Featured Essay: MIchael, Muppets, and Memories

by Caleb Coy

The boys found the record player in my mother’s basement in the toy room turned guest bedroom next to the stuffed animals. When I was a child in the 1980s she had one of those tall silver stereo cabinets with a glass door over it. It was where I first heard John Denver, Michael Jackson, Earth Wind & Fire, Sesame Street, The Muppets, and “Purple Rain” by Prince.

My mom sold off the huge cabinet by the time I was in high school. She went without a record player for years until we got her one for Christmas. This was one of those smaller, retro Crosley units you find at a department store display and includes a CD reader and radio with a brass-colored front plate. Then we tried it out with Jim Croce, Kenny Rogers, and The Avett Brothers, and an old recording of Nikki Giovanni and the New York Community Choir.

Over time, we’d forgotten about the record player. It stayed in the old playroom, left under a pile of old toys and blankets, until we cleaned it up and moved the pullout sofa in to make it into a guest bedroom. My wife and I would stay in it, or my brother and his wife, as we moved out and grew up and had children.

Time marched on. We’d put aside cassettes and CDs for digital downloads. Even the Bose radio fell out of use. If Mom wanted to play a song she had her Alexa in the kitchen, millions of songs out of a baseball-sized speaker. Then one evening I have two boys over, ages eight and twelve. They notice the record player. Their eyes grow wide.

The boys try out the radio dial, but what really catches their attention is how the record player works. They’re as fascinated as I was by how the platter automatically begins to spin once you take the arm off the lever. When I was little it felt almost like the machine was alive, like a little carousel of horses was underneath, pulling the music along.

We go through the records in the stack, some of them Mom’s originals, some acquired in yard sales over the years. Kenny and Time In A Bottle are still around. The Second Gleam, the only one younger than me, is in almost mint condition. Thriller is the first one they select, Michael glowing in his white suit on the cover. My twelve-year-old has been singing along to “Beat It” for the past year, even dancing with me in the parking lot with me when it comes on the radio. The King of Pop is the perfect introduction to vinyl—not too old for them to appreciate, but old enough for them to appreciate the time machine.

I show them how to set the record on the platter, lift the arm, and set the stylus on the edge of the spinning record, pointing out the groove circles between the songs. In a way, it was more efficient than cassettes at selecting a song quickly. Instantly the crackle is a trigger of my earliest musical memories, and every one of us in the room is a little boy.

We play “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” for a minute, until their ADHD brains lose patience and move it to “Thriller.” We attempt the zombie dance and forgetfully lip-sync the lyrics. I’m tasked with playing Vincent Price, including the song-ending cackle. For a good two minutes my mother’s basement is haunted by dark winds, creaking doors, howling werewolves, and electrified kids. It’s “Thriller” as I remembered it, funky and fresh. We had truly awoken the undead.

We have to play “Beat It,” of course, and I’m pleased to see my oldest enjoy it just as much as if it were coming from an iPod, if not more.

But now it’s my eight-year-old’s turn to choose a record. At first he wants to hear John Denver sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” but then he spots Kermit and Miss Piggy in a canoe under a rainbow. We have to pop in the soundtrack to The Muppet Movie.

This song has a history in our family. Since I was a kid, I would imitate Kermit the Frog, and my cousin would play “The Rainbow Connection” on the piano. The banjo starts up, playing the opening bars, followed by the piano. In this brief span of time an idea hits all three of us at once. There is a plush ventriloquy doll of Bert the Sesame Street muppet leaning against the record player. The boys hand it to me, I get my hand inside, and Bert begins lip synching “The Rainbow Connection.” The three of us are swaying around the room as Bert performs the song to his fullest.

We all traveled on a carousel back in time that evening. Record players to me will always be a time machine. Thanks to a needle in a groove, I was a child again in my mother’s house, being introduced for the first time to the songs that shaped our pop culture for almost half a century. Sometimes I wonder what kind of future my children will press into their records. But on that day, I looked only to the past.

Caleb Coy is a freelance writer with a master’s degree in English from Virginia Tech. He lives with his family in southwest Virginia. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, Potomac Review, Plough, Harpur Palate, The Common, and elsewhere. He is the author of the 2015 novel, An Authentic Derivative. He is currently at work on a memoir.