Chronicles of an Aging Gheorghie: Musical Memories

Our man in the OBX returns with a cool retrospective on his music collection, yesterday and today:

When the missus and I downsized in preparation for our move almost four years ago, one of my least pleasant chores was purging my music collection. Growing up and starting work in the 1970s and ‘80s, I used an inordinate amount of disposable income to buy music. I owned 400-plus albums and another couple hundred CDs, after they supplanted albums.

All of the music had made seven previous moves with me, but we were relocating to a house that was almost one-third smaller. Our new house didn’t have the storage space, and my old-school, component stereo system – receiver, turntable, CD player, cassette deck, two speakers – was in rapidly declining health. The layout of the living space in the new house didn’t quite lend itself to a replacement stereo system, either, and I entertained vague notions of updating my music collection with streaming services and Bluetooth speakers and whatnot.

I saved a few albums for sentimental reasons and stuffed them into a cedar chest with old photos and assorted flotsam and jetsam. Most of the remaining albums I carried to a used record store in Norfolk called Skinnie’s, where the owner, a fellow named Steve, said he was interested. My albums were weighted heavily toward blues, jazz and ‘60s and ‘70s soul music, with a sprinkling of rock, alternative and what’s now called Americana. I brought in armloads of albums and Steve began to thumb through them. He looked up at one point, a little sheepish, and said, I can’t come close to paying you what they’re worth. I told him, no worries, that I was moving, had no place to put them, and pay me what you can. I told him I was happy they were with someone who appreciated them, whether he squirreled them away for himself or sold them all to customers who would want them. When I made a second music drop several days later, I drew some satisfaction from the fact that Steve had used my records as the foundation for a separate blues bin, and that the jazz discs had greatly enhanced that section of the store.

I saved a greater portion of my CDs – easier to store – and play them on a modest, little component system my wife kept and that sits on a corner table. As for updating and replacing the music I purged, well, a combination of laziness and techno-aversion prevailed. Shoot, I lean on the G:TB community and this site to keep me marginally current and to remind me of music I’ve forgotten.

Fast-forward to Christmas 2018. My wife and I keep gift giving with each other to a minimum, since we don’t need to further clutter our space with more stuff. But this Christmas, Suzanne brought out a box about two feet square and a foot high. She came across it while shopping for something else and decided to take a flier – a Victrola turntable, with self-contained speakers, an old-school radio dial and Bluetooth capabilities. Nothing fancy and relatively inexpensive. She kept some albums that she bought and thought it would be a kick to be able to play hers, as well as mine.

We bought a small table for the Victrola to sit on and carved out a space in the living area. I fished our albums out of the cedar chest – I’m not sure we’d opened it since we moved – and was jazzed to see that I’d saved more records than I remembered. A decent sampling of my old collection. Once or twice a week, we’ll crank up the turntable and play an album or two. Always makes me smile.
(Brief aside: digitizing voices, sounds and instrumentation and delivering tunes via electronic devices seems perfectly logical to me; but embedding music into the narrow grooves of a thin, round piece of vinyl and transmitting it through a stylus as it spins?!? That’s some goddamned wizardry.)

Records, and by extension, turntables appear to be making a comeback. Well, probably not a comeback. More like they climbed off life support and are now resting comfortably in an assisted-living facility outside Princeton, N.J. According to an October 2018 story on the music site Auxoro, vinyl purchases plummeted from a peak of 340 million people who bought records in 1978, to only 4.9 million people in 1991. Fewer than 900,000 albums were bought in 2006, according to the Record Industry Association of America, but in 2017, that number jumped to 14.3 million. Analysts think the number approached 20 million last year and believe that sales are likely higher, since the RIAA tracks only new record purchases and not used albums or indie-store traffic. A local music store here on the Outer Banks sells albums. The Barnes & Noble in Newport News, Va., sells records, as well, and not just remastered classics like the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or Aretha, but I saw the Lumineers and Panic! At the Disco. B&N also has a fair online album catalog.

Turntable purchases, according to a statistical aggregate site, jumped from 49,000 in 2012 to 67,000 in 2017. A high-end turntable manufacturer based in the Czech Republic, SEV Litovel, saw its production jump from 32,000 in 2009 to 125,000 in 2016 and spent $7 million on a new plant and expanded staff to meet demand. You can spend anywhere from $50-$60 to upwards of $10,000 on a turntable.

To be sure, records are a niche market, for oldsters such as myself who can’t give up the ghost, for audiophiles with deep pockets who regard music and its presentation as aural experience akin to art galleries, even for curious Millenials and GenXers who are intrigued by album art or liner notes or just the opportunity to hold onto a functioning piece of history. I believe that museums ought to have an exhibit, alongside the pioneers in covered wagons and Native-American villages, of a guy with shaggy hair and bell bottoms leaning over a turntable to place the needle on a record, with posters of Diana Ross and Carlos Santana on the walls behind him.

Today’s technology makes music access and storage so much more convenient and efficient and sensible. I begrudge no one’s attempts to streamline their existence. Hell, I should do more of it, myself. But a little impracticality and inconvenience helps keep you honest. And if there’s music at the end of the process, so much the better.