 |
I Used to Love LPs |
|
I used to love carrying new LPs home from the store--the big goofy flatness of the things, and the obviousness (to whoever saw me) of what was in the big bag at my side. I think that their breakability was part of their loveliness, though I never actually broke one. (A friend of mine sat on, and broke, a rare Richard Hell 45 I had bought in Greenwich Village.) The fact that they could warp and melt just made them seem more treasurable. When I was six or seven, I begged my parents to buy me the soundtrack of "Breakfast at Tiffany's": it was the first album I ever owned, and for years I thought that the numbers following the song titles on the back cover were the actual times of the day when the songs had been recorded--I came away with the impression that orchestras played into the microphone only between 2:30 and 3:30 or so in the afternoon. It was my mother who brought the first Beatles album into the house--the Vee-Jay LP "Introducing the Beatles," with the almost sepia-toned cover. I listened to each song acquire its individuating scratches. I remember exchanging a Dave Clark Five 45 ("Can't You See That She's Mine?") three times because I was convinced that each copy I bought was skipping at the start. I liked being able to look directly into the grooves of a record, and I liked seeing the darker, smoother bands that separated one song from another; the little visible spools of recording tape in cassettes have always seemed very unforthcoming to me. I remember being thrilled when I read that Frank Zappa, as a teenager, had used a piece of chalk to mark off particular sound effects on an Edgar Varese record he owned, so that he could lower the needle into the very grooves in which his favorite percussive outbursts were lodged. I even liked the times when I had to weigh down the needle's cartridge with a stack of two or three pennies Scotch-taped together; it was as if the music were being gouged out of the plastic. I sometimes listened to records with the volume set at zero: I would lower my ear to the needle and listen to the trebliest, tiniest versions of the songs. |
1996 © 2004 |