worth a cracker to anyone but me.
I think I got $4 for the Abbey Road album (and that’s not retail).
Too funny as I like you play music, hardly ever listen unless live. Quiet is nice.
I always used to listen to music in my car, back when I listened to Alt. Rock. Now I just prefer the silence. It may be that as I get older, I feel the need to focus more on driving rather than singing along with music.
Word, Gramps.
That’s me!
I still have some vinyl. Among them, an early Santana, several Sinatras, the original “Irma la Douce” . Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone…
Shoot! Now I have to bend my stiff ol’ knee and get down to their shelf. But back in the 50s and 60s, when I still lived at home, my father and I amassed a helluva collection. He was mostly classical and I leaned towards jazz. Funny…I’ve just had a teenage memory of Eartha Kit. Dad always called her Earthy Kit. Yep. Bang on the button, Dad.
Git some spry young feller to get on his good knees and have a look at your collection. And hand you cash and a clean spot on the shelf.
And……apropos of nothing, skinny guys with impossibly long hair Drive.Me.Wild. (Don’t tell poor unsuspecting Geoff.) OK, I got that off my chest and shared it with the group. And *that* just made me remember that I’m not 25 any more, either……and now I’m gonna put on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ album and think about life…..
Oh, Ed. I hear ya. When I met my husband when I was 30 and he was 23, he was skinny with long, curly hair. (Still has long, curly hair, but not so skinny, Has a beer belly.) But, yeah… I LOVE skinny guys. Especially with long hair. Still do, but only from an aesthetic perspective. Not sexual.
For the record, I enjoy man-buns. And jeez. When I met Dave he was 6’5″ and about 160 pounds with the most gorgeous flowing dark hair…so there you go. I actually veer more toward 5’10 with a little meat on. Or David Strathairn, whichever shows up first.
I remember vividly that picture you posted of Dave when he was younger… in a bathtub. GAAAAHHHH!!!! 😍
Mimi and Murr — when I was in high school I had long hair but wasn’t skinny. When I got married I was skinny buy didn’t have long hair. Now I got neither to display. And I loved man-buns when they were on Toshiro Mifune or Tetsuya Nakadai, but that was it.
A lot of the hair goes away altogether, but some of the rest just migrates.
Scalp to ears, in my case.
An original VU copy with unpeeled sticker and Warhol crony Eric Emerson’s face on the back cover (it was airbrushed out after he threatened to sue for drug money) in good condition would be worth a Tesla. They’ve reissued it on vinyl, with Eric’s face reinstated- I bought a copy just so I can dream about selling it on eBay!
I’m feeling lucky I DON’T know these things!
About 3 or 4 years ago, I gave all of our vinyl (about 1,000 pieces) to our son-in-law and farmed out the electronics that went with them to anyone who could use (eCycle got some of it). I don’t miss any of it – love having the stuff out of the house. Maybe if we were the ages of you kids, we would have had some of the pieces that you name, but we old oldsters didn’t groove on that stuff.
mp3: the only way to go
“You kids?” Okay, I know that Murr is a few years older than I am…. but “kids?” Jeeze, I haven’t been called a kid since Paul’s aunt Marie died. She was in her 90s, so, yeah… I guess we were kids.So I am wondering…. exactly HOW old are YOU, Cop Car? I’m 67, and feel older AND younger in some ways.
I’ll let you two play together.
I bought a turntable and downloaded the Audacity app so I could transcribe my rarest LPs and painstakingly edit out every skip, click or pop. Now they’re all available online, even something about which the musician’s own daughter said she was certain the master tapes had disappeared forever. The turntable and the LPs are now in the garage.
I can’t part with my vinyl. I upgraded my (vintage) turntable, fixed up the old Marantz that I bought in ‘74, reconed the speakers, and now even the skips and scratches sound pretty good.
On the other hand, congrats for lightening your load.
“Reconed the speakers?” OMG, that’s a true audiophile speaking! And, I remember when Marantz was a revered, premium brand.
Gave a huuuuge collection of utterly sandblasted vinyl (most of it bought at used record stores in Cambridge MA)…plus all Bill’s DAD’s jazz vinyl (a huge cabinet full) to ReStore. The collectors in the area went crazy, and one who is a friend figured out whose collection it must’ve been. I felt bad for not having offered it to him in the first place, but I was cleaning out 30 years of Bill’s accumulation in the basement, and I could not be bothered with worrying about where it would all go. I was dimly aware that someone might want it, but I had to make a split second decision, and I said, “Take it. Take it all.” They sold those records for .25 apiece. Now Liam’s planning to take the turntable, and talking about buying a sound system (he can’t have my speakers and tuner just yet), and asking what all I had…sigh. Like you and Cindy McIntyre, I do not understand the fascination with film and vinyl. Been there. It was all a pain.