Old Records Never Die (20 page)

That night seemed like a lifetime ago. Many lifetimes. And here we were, several decades later, in an apartment we could barely afford, our four-year-old napping in the next room, feeling giddy about that same song.

“Where did you find this?” Kelly asked, pulling the black disk out of its sleeve.

“In Nashville,” I said. “Look at the sticker.”

There was a small orange circle on the front that just read
FIRST COAST DJ
.

Her eyes went wide.

“Was that our wedding DJ?” she asked.

“I'm pretty sure it was,” I said.

I was basing this on absolutely no evidence, other than that we had a DJ at our wedding, and we provided him with a Journey record to play during the ceremony—this was back in the neolithic days when DJs still used vinyl—and we never saw that record again. We just assumed the DJ had stolen it, but we didn't care. We had long since moved on to CDs.

I tried searching my old e-mails, to see if I had anything from a
“First Coast DJ” around the time of our wedding. But I used AOL back then, and that account was long gone. Even my Yahoo e-mail, which I rarely checked anymore, had nothing. There's a First Coast DJ doing weddings in Florida, nearish where Kelly and I got hitched, but when I contacted him, he sent back a terse e-mail, writing only “I think you have me mistaken with someone else.”

I told none of this to my wife.

“I can't believe you found it,” Kelly said, admiring the faded album sleeve like it was an old high school yearbook.

“You want to hear it?” I asked.

Kelly laughed, and she blushed, like I'd just suggested we have sex on the kitchen floor.

“I don't think I've listened to this song since our wedding,” she said.

Of course that wasn't true. We'd heard “Don't Stop Believin'” at least a thousand times since then. It gets played incessantly. We'd heard it on satellite radio, in TV commercials, in movies and reality shows and TV shows about teenagers who weren't even alive when we sat in that borrowed car in Wisconsin. But I knew what she meant.

She didn't mean the song in general. She meant
this
song. This specific piece of plastic, which we both agreed to believe, at least for today, was the same object used during a formal ceremony many, many years ago—which, if we're being honest, was mostly for our mothers—to play a song that symbolized something true about our relationship, that wasn't about “for better or worse,” or fathers giving away brides, or drunken toasts about “true love” and “she gets you” and all the other well-intentioned wishes that meant nothing, really. This was a song that would only feel significant if you were in that car with us in Lake Geneva at 2:00 a.m., laughing ourselves dizzy as the radio blared “Don't Stop Believin'.” That was where it happened, when we became a
we
, and I knew I'd be with her for the long haul.
I remember feeling weightless, and thinking, “We could go anywhere right now. We could just drive and drive and see where it takes us.”

Charlie was still napping, so we put the record on the Crosley. We laughed at the guitar arpeggio—so epic and self-important—and clapped along with Steve Perry, right between “don't stop” and “believing.” We didn't talk about the wedding, or that night in Lake Geneva, because we didn't need to. The song was enough.

At some point, we started dancing. Not in the awkwardly self-conscious way you do at weddings. We just fell into each other's arms. I can't remember the last time I danced with my wife. Most days, we're focused on the tiny human being we created, and how to keep him from breaking things and/or himself. When we're alone, it's all about logistics, and then TV. But this, for once, was just about us. I'd forgotten how much of us we'd let slip away.

We could've stayed like that forever, swaying along to those familiar notes, laughing at twenty-year-old jokes. But then we belted out the “some were born to SING the blues” part and woke Charlie up from his nap. We always belt out that part, as loud as humanly possible. Because that's the only way your baby daddy will hear it.

I
was back at the Record Swap in Champaign. It was just six months ago that I'd first walked through these doors, but it felt like a lifetime. The last time I was here, the weather was still warm, and Bob treated me like an insane person. But something had changed. Winter had come, for one thing. I'd driven through a blizzard to get here. And something had definitely shifted for Bob. He greeted me like an old friend. Somebody to be trusted.

“Let's see what we've got here,” he said, as he peeled off the plastic tarp, like a homicide detective showing a dead body to relatives. The tarp crackled angrily, spitting dust into the air.

Underneath were boxes. Dozens of boxes. Shapeless, squishy, sad-looking boxes.

I'd been looking for my old records for, god, I don't even remember how long it'd been. Almost a year? I'd started in earnest last spring, and we were already deep into February. Since then, I'd looked through at least a thousand boxes, bins, racks, and milk crates. That's a ballpark figure, but I think it's pretty accurate. I'd been to a lot of places. I'd been to every record store in Chicago still
in operation at least four times. And I'd expanded the search outside Illinois, into eight states in every direction.

I'd traveled out to Pennsylvania, into New Jersey, and eventually upstate New York, visiting stores that all looked the same—the same fading Pink Floyd and Kurt Cobain posters on the same cement walls, the same plastic dividers with band names drawn in Sharpie, the same skinny guys with scraggly beards buying and selling the same records from and to one another.

And I flipped and I flipped and I flipped.

I'd been out west. Well, Saint Louis. That's west, right? I'd been to a store in East Saint Louis—no bigger than some of my first postcollege apartments—and eavesdropped as a guy with an armful of Boz Scaggs albums loudly explained how to solve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. And then he got into an equally intense argument with another middle-aged guy with a white beard about whether Jethro Tull was better pre- or post-
Aqualung
.

“I believe two things,” the Boz Scaggs–loving guy announced. “The Jews should have their own homeland, and ‘Lido Shuffle' is the greatest song of the seventies.”

And I flipped and I flipped and I flipped.

I'd been to a lot of record stores. And here's something you learn when you go to enough of them. Record stores—at least the good ones—are always in bad neighborhoods. You're always worried about whether it was a good idea to park your car nearby. It's always on the same street as a thrift store or a McDonald's where kids are doing whippets in the parking lot, or there's a middle-aged guy sitting at a bus stop who clearly has nowhere else to go. You're always within a short walk of a discount tobacco store or a place that buys gold.

And I flipped and I flipped and I flipped.

I flipped through so many records, I had calluses on my thumbs
and index fingers. I got such a big blister on one of my thumbs that I actually went to a dermatologist.

It was my record-store stigmata.

There were times when I felt despondent. Not that I had any reason to be. I'd been absurdly lucky. I'd already tracked more of my original records than I could have reasonably hoped to find. But it does something to you, all of that flipping. The victories don't come very often. And when they do, they're quickly forgotten. I was always looking ahead, wondering what buried treasure was hidden in the next box.

I flipped, and flipped, and flipped, and flipped, and flipped. And almost always came up empty-handed. It can break your spirit after a while, all that flipping. You want more wins. You want something more to show for your effort than a few mud-splattered records and a callused lobster claw grip.

Crate digging is like driving through Nevada. Every once in a while, you stumble upon something miraculous. An impossible city of lights in the middle of nowhere. But then you're back on the highway, and it's just desert again. It's mile after mile after mile of nothing. You keep looking to the horizon, waiting for those lights to appear again. But they come too infrequently.

Just when I was beginning to have my doubts, when the constant flipping was starting to feel meaningless and stupid, a sure sign that I was wasting my life, I got the call from Bob.

Less than six hours later, I was in the back room of the Record Swap.

“You can look through everything, if you want,” Bob offered, watching me look at the boxes. “I don't want to interrupt you.”

He glanced toward the front of the store. There was nobody there. Not a soul. And not much hope that any customers would be arriving anytime soon. Outside, it was a blustery white. An angry wind pounded snow against the glass.

Bob looked back at me and waited. He had nowhere else to go, and he seemed as curious about what was hidden in those boxes as I was.

I crouched on the floor. My calves were already quivering, threatening to collapse. It was cold; the room wasn't heated, other than a tiny space heater, which wasn't currently turned on. Other than the records—which hadn't seen sunlight in at least a decade—there wasn't much back here. Just gray walls that were probably cold to the touch in July, and lights that seemed designed for a coal mine.

I opened the first box, releasing a dust cloud of disintegrating cardboard. Inside were dozens of classical records, some Perry Como, and fourteen copies of Phil Collins's
Hello, I Must Be Going!

A gentle thud moved across the ceiling, sending a trickle of dust down toward us. I looked up nervously, but Bob didn't flinch. “There's an apartment upstairs,” he said. “I don't ever see them, wouldn't even know they're there other than the footsteps.” We listened as the thud kept moving, until it settled on a spot. “Sometimes I pretend it's a ghost,” Bob said, with a half smile.

The wind pounded more snow against the window out front, perfectly timed to make Bob's ghost wish extra creepy. I was acutely aware of how alone we were, and how nothing about this made me comfortable.

Four boxes down. Only about a hundred or so left to go.

I'd spent almost a year trying to make this happen. It was a gentle operation. I had to take my time, not come on too strong. If I'd asked for what I actually wanted—“I WANT TO COME TO YOUR BASEMENT AND LOOK THROUGH YOUR THINGS”—that would have scared him away. I had to be seductive about it. Send e-mails just to say hello. Make conversation. Show him I was a friend. And harmless. Demonstrate that I shared his love of records, but not in
an aggressive or demanding way. I couldn't let him see the desperation in my head, the way my body vibrated when I thought about what records he might be sitting on, in some moldy basement, just waiting for me to come and liberate them.

I came up with plots. I asked if maybe I could spend a weekend working at the store, so I could write about what really happens behind the scenes at a record store in the new millennium. After we became colleagues, it wouldn't be weird if we went out for a beer after work. And then, hey, let's get a nightcap at your house! I'll pay for the six-pack! And once we were in his living room, hey, didn't you mention that you had a bunch of records downstairs? Mind if I take a look?

I didn't mention all of that, obviously. Just the part about being a free-of-charge employee. But he never responded.

Months passed, and I decided to be bold. I sent him an e-mail, told him I was coming back to Champaign and would be visiting the store. I laid it on thick, telling him my magazine story about the record industry was taking a new turn. It would now feature him, “a survivor who stuck through the lean years and saw how the industry changed and evolved, going from the near-extinction of the late 1990s to the recent resurgence.” Who knows, I might even write that story one day.

I heard back from him within twenty-four hours. “I've been working hard on organizing the basement (or at least my LPs) and it is just about presentable so you are welcome to take a look,” he wrote.

I wrote back: “I can be there tomorrow.”

My trip up there was treacherous. For several reasons. One, it was Valentine's Day. Which is really a terrible time to leave your wife to take a road trip to southern Illinois to hang out in the basement of a guy who owns a record store. Even if she says she understands, and of course you need to do this, and it's such a commercial
holiday that neither of you believe in anyway, you still look like an asshole.

Second, there was that winter storm. A major one. The kind that any reasonable person wouldn't consider driving two hours through unless it was an actual emergency. The snow was like something from a stop-motion animation special where Santa Claus has to cancel Christmas.

And now here I was, in the back room of a cold record store, looking through boxes of records, while the owner watched me and talked on and on about god only knows. I nodded like I was listening and kept flipping, hoping that this was just the beginning, and eventually he'd let me come back to his home and look through the real stuff in his basement, which would likely take most of the night.

And for what? Why was I doing this? I was starting to feel foolish. Who the fuck wastes an entire year of their life chasing down old records, especially records that are easily replaceable? I could buy them all on Amazon in about fifteen minutes. This was crazy!

“Your thing is not that crazy,” Bob said.

Excuse me?

“I've talked to some people about it,” Bob continued. “I talked to a guy last weekend. I told him about what you're trying to do, and how I thought it was kinda nuts. And he was like, ‘No, he's completely right. Every record that you own is a unique thing. It has a pop here and a click here, and this and that. You can't just replace it with something else. Because it won't be exactly the same.' I thought about it, and I realized he's right, it totally makes sense.”

I looked up at him, waiting for the punch line. But it didn't come.

“I've been digging up some records I had when I was a teenager. Some of them have been with me for most of my life. And I never thought there was anything important about them. I mean, I loved them, but I loved the music. I didn't love the actual record. That was
just the container. What's the difference between a new copy of
Born to Run
and your old scratched copy? But now I understand.”

He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “You've opened my mind to that.”

Bob helped me pull down boxes and line them up on the floor. Most were unmarked, but some were labeled with genres, like “alt-rock,” “CDs,” and one that just read “MINE.” An especially water-damaged box was marked “scratched smelly records,” which seemed like a promising sign. But when I tried to open it, Bob waved me away. “These are not yours,” he said. “I remember buying these myself. They still smell. They're bad, man. Really, really bad.”

“So why'd you buy them?” I asked.

“Well . . . they're cool albums.”

I kept digging. He saw me lingering over one album a little too long. “Is that yours?” he asked.

“It might be,” I said.

“Well take it,” he said. “Take it home and listen to it. That's the only way you'll know.”

I was pretty sure it wasn't mine. Positive even. But that's not why I stopped when I saw it.

It was Neutral Milk Hotel's
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
. Which was an odd record to see in these boxes, buried under the mountains of abandoned, unloved vinyl. It was nestled between a Night Ranger album and Tammy Faye's
We're Blest
(with a sticker price listed at twenty-five cents). It so clearly didn't belong here. It was like some Brooklyn hipster kid who wandered into a church basement and decided he preferred it here, snacking on cold coffee and kuchen with seniors.

I knew the record wasn't mine. But seeing it again, being reminded of that amazing cover—the woman with a cucumber-slice head doing a
sieg heil
salute, or whatever the hell is happening—it
reminded me of my uneasy early courtship with the album. It was 1998 or thereabouts, and I'd heard nothing but good things from friends. But my first impressions of Jeff Mangum's magnum opus weren't promising.

“This dude is really into Jesus,” I remember thinking. “Whoa, whoa, did he just say ‘Semen stains the mountain tops'? Ho boy.”

Despite my initial misgivings, I listened to it again. I listened to it at every opportunity. Because that's what you do when you're in your twenties. You give new music a fighting chance. Because you know something might not click until the fourth or fifteenth or even fifty-second listen. That's how long it takes sometimes. You have to let music live with you for a while. You have to listen to it when you're not really listening to it. It has to sneak up on you when you're doing something else, or it finally starts to trust you. Because music is alive, and it's as wary of you as you are of it.