LikeTheDew.com

“Hey! Guess what?”

“You sold your book.”

“Not yet.”

“You’ve learned to cut your own hair?”

“No. Vinyl’s back.”

“I didn’t know it was missing.”

“You know, vinyl. LP’s. Long-playing records. Albums.”

“You mean like the thousands we have in the basement?”

‘Right!”

“The very same albums we spread all over the floor when we had a party and you insisted on playing ‘Black Dog’ because ‘it’s the greatest rock and roll song of all time?’ ”

“Look at it this way. How many ‘Peaches and Herb’ CD’s do we have?”

“I am confident we don’t have any.”

“Correct. So what happens when we want to listen to ‘Peaches and Herb’?”

“Please enlighten me.”

“We don’t listen. Of course we have a ‘Peaches and Herb’ album … but it’s in the basement and we can’t play it.”

“Sweetheart, when was the last time you wanted to listen to ‘Peaches and Herb’?”

“That’s not the point. If we had our albums up here, we could if we wanted to.”

“Well, there’s that.”

“And there’s more!”

“I’m sure there is.”

“Jim and Melissa at Antiques On The Square sell tons of LP’s. He says sales are up and CD sales are falling. He’s even selling turntables.”

“You have a turntable. It’s in the basement next to the records.”

“I know! I’m going to bring it upstairs and hook it up to the tuner.”

“And where will you put the turntable?”

“On top of the woofer.”

“And the albums?”

“On the shelves in the living room next to the turntable.”

“We don’t have shelves in the living room.”

“Not yet we don’t. I talked to Grover and he said it would be no problem to build floor to ceiling shelves on the wall next to the woofer.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

“No turntable, no shelves, no albums. We’ll never listen to them.”

“Did you forget about Michael Bolton? Or the Starland Vocal Band? Or The Tornados?”

“How could I? Look, honey, why don’t you go rearrange your Coke bottle collection?”

“I’m running out of room. I was thinking about moving them to the …”

“Go away.”

“Yes ma’am.”

1. Will Cantrell says:

   January 23, 2010 at 1:24 pm

   Great article Mark! Your house sounds (or reads) a little like my house at times.

   Gawd, do I miss LP albums! Must’ve squandered a small fortune—no, make that a big fortune— on LP’s when I was teenager. The Temptations, Candy Staton (she’s an evangelist these days, I think) Smokey Robinson, The Rascals, The Intruders, Mary Wells, Otis Redding, etc, etc. I think the thing that I miss the most are the liner notes on the backs of the LP album jackets In those days before Al Gore invented the Internet and Ted Turner invented the 24 hour news cycle at CNN, that was the place where I got most of my ‘inside information’ about my artists/heroes. From liner notes, you learned heretofore top secret information like “Davis” was the real name of David Ruffin (the troubled but perhaps also the most under rated soul singer of our Baby Boom generation) and he hailed from the small town of Whynot, Miss. Or that the ‘Pips’ were named in honor of Gladys and brother Bubba’s cousin. You couldn’t find information like that that ‘jes anywhere’.
   Yeah, yeah, I know that liner notes were often included on CD’s but I always had a devlish time trying to figure out how to get those little CD jewel cases open after purchase. I swear, seems like it sometimes took hours. (This might have been the real reason for the demise of the record industry.) Often I was forced to resort to using a hammer…which ruined everything including the liner notes.

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2. Mark Johnson says:

   January 28, 2010 at 9:43 am

   You would enjoy “Hound Dog” by Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller. Amaze your friends with R&R trivia like “Who was the first person to record Hound Dog?” (Big Mama Thornton. ) A lot of our record collection comes from a combination of my being a disc jockey for awhile, and Rebecca being a last-year teenager when I married her. Glad you liked the story.

   Reply