Featured Essay: Vinly Memories

by Joe Jones

I have a collection of “records” that I describe by spreading my arms wide to demonstrate feet of shelf space (somewhere around six feet).  I seldom play them anymore, although, when I do, I wonder why I don’t do it more often.  There are some LP’s I’ve played so much they are part of my DNA; there are some I don’t remember having.  I’m sure I could find them all on Spotify, and there are duplicates among my CD’s (about 10 feet, but a CD case is around twice as thick as an LP and its cardboard cover).  But the hunt for something to put on the turntable is a trip through the gamut of my changing tastes over some sixty years, a wandering through an antique store versus a patting of my mental pockets for something to play on Spotify.

My catalog is witness to changes in not just my taste but the patterns of my consumption of music.  The oldest LP’s are older than I am: two albums of Glenn Miller’s big band were in my parents’ collection (about 6 inches), that I played over and over, to listen and to play along on drums.  There were also Bach organ music, the Beethoven Bicentennial collection (one box: symphonies), the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and not a little elevator music.  Identifying the last LP I ever bought would require a long study of my footage.  There are some I haven’t listened to yet, recently gifted to me by my son-in-law from the jazz records his brother left behind.

But the first LP I ever bought leaps right to mind: Jan and Dean Take Linda Surfing.  I already had a 45 of The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.  The B side was The Anaheim Azuza and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, and Timing Association; yes, I know that title from memory.  My parents, my sister, and I had a decent assortment of 45’s because they were cheap.  The $5.00 cost of  an LP, however, was a hill too far, and took an eternity of begging and the accumulation of my own funds to reach.  ‘That’s a lot of money,’ I was told, ‘and you’ll get tired of it before you know it.’  I had window-shopped Armand’s Record Store in the Cherry Hill Mall, but I hadn’t been allowed to actually browse the bins until the fateful day.  I had narrowed my desire down to a few artists, though I don’t remember who the others were.   The Jan and Dean title was a greatest hits album of sorts, including Surfin’, Surfin’ Safari,  Surfin’ USA, Walk Like a Man (a Four Seasons hit), and some other covers I might have recognized from the radio.  The motivation was probably Mr. Bass Man, but the high percentage of recognizable songs was the clincher: more bang for the five bucks.  I returned to Armand’s, never without the same admonitions about my foolishness, for more: including The Dave Clark Five and, of course, The Beatles.  There is unexplored significance in the fact that I do not own a single Rolling Stones record, nor any Motown LP’s, though we had The Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love single, and maybe others.

The desire to own music was strong, fed by the hunger to hear what I liked and the increasingly unsatisfying, repetitive menu of AM radio.  I was aware of FM on my parents’ console TV/Stereo, and I eventually discovered, amid the Easy Listening and Muzak, not one but two FM stations that played something different.  It would be easy to call it Rock if it were not for all the specialization that has entered the lexicon since then: Rock N Roll, Album Rock, Alternative Rock, etc.  At first it was, even more than AM, unlistenable to me: for every morsel that fascinated me, there seemed to be endless tracks that were boring, incomprehensible, or insane.  This was the heyday of Rock – I was 12 in 1968, and had started listening to AM in 3rd grade – but the menu was now more full, and full of exotica.  I do remember that I heard Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s Return of the Son of the Monster Magnet, a whole album-side jam of weird noise that begins with “Suzy…, Suzy Creamcheese, honey…, what’s got into ya?”  I bought the double album, Freak Out!, on faith, and was let down by the rest of it, not understanding Zappa’s mix of musicianship and irony, and thinking I’d been had until my middle college years when a cool frat brother performed Who Are the Brain Police? at a private, drunken talent night, and I was able to sing along.

By middle school this uneconomical vinyl habit had progressed to the point where my parents actually gave me a portable stereo of my own, no doubt to move the noise out of their living room.  The only scolding I ever got about playing it too loud was over my own copy of Beethoven’s Fourth.  I’m not sure if that was a gift – there was already the Bicentennial version in the house – but it enabled comparison between two versions of the same, ostensibly Standard piece, which was both fuel and oxygen for my love of Classical music (another term that has been picked and prodded until it means more and less than it used to.)  I took that stereo to parties and played mostly my stuff, and still don’t know why I wasn’t banished, although I may have been without knowing it.  

What I was buying by then was influenced primarily by other people, mostly older males.  Harry V, three years older, played Vanilla Fudge for me on his makeshift stereo (I may have heard their version of You Keep Me Hangin’ On on the radio, but didn’t appreciate it until that private hearing).  Doug S, my age but with older siblings, turned me on to Cream’s Wheels of Fire LP in around 7th grade.  In High School there was Sam F who, in contrast to my buttoned-down, short- hair shtick, was all about platform shoes, Apache scarves with the ring holding them on the neck, and hair to his shoulders.  Despite the apparent difference between us, he latched on to my interest in music and loaned me Jimi Hendrix, Savoy Brown, and more.   By then I had long been deep into a search that I couldn’t name and never fulfilled: for a sound, or a genre, a finally satisfying mix of order and mayhem, heavy and soaring, serious and off-the-cuff, that would not just please me but define me.  Later I realized only in retrospect that I had stopped looking, that there was almost too much to hear, as opposed to the One Thing.  That eclecticism would define me.

The single biggest influence on tastes was a house at 5, 49th St, Brant Beach, New Jersey (as my Aunt Betty, the owner, recited cheerfully whenever she had half a chance).   First there was the Hi-Fi console (not stereo, no TV), with its cabinet of records, mostly Broadway musical cast albums (around 2 feet).  When it wasn’t playing our 45’s, it played show tunes, and my mom and my aunt sang along, harmonies rampant.  Not only do I know those songs, some really obscure (“Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a helluva lot…” from Pajama Game), but the sound of them, or just my own attempts to sing harmony, can readily bring tears to my eyes.  

The real pivot point, however, was my friendship with the kid next door.  Tommy D was one of seven kids, most of whom were older.  There were a lot of records in the room that Tommy shared with Danny, the hunky surfer dude four or five years older than us who bleached his long, curly hair with lemon juice in the kitchen sink.  There was also a friend of theirs who rented nearby one summer and who attended Lawrenceville prep school.  Thanks to them I stood at the receiving end of a musical funnel from the previous generations, each year or two of seniority being, at that age, an eon of experience.  I learned about Woodstock, Taj Mahal, Paul Butterfield, Electric Flag, Joe Cocker, Traffic, and Led Zeppelin, not to mention others that didn’t make an immediate impression.  We listened in Tommy’s room until Danny threw us out.  

My Aunt was complicit in my education because she loved music and, being an independent working woman, had records and two record players, and indulged my sister and I whenever she had the opportunity.  She belonged to a record club – probably Columbia House – before we all caught on to what a ripoff they could be, and offered us a chance to pick one each from the list.  My sister chose a ‘Greatest Hits of the Year’ Album, missing the fine print or music-biz code words that explained it was all covers, not originals; she was furious, and I don’t remember hearing it after the first playing.  I chose The New Christy Minstrels’ Tell Tall Tales (Legends and Nonsense), and loved and learned every word, to the distraction of my family.  I’m not sure how I made a better choice than my sister; I may have heard one of the tracks on the radio; maybe Aunt Betty had one of their conventional folk albums.  I do know that my taste for novelty songs went beyond them, to the likes of They’re Coming to Take Me Away (Ha ha) and Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport (which I just heard on the radio last week).  These were the bane of my family’s existence, because I played them incessantly and sang the, ostensibly to myself, all the time.  The family was more relieved than I was heartbroken by my leaving one of those nonsense 45’s in the back window of our Pontiac to warp in the sun. I obsessed similarly with Country Joe and the Fish’s Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag, from Woodstock, until my seashore buddies threatened to kill me or, worse, abandon me as uncool.  I can still sing any of them, but have learned that discretion is the better part of fandom.

The last big influencers were the people I met at college.  Playing music for one another was a ritual, at once casual and obligatory.  Stereos were to be played loud and with the door open; dorm-room visits had to have a sound track.  There were Elton John, newer Show Tunes from newer shows, Tower of Power.  Perhaps more important than introductions to new music was new appreciation of other peoples’ favorites, from The Isley Brothers to Marshall Tucker.  One guy on my freshman hall was obsessed with the Beatles, whom I had let drift away during my questing years, not realizing that they were ahead of me on the same path.  We took sharing to the point of Topping, a name we gave to taking turns playing a single track, with commentary, and answering with another, with explanation of the connection.  With the help of certain consumables, we could go on for hours.  

That same guy, still very close, though too far away, declared a few years back that he was, thanks to Spotify, not going to own music any more.  I admit to the ease of that, and the special treat there is in reading or hearing about a piece of music and going to the ether to hear it immediately, without the still-haunted exercise of deciding to buy a record(ing).  But I’m glad I have the library I seldom listen to, still there for the occasions when I feel like going back among the record jackets to have a look at me.

Joe Jones, just retired from the family business, is a once and future writer living a mile from where he was born.