I remember receiving my first CD player for my 23rd
birthday in 1988. It was a Kenwood 5 CD changer that seemed to weigh about 40
pounds, but at the time it was state of the art. It was accompanied by the Eric
Clapton Crossroads box set. The new
technology, convenient packaging and crisp sound heralded the dawn of a new
future for audiophiles, and since music has always been a major part of my
life, I wanted to be on the cutting edge. The first CD I purchased was Credence
Clearwater Revival’s Chronicle. I was hooked. In addition to buying all my
new music in this format, I methodically began replacing all my favorite albums
and cassettes with CD’s. I packed my albums in a crate and put them in
storage. It would be over 20 years
before I bought another one.
As the CD yielded to downloading and society’s attention
span grew shorter, I started to feel disconnected from the music scene for the
first time in my life. Terrestrial radio sucked and the initial excitement of
satellite radio and services like Pandora quickly rung empty and devoid of
character-just soulless, computerized playlists of digitized songs.
Around 5 years ago, I visited Mike, an old friend now living
in Philly. After catching up over a few steaks and cold ones, he decided to put
on some music, a passion we both shared. I stifled a chuckle as he opened his
media cabinet and I saw a stack of albums next to a turntable. After my initial
rush of nostalgic amusement, I became curious. He pulled Peter Tosh’s Bush Doctor, and when the needle hit the
vinyl, something happened to me. As Peter and Mick Jagger traded verses on "(You
Gotta Walk) Don't Look Back," I felt that connection that I had been
missing all that time. I recalled Mr. Horan, my high school communications
teacher, and his obsession with Marshall McLuhan. After 28 years, I finally
understood what he meant by “the medium IS the message.”
A week later, I found a Sony turntable in Best Buy for about
a hundred bucks. It did have some modern attributes-an easy connection to my
existing home theater and a USB slot to upload vinyl songs to any hard drive. I
dusted off the crate of albums that I had been carting around for 22
years. After serving their sentence in basements,
attics, closets and storage facilities, my old friends did not disappoint. They
sounded as imperfectly perfect as the day I stopped playing them. I remembered
every skip, hum and crackle, even sometimes recalling the surrounding
circumstances (it usually had something to do with lending them to my friend
Nicky).
Next was a trip to the used record store. Oh, they’re still
out there and they’re thriving in most cases. Then I discovered that Amazon had
an amazing catalogue of used and new albums and I knew I wasn’t alone. New
music was being formatted in vinyl again. Old albums were being re-mastered and
reissued. My vinyl collection was alive again.
I can only describe it as a visceral feeling.-the contact of
the needle with the vinyl and the warm sound that follows. Maybe it’s an
unconscious reaction to the collateral disconnects that were born from this sea
of technology. Maybe because it’s
something you can only do at home. You
can’t fast forward, rewind, share or shuffle; you can’t create playlists. It’s
a here and now moment; the kind that you savor.
