Featured Essay: Transcontinental Platters

by Greg Dubrow

If you are reading this, you are a music obsessive like me. Like most of us, you’ve had to move house more than once and bring along substantial amount of music. So you’ll understand why I had to bring my music with me even as I moved not just across town, across the state, or across the country, but across an ocean. You’re not just bringing the physical music, you’re bringing so much more – emotions and memories.

But to understand the present, a quick tour through the past. I came of age as a music collector in the early 1980s, so my format for music collecting has gone from cassettes -> vinyl -> CDs -> vinyl, with mp3s of course being part of the mix from the late-90s but never the default mode.

I started with cassettes because, well, a cassette player was all I had when I was a high school freshman. My mother and step-father did have some vinyl but the record player never worked well and I was discouraged from using it. I do remember early on, maybe age 8, listening as they put on a Roger Miller greatest hits record. ”King of the Road”, “Do Wacka Do” and “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd” are very early music memories.

When it came time to buy my own music, cassettes it was. Being a broke kid I used Columbia House to stock up. Among the first haul was Bruce Springsteen’s The River, the first Pretenders record. I would get cassettes of Danish bands like Gasolin’ and Shu-Bi-Dua from visiting Danish relatives.

In my junior year of high school I saved up money from after-school jobs to buy an integrated stereo system from Silo (“Silo is having a sale! A what? A sale!” IYKYK). Amp/tuner, turntable, dual cassette player, speakers, and a stereo stand that fit the individual components and had room for vinyl on the bottom shelf. This being the early 1980s and me already starting to lean left of center, among my first buys were R.E.M., Graham Parker, Pretenders and The Replacement’s Tim. I still have most of them; some are worth a bit of money, but worth even more to me sentimentally. I still rue giving some albums to my younger brother when I replaced some of them with CDs.

Like many people my age, I moved to CDs in the late 1980s/early 1990s. You can see a noticeable gap in my vinyl collection of artists from the 1990s to early aughts and 90s/early aughts albums from artists I was already following. I caught the vinyl revival while it was already on the upswing so I missed out on the glory days of bargain bin gold. Since I started buying vinyl again I’ve bought new, recent vintage, and very vintage. When I buy a new release it’s on vinyl, unless it’s CD only.

As with all serious music collectors, moving house takes on an extra dimension. You need more boxes, more care, and more time than the casual music fan. Depending on the circumstance you may need some ruthlessness and have to get rid of things to lighten the load. Or you may have to split the loot with an ex.

As an adult I moved from Philadelphia to Miami to the SF Bay area. Within Philly and California I moved a few times. Luckily I never had to split the loot with an ex and I never questioned that I’d bring everything with me from place to place. Yes, everything. Even the stuff I got from years working in the music business, promos from other label reps or conferences, things I’d have never bought. Everything came with me.

Then I decided to move back to Europe (I was born in Denmark). Specifically to Lyon, France. Much to my wife’s thinly-veiled chagrin, I insisted on moving the music, which in April 2022 consisted of about 900+ vinyl LP & EP, more than 115 7” vinyl singles, more than 1,000 CDs and EPs, and some CD singles. It probably added a couple of hundred dollars to the cost but it was non-negotiable for me. In late April the moving crew put everything on a truck bound from San Francisco to Houston. It then went on a cargo ship and hung out in Rotterdam for a month or so as customs were sorted out.

Our things arrived in Lyon in October but because we were in a temporary space that didn’t have a turntable, there would be no immediate unpacking. I then got a job which got us to Denmark in December 2022, so back into a truck everything went. In February 2022 we signed a lease on an apartment, and among the first things I did was to go to a local record store (the amazing Amager Records) and bought refurbished equipment; an Akai tube amp, Harmon-Kardon bookshelf speakers, and a Technics turntable. I set up the Ikea Kallax and two other shelves.

Finally, in mid-February 2023, almost a year after I packed them up, my records were ready to play. I’m fairly certain that the first thing I put on was R.E.M., either Murmur or Fables.

I still buy vinyl, though not as much as I used to. Moving across continents has cured me from the “what the hell, buy it” mindset. Which kind of bums me out because there was a great Sunday flea-market near us in Lyon. I could have bought some great French stuff (freak-beat, Serge Gainsbourg) at good prices.

Having this much music of course means deciding what to play. Since I went to the trouble and expense of moving a lot of things I hadn’t played in a while, I used my data nerd skills and wrote a small script to randomize selection (during COVID lockdown I spent some time one week cataloging everything into a spreadsheet and Discogs).

A few months ago I decided to revive my long-form blogging brain, and started to post on Medium. Among the posts are short “reviews” of what the random generator pulled. I realized right away that each review was not just about the music, but what about that particular album and/or artist meant to me at the time and means to me now. In a cosmic twist of fate, the first album to come up was Chasing Ray by Copenhagen surf-rock band El Ray. The album came out in 2010, and I bought it on a visit to Denmark, likely around 2012-2014. They’re not as active as before, but they do play out now and then.

I’m a little behind on writing the reviews, and by a weird quirk of the random selection, most of the first things I listened to were CDs, but vinyl has popped up more often. Head on over to my Medium blog and read the “Random Rules” posts up so far. More to come soon.

Fellow music obsessives will understand why the collection has crossed continents. When I pull out an old R.E.M., Replacements, Pretenders, or something else that’s been boxed up more than a few times, I’m transported back to the first time I listened to it. I can still remember being in my converted attic bedroom at the house where I grew up, as the first chords of “Hold My Life” blew through the speakers. I can still remember playing Murmur over and over and over again. It’s not just the physical vinyl that came with me, but the connection with those versions of myself I’ve also brought with me over land and sea.

Greg Dubrow was born in Copenhagen, Denmark and lives there again after living in the US since age 5. His records have travelled from Philadelphia to Miami to San Francisco and now to Denmark after a short stay in France. In the US he played bass in a number of bands including Gosta Berling, Slowness, Big Still, Idle Wilds, and many others. You can see his music credits here. He writes essays on music and other topics on The Polymaths Dilemma (on Medium). You can also follow him on BlueSky as amnesiac13 and on Flickr.I Have That on Vinyl is a reader supported publication.

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