Old Records Never Die (17 page)

She told me about the summer after we broke up. I was up in Michigan, at my family's cottage. And she was back in the suburbs of Chicago. I'd sent a mix tape to Christine—our mutual friend, with the mom who didn't hide her vibrators all that well—which I'd asked her to share with Heather. I'd included a special song, just for her.

It was “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Because I was a dick. A dick with a broken heart, but a dick nonetheless.

“I just burst into tears,” she told me. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I'm so terrible. I'm such an awful person.'”

I made up for it, thank god. I sent anther mix tape before the end of the summer, this time with “She's Got a Way,” along with a letter of explanation.

“You said something like, ‘This was the song I meant to send when I sent you that other song.' Which sounded to me like, ‘I was really pissed off at you then, so I sent you that mean song, but this song is what I really meant.'”

“I'm pretty sure that's what I meant,” I said.

“Well, it was too little too late,” she said. “To be honest, it might have tipped me over the edge if you had sent me ‘She's Got a Way' the first time.”

And then, without even thinking about it, she leaned toward the record player and nudged the needle, like she was pushing it past a scratch. I know exactly why she did this. Because my copy of
Cold Spring Harbor
, the one I played for her back when we were teenagers, had a scratch in “She's Got a Way,” right around the point where Joel sings about the “million dreams of love” surrounding her. I hadn't remembered that scratch until I saw Heather instinctively reach out, like she'd done a thousand times before, a million years ago, to save the song from getting stuck in an endless loop.

But this wasn't my record. It was just something that I'd picked up at a record store in Chicago. It didn't have that specific scratch she remembered. But she nudged the needle anyway, like she was scratching at the empty space left by an amputated leg.

She didn't even notice what she was doing. But I did.

And that was it. That was all I needed. It's what I came looking for, even if I wasn't exactly sure why.

The bar had burned down. The old stone walls were gone. I was a different person, and so was she. Nothing was the same anymore.
But there was still that little misshapen step, the little flaw you had to know to look for. Somehow, miraculously, that survived. Even if it wasn't technically there, it was still there.

I wasn't drunk—which was kind of insane, given the volume of wine we'd consumed. But it was also almost 10:00 p.m., which meant I'd been sitting at her kitchen table, listening to records, for over six hours. I made up some excuse about having to get up early, and she helped me carry my records and the record player to the car.

“Give me that for a second,” she said, pulling the
Slippery When Wet
record out of the stack. She found a pen and scribbled something on the front sleeve.

She'd crossed out the old phone number and written a new one.

“Let's get together again,” she said. “Maybe bring the wives.”

“I'd love to meet her.”

“And the kids. Your Charlie is adorable.”

Driving home, I let Billy Joel's “Angry Young Man” blare through the car speakers. I'd forgotten how badass the droning C note opening in “Angry Young Man” really is. The lyrics don't get much more complex than “I'm young and angry,” which is the least original observation made in pop music since “I'm young and horny.” But goddamn, those pounding thumbs sound great.

At every stoplight, I was air-pianoing to “Angry Young Man” with the same manic and unironic glee I did as a teenager. And for the first time in a long, long while, I was okay with that.

I
t shouldn't have worked. There was no reasonable explanation for it. I could see the boot print with my own eyes—thick chunks of dried mud that had coagulated over time. The record should be useless—unplayable junk. The fact that it'd survived this long, stored for future generations to puzzle over, was a laughable lack of good judgment. You didn't need to understand the science of how the grooves on a vinyl record create sound—which has something to do with electrical energy converted into vibrations—to realize that, nope, this record was fucked.

But there it was, spinning on the turntable, the stylus drifting effortlessly across its warped surface, and somehow, miraculously, creating a more crisp, vibrant, testicle-rattling sound than I'd ever heard coming from a Rolling Stones record.

Robert was on his feet, assuming that rock-front-man pose that always seemed to come so naturally to him—his groin the magnetic center of his body—and the lyrics burst from him like a painful wailing.

“Waaaaaaar, children,” he sang, a bit more late-seventies Elvis than a young Mick Jagger. “It's just a shot away! It's just a shot away!”

Robert was a little puffier than he'd been in his twenties, when he and I had first become fast friends. His belly was a little more pronounced, his hair a little grayer. But you could say the same about me. I hadn't aged any more gracefully.

Let he who is without paunch cast the first stone.

The music was coming from my Crosley three-speed portable turntable. And the sound, oh, it was spectacularly shitty. But it filled the room just enough to cast the shadows we needed to see again.

Robert and I were in the basement of a fraternity that hadn't been our home since we were barely of legal drinking age. It was familiar in all the predictable ways—I recognized the checkerboard floors, the battered staircase, the empty bottles of Milwaukee's Best lining the halls like bread crumb trails. But it also felt cold and distant, like visiting the wake of a dead friend. At least until we turned on the music.

Then I started to recognize where I was, and why it had once meant something to me.

A few months earlier, I'd called Robert, who I hadn't talked to since at least the late nineties. I knew he was in Chicago, but we ran in different circles now—I had a kid, and my friends were all parents who only socialized with other adults for “playdates,” where we hid in kitchens and drank too much wine and occasionally shouted, “It's his toy and you need to share.”

Robert was a relic from another era. The last time our friendship wasn't mired in the past tense, we were both young and single and embarrassingly broke. In my memory, he'll always be the guy from college, the sinewy dude from Wyoming who wore leather jackets graffitied with spray paint. The guy who had once karate-chopped a car's headlight because the owner had poured beer into my ashtray at a local pub, and Robert took it as a personal offense. The guy who loved Elvis and Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, not because
he was being ironic or trying to prove how clever or unique or un-mainstream he was, but because he honestly loved Elvis and Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck.

I asked if he wanted to join me for a day trip to Beloit College, our alma mater—a tiny liberal arts school in southern Wisconsin that likes to bill itself as the “Yale of the West.” I wanted to visit some of our old college haunts, listen to music the way we used to listen to it, and . . . well, that was pretty much it.

Robert said yes immediately. He even offered to drive. I'm not sure why he agreed so easily, and so enthusiastically. Nothing about this was convenient, and all I was offering was a chance to wander aimlessly around a campus that wasn't our home anymore, where we knew no one. But that didn't seem to faze him.

The frat guys gathered around us were twenty, maybe nineteen. There was Alex, in the oversize sweatshirt with the Greek letters on the front. And Ulysses, dressed in a tie and button-down like he was a college student in the 1950s. They were smiling and nodding along to the music, but they did it in the way an eight-year-old nods along to “American Pie” when their parents insist on turning it up too loud when it comes on the radio during a road trip. They don't really care, but that song seems to be the consensus for the moment, so what the hell, let's do this!

“This is kind of blowing my mind,” Alex said, with a smile I wasn't sure if I could trust.

“It's insane, right?” I said, turning to him. “This shouldn't be happening. It's defying all the laws of physics and common sense. Best-case scenario, it should sound like a power drill dropped in oatmeal.”

“This is your record?” he asked.

“Well, no,” I admitted. “I stole it.”

“Seriously? That's so cool. Like how long ago?”

“About twenty minutes.”

Alex seemed shaken by this news.

“Twenty minutes from right now?”

“Yep,” I said. “You know the radio station on campus?”

“Yeah,” he said tentatively.

“Totally stole it. I'm not sure if they noticed yet, but that's why we're here. Just laying low. In case they're looking for us.”

Alex laughed nervously. Just as “Love in Vain” was really turning into something gritty and soulful. Why was Alex getting so caught up in the stealing part of the story, and totally missing the really remarkable part, the fact that a vinyl record—a really battered and bruised copy of the Rolling Stones'
Let It Bleed
, caked with mud from another century—was not just playable, but appeared to have somehow improved with age?

There was a story behind it. A story I hadn't bothered to mention to Franny and Maureen, the friendly twentysomething station managers who'd been so accommodating when I contacted them several weeks ago and told them I was an alum, writing a story about college radio or something. I don't remember exactly what I told them. What matters is, they said yes! They invited me to tour the station, to see the old soundboard where I'd worked briefly as a DJ during my college years, and even check out the shelves of vinyl records that were inexplicably still kept in the back.

I knew what I'd find on those shelves. The only question was, how could I get it out? Without, you know . . . stealing.

When we happened upon the footprint-scarred
Let It Bleed
, I told them about my decades-old feud with the station manager, which resulted in him grinding his muddy boots into the radio station's own copy of
Let It Bleed
with extreme prejudice. But I avoided getting into too many details about how it was probably mostly my fault.

During my junior year, I was invited to host my own radio show,
despite my insistence that it should be entirely devoted to the Rolling Stones. And not the familiar stuff. All the deep cuts and outtakes and bootlegs and non-hits. The manager told me no. Their listeners (my peers) weren't interested in obscure Stones, he said. I could host a classic-rock show, with occasional songs by the Stones, but also other artists old enough to be called “classic.” I defied him. I hosted the show I wanted. I played too many songs from
Brussels Affair
. I played
Jamming with Edward!
in its entirety. What were they going to do, dock my pay?

The manager sent me a message. He knew my affinity for
Let It Bleed
. So he made the record disappear. I found it in the Dumpster behind Pearsons Hall—thanks to a tip from a sympathetic colleague. I saved it, plucked it from its disgusting grave, smelling like rat piss and Tater Tots from the cafeteria, and shoved it back into the shelves. The manager—I wish I could remember his name—accepted my challenge. He took the smelly
Let It Bleed
out to the parking lot behind the station and, with a few witnesses, repeatedly stomped on the raw vinyl with his Doc Martens, thrashing it like a bouncer teaching a lesson to a belligerent drunk.

He returned it to the station, left it where he knew I'd find it, and scrawled “NEVER AGAIN” across the cardboard sleeve in red ink.

The message was received. I officially retired my
Rolling Stones Radio Hour
. I decided then and there that maybe I didn't have the constitution for radio work. I was too stubborn. I would focus on my side career as an amateur mixologist, creating mix tapes for women I wanted to sleep with. I considered giving
Let It Bleed
a proper burial, but that felt like admitting defeat. So I just put it back with the other Stones records, and left the dirty work of dumping the body to somebody in authority.

Twenty-five years later, it was still there.

Franny and Maureen—tall and thin and pale as bedsheets—
were as amazed as I was. Especially when they put it on the station's turntable and gave it a test drive. The turntable was sleek and metallic, so modern that the tonearm looked like a robot arm, the stylus its angry fist, ready to smash a record into accepting progress. The filthy, bedraggled
Let It Bleed
looked so out of place on top of it, like a train hobo who'd wandered into a spaceship.

But the unlikely union created something amazing. The record played! And not just begrudgingly. It came alive in ways it never did when I was younger. The vinyl's youthful sneer was gone, but all that time in neglected darkness had brought out something feral in
Let It Bleed
. It was frightening in ways it never had been when I was nineteen.

As I stood there and watched
Let It Bleed
make impossibly beautiful sounds, I made the conscious decision: I had to have it. I needed to liberate it from this graveyard, and bring it home with me, where it belonged.

I plucked the record from the turntable and said something vague about putting it back where I found it. I disappeared into the other room, through a maze of shelves filled with records that hadn't been played, much less touched, in ages. As I flipped through the stacks—pretending to look for its alphabetical nesting spot—I could almost hear the vinyl squeal with glee. They were like old dogs at a pound, watching a child walk past their cage. “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

I listened to Robert talking to Franny and Maureen, asking them about their future plans and musical tastes, and waited for my moment to strike. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest, on the cusp of a full-on panic attack. Logically, I knew this was a victimless crime. I was stealing an old piece of forgotten technology—with a street value of maybe twenty-five cents, and that's being generous. But still, this felt wrong. I've never stolen anything in my life. Sure, the occasional MP3 online. But nothing tangible. Nothing that
required stuffing something into my shirt and trying to seem inconspicuous. As a teenager, I once almost stole a porn magazine from a mall bookstore. But at the last minute, I chickened out.

I held on to the muddy
Let It Bleed
sleeve, and watched my fingers visibly tremble. And then, with a burst of adrenaline, I took it. I stuffed it . . . I don't even remember where. I walked back toward Franny and Maureen, talking way too fast, my eyes a bit too wide, tugging at Robert's sleeve. “Thanks so much, this was great, gotta go!”

I didn't tell Robert what I'd done until we were several blocks away. And by then, I was giggling. I'd gotten away with it! The perfect crime!

We went to the first place we thought we'd be safe: the fraternity house that hadn't been our home since 1991.

“We need to lay low for a little bit,” I explained to the confused-looking fraternity members. “Just until the heat dies down.”

They smiled and shrugged. Like the women at the radio station smiled and shrugged. I couldn't tell what those smiles and shrugs meant. Was it condescending? Were they being like “I wonder how much longer I need to listen to Grampa rattle on about this shit I don't care about before I can slip away and get back on Instagram”?

We'd almost reached the end of
Let It Bleed
's side one, and it hadn't hit a single skip or muddy roadblock. That was a miracle. Not like the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but a real miracle. One that gives you faith in a higher power, and that higher power's enthusiasm for Keith Richards guitar licks.

“Anybody want to hear some Boswell Sisters?” Robert suddenly announced.

The three frat guys laughed, but Robert wasn't trying to be funny. He honestly wanted to put on a Boswell Sisters record from the thirties and see if we could turn this party into a keen wingding.

This wasn't something he'd stolen from the station. These were
records he'd brought with him. I'd heard more Boswell Sisters in the last few hours than I had in my entire life.

Robert had volunteered to drive us from Chicago up to Beloit in his Dodge pickup—a beast of a truck that he liked to aim toward medians—and his tape deck was exclusively devoted to Boswell Sisters compilations. Which was strange enough for the first hour of the trip, but got even weirder when Robert insisted on making a quick stop at a mall off the highway to pick up a pellet rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition.

“You need this now?” I asked him.

He smiled impishly, and slipped another Boswell Sisters tape into the car deck. We listened to “Heebie Jeebies” at a volume better served for heavy metal, and Robert jerked his head along to the beat, pushing down on the accelerator far beyond the posted speed limit. I tried to enjoy the music and pretend there wasn't a loaded rifle sitting on the seat between us.

“The thing about the Boswell Sisters is, they're kinda dirty,” Robert said to the frat guys, who didn't seem entirely sure if this was a joke. “I mean, listen to this . . .” He paused as we all pondered the scratchy harmonizing coming from the record player. Robert laughed, hearing something we apparently didn't. “You see what I mean? ‘If you see me necking with somebody new / I'm in training for you!' That is insane, right? It's really dirty for their time.”