Featured Essay: The Night I Bought a Record I Couldn't Play

by Margaret Muiruri

It was a late autumn night characterized by heavy rain and clean streets illuminated by quivering streetlights. I was fresh out of a little sweaty club where a local band had run through half of The White Album, with their passion half ragged and half sincere. I was still ringing in the ears and trudging along a row of closed-up shops, with my coat turned up to the wind. It was then that I noticed it: a small opening brightened by the warm incandescence of a solitary bulb and over the door, in hand-written letters, the sign “Needle & Groove Records.”

The store was of a previous era. The interior was snug and hot and smelled of old cardboard sleeves, polished wood, and the slight odor of coffee in a half-consumed mug on the counter. Shelves of albums lay at exact angles in well-worn wooden caddies, each cover glaring back all the colors of the rainbow, psychedelic splashes, furious monochrome portraits, and block-letter titles.

I was just going to pass when the bell over the door tinkled, and my legs bore me in without asking leave. A man behind the counter, about sixty years of age, looked up out of a magazine, nodded slightly, and returned to his reading. In the back of it, a turntable was turning something slow and smoky, perhaps Billie Holiday, and every note had been rubbed smooth like the borders of an old photograph.

That is when I spotted it.

It was there in a bin marked “Imports,” and it was Japanese Abbey Road. The cover was clean, the colors as saturated as any I had ever viewed. The track list was printed on the back in beautiful Japanese print, and a strip of text up and down the middle of it, or obi, as it is called, was in red and cream. I received it delicately, like a dear book. The shiny jacket was caught in the poor light of the shop, and I glimpsed the sheen of the vinyl as I pushed it out a little.

It cost 35 dollars, to me, the most I had ever paid individually on an album. And here was the absurd thing: I had no turntable. Not even a cheap one. I had been streaming music and occasionally using CDs for years. It did not make any practical sense to purchase this record.

And yet…

I nevertheless purchased it.

The gent at the counter was quiet; all he said was “run the price up” and slapped it into a brown paper sleeve with a half-smile that said he had seen this sort of crazy buy a thousand times before. I walked out of the shop feeling I had stolen something exceptional out of the night.

I placed the record on my desk at home, under the puddling pool of a desk lamp. I scanned the Japanese-scripted track list and ran my fingers across the obi strip. I pictured how it would sound, Paul’s bass lines would be thicker and rounder, Ringo’s cymbals would be like rain on glass, and the harmonies would be so much more beautiful than digital files could ever record. I could almost hear the needle dropping into the groove, the subtle pop, and then the opening chord of the song, Come Together.

Weeks later, that record was a talisman. I would pick it up, expose it to the light, and let my mind decipher the music it contained. It greatly heightened my senses. I began to read late at night about pressing plants, techniques, and what the difference is between a satisfactory turntable cartridge and a fantastic one. I learned the meaning of the term “180-gram vinyl” and understood why some people, like me, are confident in using Japanese pressings due to their clarity and low surface noise.

Before long I found myself prowling around flea markets and thrift stores, going through dust-covered milk crates of abandoned records. It did not matter to me that I could not play them yet. It was the thrill of the hunt and the feeling you get when your fingers touch something unexpected, like a Miles Davis live album with a coffee stain on the sleeve, a soul compilation that has clearly cycled through three different apartments, or a novelty 45 in the shape of a star. They all appeared to be hidden gems, poised for revelation at the perfect moment.

It came eventually to pass that I purchased a turntable, a sturdy, used Technics device off a man who stored it in his garage, bundled up in a blanket. The first I played was not Abbey Road, but a dollar copy of Night Beat by Sam Cooke that I picked up in a yard sale. The needle hit, the speakers buzzed, and the voice of Sam echoed in the room like the sun filtering through unzipped blinds. I sat there motionless and felt rather than heard the sound.

When I eventually heard the Japanese version of Abbey Road, it came close to being overwhelming. The sound was shockingly clear, and I could pick out little things I never would have before—a small inhalation before a vocal line and how the reverb suspended itself around the George guitar in Something. It felt like a friend sharing an old story, revealing that I had not known half of it before.

That night in the record store instilled in me a timeless lesson: sometimes, you must fall in love with the concept of something before you can truly experience it. This record that I couldn’t listen to has sent me towards an entirely different listening experience, which is less about access and more about patience, ritual, and care.

Years later, my shelves are filled with records of all kinds, some rare, some common, some scratched in ways that make them play in strange and wonderful ways. But I still own that Japanese Abbey Road, in its sleeve carefully preserved, with its obi strip still stiff and the vinyl still perfect. And I envision that faint glow of a shop and the soft hum of Billie Holiday in the background, along with the sensation of carrying something home that you can never hear but instinctively know you already love.

The music often starts playing long before the needle ever touches the groove.

Margaret Muiruri is a Kenyan writer who has a profound desire for storytelling as an act that incorporates memory, culture, and self-experience. Her projects tend to involve music, identity, and daily life and look at all the intersections of these three, as well as nostalgia and discovery. She likes to write essays that help put common occurrences in sharp focus. Margaret is reading, spending time at local markets, or searching for her next great story when she is not writing.