Featured Essay: The Skip That Built a Family: How a Broken Led Zeppelin LP Taught Me to Love Imperfections

by Joseph Wales

The skip lives at 2:17. Not on the digital tracklist, not on the remastered vinyl—just here, on this warped 1973 Atlantic pressing of Led Zeppelin II with the RL stamp in the deadwax. When Jimmy Page’s solo should erupt into that descending riff, the needle lifts. Needle hops, heart skips, and the next note just smacks you in the teeth.

I was six the first time it caught me off guard. Dad’s battered copy—its cover stained with what he claimed was floodwater from ‘76 (Mom insisted it was Schlitz)—spun on our thrift-store Yorx turntable. As the solo loomed, he’d freeze mid-beer sip, elbow me, and growl: “Here comes the good part!” We’d air-guitar the glitch like it was written that way, our off-time strums cementing the skip into family gospel.

Fast forward thirty years. I dropped $200 on a “pristine” Mobile Fidelity reissue. When the solo played uninterrupted, my stomach lurched. This wasn’t our Zeppelin. That night, I dug out Dad’s original. The water warp was still there—a frozen tidal wave near the label—and when the skip hit, my fingers started strumming old ghosts. Some grooves, man, they get under your skin.

 I had to look for a master tape engineer to help decode this mystery.

MARTY’S VINYL AUTOPSY

I found Marty through a Reddit rabbit hole about defective RL cuts. His Nashville basement studio smelled of old electronics and cheap bourbon, master tape reels stacked like firewood. When I described our skip, the 72-year-old engineer didn’t even look up from his oscilloscope.

“Kid, you’re mourning the wrong thing.” He slapped my dad’s LP onto a ’60s Presto lathe. “This ain’t damage—it’s the record’s curriculum vitae.” The needle hit 2:17. The skip jumped—thwip—and Marty’s finger stabbed the air. “Hear that? That’s nonfill. Molten vinyl didn’t fill the stamper right in ‘73. Probably some hungover bastard at Pressing Plant #3.” He dragged me to a microscope. Through the lens, the groove looked like a canyon with a landslide. “Now this—” He cued the same passage on the MoFi reissue—“is embalmed meat.”

He schooled me in vinyl’s secret language:

• Groove echo: When a pressed-in bubble makes cymbals pulse like a heart murmur
• Sonic sutures: His term for flaws that improve music, like the staple click on original Chain of Fools pressings
• The “Wobble Test”: “Tilt any record 5 degrees—if the warp sounds musical, it’s a keeper.”

As I left, he tossed me a test pressing Physical Graffiti. “Side two, 3:08. There’s a moth wing in the vinyl. Best goddamn tambourine you’ll ever hear.”

THE BROKEN CHOIR

Now, I hunt for broken records like I’m Indiana Jones in a Goodwill—digging through dollar bins and estate sales, not for rarity or fidelity, but for scars. Each defect tells a story. Each skip is a secret handshake between the record and whoever loved it enough to keep it alive.

The Prison Break The first time I played my copy of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison, the needle caught on something deep in the groove. Not a skip—a loop. Right as Cash snarled “I shot a man in Reno—” the record hiccuped, dragging him back to the start of the line. “I shot a man in—I shot a man in—I shot a—” A broken confession, stuck in purgatory.

The Ghost in the Machine Or my promo Dark Side of the Moon—factory worker left a fingerprint right on The Great Gig in the Sky. When Clare Torry starts wailing, her voice fizzes and crackles. It’s like a ghost breaking through.

The Time Traveler A water-damaged Pet Sounds where the warp slows Wouldn’t It Be Nice by 3%—just enough to make the teenage romance sound like a middle-aged memory. Even streaming platforms acknowledge this magic now—play Bella Donna on Spotify, and the algorithm adds vinyl crackle during Edge of Seventeen’s intro. We crave proof that music lived before it reached us.

THE INFINITE RIFF

My favorite? Dead Kennedys single with a literal stab wound. Some punk in ‘82 got pissed and stabbed right through Holiday in Cambodia. Now the chorus glitches—“Pol—Pot—Pol—Pot—”—like a riot on loop. I asked the record store clerk about it. He shrugged. “Punk kid in ‘82, probably. Got mad and took it out on the vinyl.” Now, the anger is part of the music.

These records shouldn’t work. But they do—better than the clean copies, because they’ve lived. A perfect record is a museum piece. A flawed one is a war story. And when you play them loud enough, the whole room leans in, waiting for the moment it breaks.

THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

Last Christmas, Dad visited my apartment. I cued up the original II, and when the skip hit, we shouted the riff in unison—his hands still miming his ’70s Gibson SG, mine air-strumming an invisible Strat. After, he squinted at the turntable. “Wait… does it always do that?” The moment hung like a sustained feedback note. He’d forgotten the ritual. But the record hadn’t.

Now, I DJ with Marty’s test pressing, the one with the moth wing. During the quiet bits, that thing flutters like a heartbeat. Most people don’t even catch it. But when they do, man, it’s like the record’s alive and telling secrets—but sometimes, a listener’s head jerks up. They’ll lock eyes with me, point at the speaker, and mouth: “Did you hear that?”

I always grin. Another imperfectionist baptized.

Joseph Wales is an SEO content writer and culture journalist who turns niche obsessions into engaging stories. With a background spanning music, finance, pet culture, and beyond, he crafts pieces that rank—and resonate. Whether he’s explaining mortgage types and functions for Supermoney, decoding the hidden history of a scratched Led Zeppelin record, or settling the debate on bat repellents, his work lives at the intersection of research and readability. Clients include Varmint Removal, Calamity Politics, and indie outlets where geekery meets journalism.