Old Records Never Die (3 page)

The girl with the Cramps T-shirt was almost finished with her grapes. I would have to say something soon.

“Could you, uh . . . ,” I attempted. “Tell me where you . . . heh . . . Just curious if you . . . you know . . . the used records?”

She smiled warmly at me, like it was a question she got all the time from old guys with gray in their beards.

“It's right behind you, sweetie,” she said, gesturing toward the middle aisle.

I thanked her and drifted toward the used section, which was actually labeled
LAST-CHANCE SALOON
.

This was more promising. Here were the records that might've come from my personal library. Not the titles, necessarily, but the general poor condition. They smelled like something that'd been left in the basement during a Chicago winter. If you grabbed them with too much force, the sleeves folded back. I spent almost a full minute cradling albums like Bryan Adams's
Cuts Like a Knife
and the Greg Kihn Band's
Kihnspiracy
, not because they were records I particularly cherished, but because they had the physical battle scars of music from my era. Also, it didn't hurt that the average price for a bargain bin record—fifty-nine cents on the high end—meant I could probably buy back my entire collection for about a hundred dollars.

I'm all for superior sound quality, but vinyl made after 2000 is fundamentally different from vinyl made in the twentieth century. It smells different, it feels different. The vinyl copy of the Pixies'
Doolittle
I purchased at Reckless in 1990 is only tangentially related to the reissue vinyl copy, ticket price $19.99, currently for sale at Reckless. I don't give a shit about rare test pressings. Or when new albums come with free download coupons. Or colored vinyl. Or goddamn picture discs. I want the records I recognize. The records that feel like a part of my double helix.

I spent an hour combing through the Last-Chance Saloon.
And then I brought the Pixies'
Doolittle
reissue for $19.99 to the counter. Because I am weak and everything in the Last-Chance Saloon was shit.

I gave the hot girl in the Cramps T-shirt a credit card.

“Did you find everything you needed?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. But that was a lie. I hadn't even come close to finding everything I needed. But I couldn't answer her honestly without getting into a whole thing about music and memories and authenticity. I'd have to tell her about feelings that would probably sound crazy to someone like her—what are they calling people in their twenties now? Postmillennials? Have we rolled around to Generation A yet? I'd have to tell her about memory and reconnecting with your past and how to reconcile that with growing up and how shitty and wonderful but mostly shitty it is to be an adult with a head full of preadolescent emotions, and she'd probably just nod politely as I was telling her all this, while she was inching her fingers toward that silent alarm button under the desk. And of course I'd have to mention Questlove, the drummer from the Roots, and how this all traces back to him. He's where it all started. And that would take us into a whole rabbit hole of explanations and backstories and justifications, none of which would make all that much sense to her.

But nobody wants to hear that old-man yammering, do they? Oh, what the hell.

I'm going to back up.

I'm a journalist. An “entertainment” journalist, if you want to get all specific about it.

This wasn't my choice.

When I was coming out of college, my first intention was to be
a playwright. I would move to Chicago and write hilariously profane and poignant plays for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. I'd be like a modern-day Christopher Durang but without the religious hang-ups, or an August Strindberg who watched too much porn and too many Woody Allen movies. I stumbled into journalism by accident. The father of my writing partner was a columnist for
Playboy
, and after meeting several silver-fox editors at social functions, my friend and I were paid way too much money to write funny stories for the magazine about
Baywatch
and lesbians.

For lack of any other options, I stayed with the money, and within a few decades, I was writing regularly for publications like
Vanity Fair
,
Esquire
, and the
New York Times Magazine
, mostly interviewing celebrities like Tina Fey, Sir Ian McKellen, Willie Nelson, Stephen Colbert, Sarah Silverman, and (as of this writing) approximately 213 other people you've probably heard of.

When you talk to famous people for a living, it all starts to blend together after a while. You remember meeting people like Buzz Aldrin and John Cusack and Isabella Rossellini, but you have only a vague recollection of what you discussed with them. But that wasn't the case with Questlove, the coolest neo-soul drummer in the universe. I can remember everything about our phone conversation. It was an assignment for MTV Hive, a website offshoot of MTV. Quest had a new memoir out, and I was tasked with getting a few ridiculous yarns out of him. For the first twenty minutes or so of our conversation, it was more or less as expected. We talked about the time he roller-skated with Prince, and ran out of a Tracy Morgan toe-licking party. But then the topic turned to the Sugarhill Gang's “Rapper's Delight.”

We both laughed as we recounted the brilliantly weird lyrics. “I said a hip, hop, the hippy to the hippy / To the hip hip hop, you don't stop. . . .” If you were alive in the early eighties and didn't identify as
a grown-up, you can probably remember where you were when you first heard “Rapper's Delight.”

For Quest, it was while washing dishes with his sister and listening to a local soul station in Philadelphia. He immediately went out and bought the song on a twelve-inch. It was the first record he ever purchased with his own money. He found his copy at the Listening Booth on Chestnut Street in Philly, and it cost $2.99 plus tax. $3.17 total.

It was the first piece in what grew to be his seventy-thousand-plus record collection.

“Seventy thousand?” I asked, dumbfounded. “You have seventy thousand records?”

“Something like that,” he said. “I'm rounding down.”

Instead of buying a home with his new income as the
Tonight Show
bandleader, he invested in a vinyl library “with a cherrywood floor and a sliding ladder. It was necessary, because it was getting to a point where the records were taking over. You had to have some sort of Indiana Jones skill level to navigate my house, just to jump over stuff without cracking a record.”

“Is there anything in your collection that's indispensable?” I asked. “Anything you'd never sell?”

“Well, I'd never sell my ‘Rapper's Delight,'” he said.

“You still have it?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You have the original? The one you bought for $3.17?”

“The original.” He laughed. “I've never given it up. Never even occurred to me.”

He had held on to a tiny piece of plastic for more than three decades?

“I've always taken meticulous care of that stuff,” he told me. “I've always had some sort of library system for my records, so nothing
just disappeared without me knowing about it. Not just ‘Rapper's Delight,' but all my records. They've never been in any danger. You're probably the same way about your records.”

I was silent for a second.

“I don't have records anymore,” I told him. “I sold them all long ago.”

Now there was silence on the other end of the phone.

“Oh, man, I'm sorry,” Quest finally said, his voice a whisper. He seemed sincerely shaken by my admission, like I'd just casually confessed that I'd put a pillow over my dad's face while he slept and held it there until he stopped breathing.

“Well, you know, I could always get them back,” I said, backpedaling.

“Sure, yeah, absolutely,” Quest said. But he didn't believe it, I could tell. It was like when a clearly crazy person says, “I'm not crazy,” and you're like “Oh, yeah, totally, you're not crazy at all,” but you absolutely think that motherfucker is crazy.

We moved on to another topic, but in my head, I was still thinking about it. It's not like I just threw out all my records one day, made a bonfire, and watched the vinyl burn. It happened over time, as these things usually do.

It started because of CDs. Right? That's why we all gave up on vinyl. Because the technology changed. You don't want to be the one who's like, “Enjoy your jetpacks. I'll stick with my Volvo.”

My first CD was the Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 album. It was 1988. Late December. I'd gotten a CD boom box for Christmas from my parents, and I needed to christen it. I visited the mall and picked the Wilburys' CD only because that goddamn video for “Handle with Care” had been hammered into my subconscious by MTV. Listening to the compact disc was breathtaking. I'd never heard music with so much clarity. And so fucking loud. This was clearly the future.

Over the coming months, I began selling off my records. I was like the guy who gets kissed by a hot girl and decides he has to get rid of his porn collection immediately because “I won't be needing this anymore.” I'd been that guy—several times, in fact, back when getting rid of porn meant filling a pillowcase full of VHS tapes and taking them to the nearest inconspicuous Dumpster—but my vinyl wasn't as easy to cast off.

At first, I sold off just the nonessentials. Nothing that would be missed. A few dozen greatest-hits albums, and artists who seemed like a good idea at the time but had outgrown their usefulness (the Dream Academy, Blind Melon, Porno for Pyros, 4 Non Blondes). Entire chunks of certain artists' canons were easy to let go—early-period Tom Waits, late-period Genesis, Christian-period Bob Dylan. If I were on a helicopter filled with all my records and it started going down and the pilot screamed, “We need to lose some weight,” those would have been the records I threw overboard first.

I never had remorse or worries that I might never see this music again. Selling my copy of the Police's
Synchronicity
or the Pixies'
Doolittle
was just a means to an end, not an irrevocable act. If I ever had a change of heart, I could always buy another copy—hell, I could go back to the same Discount Record and Tapes at Lincoln Mall in the south suburbs of Chicago, the exact place where I'd bought both of those records, and find copies in the cutout bin for a fraction of what I sold them for. Selling records in the late twentieth century was a victimless crime.

And the money was good. My Clash records alone—I had all six studio albums and the “Hitsville U.K.” 7-inch—paid for an entire week of groceries from the liquor store down the block. Even when the profits were middling—I got ten cents for John Cougar Mellencamp's
Scarecrow
—it still felt like a victory. Being able to hear “Small
Town” whenever I wanted was not inherently valuable, but you never knew when you might need an extra dime.

It never occurred to me that I might ever run out of records. The last time I counted, somewhere around 1987, I had in the ballpark of two thousand. The first purge of three hundred barely left a dent. And from there, it was just a few records here, a few dozen there, as I needed them. I never made the conscious decision to deep-six my vinyl. It was always just, “Shit, I need beer money for the weekend. Oh wait, I still have that copy of the Stooges'
Raw Power
!” It was like a low-interest-bearing savings account with guilt-free withdrawals. I was never going to get rich on a bunch of old Elvis Costello records held together with Scotch tape, or a
Purple Rain
that was so warped it sounded like the doves were crying because Prince was having a stroke. These weren't investments, they were just antiques from my past that had small yet immediate monetary value.

Most of my records disappeared in a blur. But I remember the last one. It was the Replacements'
Let It Be
. I sold it in 1999, the year I got married and my dad died. I was still embarrassingly poor, and needed money fast. During a visit to my parents, I found it in my old bedroom closet—the one record I'd always managed to talk myself out of selling. But at this point, it seemed silly to hold on to it. I already had the CD, which was vastly superior (or so I thought at the time). The ragged and well-worn vinyl had long outlasted its usefulness, even as its secondary purpose, as a brilliant hiding spot for my weed.

That was my one concern when I visited the Record Swap in suburban Homewood—ironically, the very same record store where I bought my original copy of
Let It Be
back in 1986. Would they actually buy a record that smelled so pungently of marijuana? As it turned out, yes they would.

Driving back to Chicago from the Record Swap, I felt lighter,
like I'd unburdened myself of some great worry. There was no value in these physical relics, which (I'd told myself) symbolized only lonely nights in my teenage bedroom. I was a snake shedding its skin; if somebody wanted to give me cash for that discarded rind, well, my gas tank thanks you, sucker. I blasted “I Will Dare” from my car stereo as I sped down Lake Shore Drive, all the windows open, and believed I hadn't actually lost anything.