Old Records Never Die (2 page)

T
hink about the first song that meant something to you.

I don't mean a song that just had a hummable melody and you knew all the lyrics because it was on the radio incessantly, and you were like “I love this song,” but you meant it like people mean “I love ice cream,” which is just something people feel about ice cream when they're in the midst of eating it. But ice cream isn't something you stay up late thinking about. You don't argue about ice cream's deeper meanings with your friends. You don't obsess over ice cream because you feel like ice cream understands you in ways you didn't think it was possible to be understood. Nobody says, “This is the ice cream I want eaten at my funeral.”

I'm talking about the kind of music that sinks into your pores, that enters your bloodstream and becomes part of your DNA. It's the song that stuck by you when you felt abandoned or misunderstood, and you're pretty convinced it was written specifically for you. When you hear people say “I love that song too,” you just smirk. What do they know of love? Their relationship with the song is a one-night stand—a summer fling at best—but you and this song, you're soul mates.

When people challenge you with that hypothetical poser “If you could bring only one album to a desert island, what would it be?” you always mention a certain record, because it's got that song you're pretty sure you could spend the rest of your earthly time listening to on a constant loop, as you collected firewood and hunted for animals with crudely made spears and went slowly insane. That song, that particular arrangement of notes and words, would be all the comfort you needed as you died alone on a beach. But you don't say that. You pretend it's a difficult question, and it's the first time you're considering it, and you're like, “Hmm, let me think about that.” You try to be all cool and casual about it, pretending that your feelings about the song aren't a little bit inappropriate, and hearing it doesn't automatically make you feel less alone in the universe, and if it didn't exist, something about you would be different on a molecular level.

Think about that song right now. Close your eyes and let those familiar chords drift through your head.

Is it there? Can you hear it?

What does it smell like?

Now, for some of you, what I just asked will make no sense. You think I'm talking gibberish. And that's okay. You're from a generation that knows about music only as a digital thing. It isn't something that can be touched or held. It's not a physical thing. It's in the ether. It's on a screen and needs to be bitstream compliant. It's all about megabytes and gigabytes and compression algorithms. It has to be downloaded or streamed or kept in a cloud.

Not so long ago, there were two audio formats: “That sounds good” and “Nope, sounds like an Alvin and the Chipmunks record.” That was all you needed to know. Now, when you get new music, you have to ask, “Am I going to need a LAME MP3 encoder to hear this?” Or “Does it have enough kilobits? Just 128? I accept nothing less than 640!”

MP3s, or M4As or WMAs or AIFFs or OGGs, whatever your digital format of choice, don't smell like anything. The device that plays your music—your iPod or laptop or whatever—that may smell like something. But it'll smell like that same thing whether you're listening to Foo Fighters or Jay Z. It's not unique to a particular song or album.

Records are something different. They're physical objects. Big, bulky, inconvenient, easily damaged objects. Vinyl is like skin that changes, in good and bad ways, over a lifetime. Skin gets damaged, intentionally or by accident—maybe it gets burned, or tattooed, or scarred—but it always retains some of its original character. It's the same skin—it's just weathered some life.

Some of these records—the good ones anyway—have a distinct smell. They might smell like the beach. Or your dad's cologne. Or when you bought Elton John's
Greatest Hits
for two dollars in 1977 at a Lions Club's garage sale in a recently renovated building that used to be a cherry processing plant, and even a decade after the fact, the record smells like cherries.

Here's another one. Billy Joel's
The Stranger
. I can't even look at the album cover without smelling Calvin Klein's Obsession.

During the mideighties, my grandmother was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. My parents flew out to New York for the surgery, and my brother and I were sent to stay with family friends. The family that took me in had a daughter, Debbie, who was about two years older than me, and almost unfairly attractive. A woman who looked like her in a Whitesnake video was one thing, but existing in the world, walking past you in the school hallway, a reminder of how your fantasies can be right in front of you but also a million miles away, was just not cool.

I remember being dropped off at her house and her parents taking me to her room, saying, “This is where you'll be sleeping.” And
I sat there, in her room, totally mesmerized. Because Jesus Christ, I was in her bedroom. The place where she slept, maybe in her underwear.

I went immediately to her records, because I just had to know—what does a beautiful woman listen to while sitting around her room in sexy underwear? The first record I pulled out was Billy Joel's
The Stranger
. I'd never heard of it before, but the cover was amazing. Joel is sitting on a bed, wearing a full suit and no shoes, gazing down at a white theater mask next to him, with a pair of boxing gloves on the wall. Cringingly pretentious, but for a thirteen-year-old boy who still owned all of his original
Star Wars
action figures, Billy Joel seemed supercomplex and deep.

I made a mental note to wear more suits and buy some boxing gloves.

The record had its own unmistakable scent. I wasn't able to put a name to it until decades later, when I was on a blind date and the girl was wearing Obsession. While we were making out, I took a deep breath of her neck and said, “You smell like Billy Joel's
The Stranger
.” (It didn't end well.)

I'm not sure how long I was sitting there, smelling Debbie's
The Stranger
, when the door burst open and Debbie came charging in.

“Hey,” she said, beaming. “You're here.”

“Yep,” I said, staring at her like she was a black bear that'd just wandered into my campsite.

She nodded, inching closer to me. “This is going to be so cool,” she said.

I had no idea what she meant by that. I remember thinking, “Cool how? What's so cool about it? And why's she standing so close to me? Is she waiting for me to do something? Maybe kiss her? Oh Jesus, should I kiss her? Of course I should kiss her! There couldn't be a more obvious signal. I'm totally going to kiss her.”

I didn't kiss her. And I never really talked to her again during the entire week I was at her house. It's possible I missed my opportunity. It's even more possible that she'd confused me with another boy and was too polite to say anything when she got close enough to realize it.

I eventually bought my own copy of
The Stranger
. But it wasn't the same. The songs sounded generally similar, but something fundamental was missing. It didn't have that hot-girl smell.

There's another record whose unmistakable odor has become a sort of personal mythology for me. The Replacements'
Let It Be
, first released in 1984, first purchased by me in 1986, and my copy eventually sold in 1999. For the vast majority of its existence, the record sleeve was used for more than just a protective envelope for the vinyl. It also served as a sort of safe-deposit box for my stash of marijuana.

It's amazing I ever thought I was getting away with anything. I think my thought process was, if somebody—my parents, DEA agents doing random searches of teenage bedrooms—got the crazy idea that kids were hiding marijuana in record sleeves, they'd look at titles a little more obvious. They'd probably check my Cypress Hill. Or my Grateful Dead. Or my Bob Marley
Legend
, which I kept in my closet in clear sight specifically as a weed red herring. It'd never cross their minds to look elsewhere. They'd be, “Oh, don't bother looking for his stash in any of those 'Mats records. They were into heavy drinking, not weed.” Because obviously, both the DEA and my mother would have done extensive research on the intoxicants of choice of my favorite artists.

I was never busted, and not because
Let It Be
was such a clever disguise. Obviously nobody cared that I was smoking marijuana.

I haven't stopped listening to those songs. I've owned the album on several formats. I've had three CDs of
Let It Be
, and numerous MP3s of the songs, which I've synced to too many iPods, iPads, nanos, minis, and shuffles. The notes are the same, the voice sounds
familiar, but it doesn't feel like my music anymore. For one thing, the smell is gone. And the scratches, well, there aren't any scratches. Which isn't something you'd think you'd miss. But I miss those scratches more than anything.

The scratches matter. They're not just an imperfection. Something meaningful happens when those scratches are made. Something is etched into the grooves. Something important has become a part of your permanent record. And the song is your witness. It's borne witness to your milestones; it held your proverbial hand when life got shitty, or gave you a danceable beat when there was something to celebrate. The song, yes, but more significantly, the physical object that was with you, that you touched and held on to and watched spin around and around as you listened to it make the music that felt like it might be the only thing keeping you alive. It wasn't just the messenger. It was your companion. It was an accomplice.

If you saw it again—that record, that specific record—would you recognize it?

Would you know it was yours?

If it was one of my records, I'd like to think I'd recognize it. Even if it's been sitting in a damp basement, or stored under a leaky air conditioner. I know where all the scratches are; I put them there myself. I know every pop and hiss. I'd recognize my records like I'd recognize my own flesh and blood.

During the first few months after my dad died in 1999, I had this recurring fantasy that he'd faked his so-called fatal heart attack. Maybe he did it so he could skip town to evade back taxes, or run away with his mistress. Whatever it was, the story was comforting. It was my life raft during his funeral: the thing that kept my head above water so I didn't suffocate on grief. I imagined him somewhere in New Orleans, with a bad dye job and a mustache, living a gypsy lifestyle as he moves from motel to motel with his Brazilian lover.

Sometimes, when I'm daydreaming, I have this vision of myself wandering through a Mardi Gras parade, and I see him in the distance, with a handlebar mustache and a safari hat, sucking back the last of his hurricane before kissing the neck of . . . what's her name? Rosario? Yolanda? And then our eyes meet, and I know that he knows that I know it's him, and he smiles at me in that weak way that says, “I'm sorry, son. I'm sorry that I wasn't there for you over these past fifteen years, and I'm sorry that I missed so much of your life. I love you more than you can begin to imagine, and I wish I didn't have to leave, but
la vida es corta
! You'll understand someday.”

And then
poof
, he's gone, disappeared into the crowd. I chase after him, pushing people out of the way, stumbling over revelers in masks and slipping through guys on stilts and knocking drinks out of the hands of tourists and running and running and running, the sound of joyous laughter and music and celebration all around me. I know I'm never going to find him, but somehow it's okay, just knowing he's still out there, and he's still breathing the same humid air that I am, and at least now he realizes that he never fooled me with his silly “he had a heart attack at sixty” ruse.

Just like I'd recognize my father's eyes in a Mardi Gras parade, I'd recognize my copy of the Replacements'
Let It Be
. The one that was with me through puberty and too many girlfriends and years of stomach-clenching loneliness and an ego that sometimes felt like it was held together with Scotch tape and sloppy punk riffs. If I saw it again, I'd know it was mine. And not just because it smells like weed.

Of course I'd recognize it. Assuming I was ever in the same room with it again, it'd be impossible for me not to recognize it. But that's not the hard part. The hard part would be finding it, since I sold the record when I was still in my twenties. A lot has happened in my life since I let it go. I got married, and had my first meaningful employment, and buried my father, and almost got divorced, and
became a parent. It would be laughably impossible, but maybe, if you looked long enough, and hard enough, and refused to give up, maybe you do find it again. Maybe you find your dead dad in the Mardi Gras parade. The thing you thought was lost forever, that part of yourself that just disappeared, that vanished when you weren't paying attention, maybe you chased it down and kept running until you cornered it in a back alley and you managed to get it back.

But then what?

C
an I help you?”

A female employee with blond hair and pink highlights had noticed me loitering near the register, obviously wanting to ask something. She looked exactly like you'd want a woman who works at a record store to look: punk but not so punk you think she might cut you, a Cramps T-shirt and lip ring, eating grapes.

She'd asked a pretty innocuous question—one I've been asked thousands of times by a thousand different store employees—and it's not a complicated question. It's not like a troll is asking you to answer a riddle before you can cross his bridge. It usually requires nothing more than a “No, thanks, I'm fine.” But my mouth muscles weren't cooperating. She smiled at me, waiting for me to get my bearings. This was obviously not unfamiliar territory for her.

I was at Reckless Records, in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood—just a few blocks from my first apartment. I hadn't been inside this store in almost two decades. And it felt, well, pretty much the same as the last time I was here. The store's soundtrack, as always, was something obscure and amazing, designed to make you feel
musically illiterate. (All I know is that there were trumpets, and the vocalist sounded like Iggy Pop trying to do a Bono-circa-
Rattle-and-Hum
impression.) Sullen, unshaven men guarded their sections as they flipped through records like old-timey accountants tapping calculators.

Every other record store I'd frequented during the eighties and nineties was, as far as I could tell, extinct. The legendary Rose Records in the Loop, with an escalator to the second floor where they kept all the on-sale stuff (and an elevator to get out), is now a barber school. The church-like Evil Clown on Halsted, once located on the same block as an S&M leather shop and a hole-in-the-wall coffee place owned by a sweet old man whose son was eaten by Jeffrey Dahmer, is gone too. It's been replaced with something called Batteries Not Included, a “bachelorette party store.” The place at Clark and Belmont, whose name I don't remember anymore, is now a Dandy Dollar.

Reckless was it. And it had moved across the street from its original location. Which was weirdly upsetting. It was like coming home from college and finding that your parents had moved your bedroom into the dining room. You still had a place to sleep, and it might even be an improvement, with more square footage and better access to things like food and TV. But it wasn't what you remembered. All the important stuff that had happened to you, it happened in that other room.

I have only one real memory of Reckless. But it was one of those “this is where I became a man” stories. Not the milestones that seemed pretty awful at the time. Like when you lost your virginity, which involved a lot of fumbling and bad decisions and neither of you enjoyed it very much but thank god that was done. The smaller but no-less-significant milestones. Like the first time a girl started flirting with you hard at a high school party, and you were like,
“Whoa, what's happening here?” And at some point, when nobody's looking, she leans in close and whispers in your ear, “I want you inside me.” Which is kind of hilarious and adorable when it comes from a sixteen-year-old, because there's no way in hell that's ever happening. She might as well have said, “I want to take a space shuttle to Mars with you and build a colony and our children will build a new human civilization.” It has as much a chance of happening as the “being inside her” idea. But you both like the way it sounds—it feels like the most erotic thing that has ever happened to anybody in the history of human beings with genitals. You go home with the electric crackle of being desired, and you don't sleep a wink that night, you just stay up, thinking about the bizarre idea that somebody in the world wants to see you naked.

My main memory from Reckless happened in 1993. I was flipping through the bins and happened to be near a group of guys who were all several years older than me. They had rumpled T-shirts with the names of bands I'd never heard of, complicated tattoos on their forearms, and one guy had a spiderweb covering his neck.

They were talking about Nirvana, and how Cobain had so obviously stolen his best ideas from the Pixies, and how even though Cobain had admitted as much, it was still musical robbery, and Nirvana was still the biggest band in the universe and the mainstream still ignored the Pixies, which just goes to prove that the vast majority of the music-listening public are idiots.

“It's like they've got Mozart conducting right across the street, but they'd rather listen to Salieri,” one of them sneered. He was the obvious leader of the group. He had a shaved head, stretched-out earlobes pierced with plates the size of mayonnaise jar lids, and smelled like Marlboro Reds. I let out a muffled laugh, just to let them know that I was listening and agreed.

“Yeah,” another guy guffawed. “It's like somebody who thinks
Stone Temple Pilots is an amazing band, and you're like, ‘Dude, have you not heard of Pearl Jam?'”

The cool bald guy with the jar lids didn't laugh. He narrowed his eyes and scowled at him.

Without looking up from the records, I did a growling parody of Eddie Vedder's baritone. The tune was “Daughter” but I invented my own lyrics. “Don't call me music,” I belted. “Not meant to!”

But the cool bald guy smiled. He chuckled even. And then he summoned me over. “Hey, kid,” he said. “I got something you should check out.”

I swear, it felt like my balls crawled up inside my body cavity. I was elated and scared shitless all at once.

He brought me over to the checkout table and reached over to a box of new arrivals. He pulled out a Pixies import called
Into the White
. It was a collection of BBC recordings, nothing I'd ever heard of, or would ever consider buying. Certainly not with a $50 price tag. But the cool bald guy with the trash can earlobes had deemed me worthy. What was I gonna say: “My grandma just loaned me $50 to help pay my rent; I really shouldn't be spending it on Pixies songs I already own that have just been rerecorded for a British radio show”?

I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen after this transaction. Actually, no, that's not true. I knew what I hoped would happen. I hoped he'd invite me back to his apartment, where all the cool kids would be hanging out, doing drugs from elaborate contraptions that looked like hookahs, having friendly debates about their favorite
Ben Is Dead
issues or
Simpsons
episodes or Hal Hartley movies. And then we'd listen to the Pixies, and he'd blare “Debaser” from big black speakers hung from ceiling chains, and I'd nod with a wry smile, because I appreciated the song's subversiveness, and it didn't in any way scare the living bejesus out of me and make me
want to drive home to my parents' house in the suburbs and hide in my old bedroom and listen to Billy Joel's “Keeping the Faith” over and over.

None of that happened. After I bought the Pixies import, I went back to the Chicago apartment I shared with four roommates, slipped it into the wood crate with all the other overpriced imports and bootlegs I didn't listen to, and immediately called my grandma to ask for another fifty dollars.

Here I was, twenty years later, just as insecure and hungry for approval. The girl with the Cramps shirt kept popping grapes into her mouth.

It was hard for me not to stare. I missed this as much as my record collection. I missed the experience of being in a place like this, a place that sold objects containing music, which provided reasons—perfectly justifiable reasons—for you to talk with hot women, their hair streaked with pink highlights and their mouths brandishing lip rings, who know fascinating minutiae about music I never knew existed but that would soon change my life.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked.

I guess the answer is I want the old thrill back, the adrenaline rush of hunting for music the way it's supposed to be hunted for.

I'm an iTunes customer, and it's great. It makes everything easier. When I find out that one of my favorite bands is putting out a new album, I just give iTunes my credit card information, and on the release date they automatically download it onto my iPod, like a spouse surprising you with breakfast in bed on your birthday. Except it's not a surprise at all, because it's your birthday, and you kinda knew it was coming, and later that night you'll be having sex that's mildly dirty, not because it's spontaneous and creative but because that's the mutual understanding that comes with an enduring relationship, whether it's between two mostly loveless life
companions or a customer and his or her iTunes account. The seduction is gone, but you'll get what you want if you just wait long enough.

Music shouldn't feel like date-night sex. It should be dangerous. Legitimately dangerous. And it used to be. There was a time when the mere act of owning a record could put you in physical peril.

When I was a teenager, I was thrilled by rumors that if you played “Stairway to Heaven” backward, you could hear satanic messages. I never tried it, but I had friends who knew guys who knew guys who had purportedly figured out a way to play a record backward, and they swore you could hear a voice muttering, “Here's to my sweet Satan,” or “I sing because I live with Satan,” or some variation on how Satan is his roommate and they have hootenannies.

This knowledge made the record even more valuable to me. Because it wasn't just the song. The song was fine, but when I heard it on the radio, it didn't seem especially frightening or dangerous. But the record, well, that was like owning an Aleister Crowley book. That actual document, the physical object more than the song, was the terrifying thing. Because you could only unlock the Satan shout-out by manipulating the record in a certain way. It didn't exist without the record. I was scared of the record for the same reason I was scared of turning out the lights in a bathroom and saying “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” three times while spinning around. I kinda knew it was bullshit, but I wasn't taking any chances.

Twenty years later, I downloaded a Robert Plant solo album. I don't remember the name. The one with Alison Krauss. I didn't really even want to hear it, but the reviews were good, and I was bored and I found it on a BitTorrent site and I was like, “Eh, whatever.” I made it through only the first song before it crashed my iPod. When I took it to an Apple store, Karl the tech guy asked me if I'd been “messing around” with LimeWire.

“Nope,” I said. And I wasn't lying. I'd already figured out that
anything you downloaded from LimeWire was likely to be just audio of Bill Clinton. Like a responsible Internet thief, I stole my music from Pirate Bay.

Karl the tech guy explained that my stolen files were probably a viral Trojan horse. And it didn't help matters that my iPod was a “classic.” Which is a polite way of saying “old.”

I've reached an age when most of the things I love are becoming “classic” at an alarming rate. This is especially true when it comes to music. A good 85 percent of my music collection has crossed or is on the verge of crossing over into classic-rock territory. I've only recently (and still begrudgingly) accepted that U2's
The Joshua Tree
is classic rock now. And despite having heard it categorized as “classic” repeatedly, I refuse to admit that Neutral Milk Hotel's
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
shares any DNA with music created by old hippies with comb-overs and grandchildren. But okay, fine, I'm a realist; I know that time marches on, and when fifteen or more years have passed, it's unrealistic to think that the things that seemed so fresh and current yesterday aren't showing a little rust today.

But not in this case. Not with a music-playing device that I bought shortly after a black man was elected US president. Just by the numbers, that's not nearly enough time to give anything nostalgic street cred.

“Can you fix it?” I asked Karl the tech guy.

“Well, no,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can sell you a new iPod, and you can stop stealing music.”

“A new iPod?” I asked. This was patently absurd to me. “You can't just take the bad songs off of it?”

“No, sorry, it doesn't work like that.”

I was just annoyed enough to start complaining like an old man, telling him how things were different in my day. I remember when music was only ever victimized by easily manageable danger. If the
sound got too smudgy—your favorite song was smeared with thumbprints—you could scrub it down with a little isopropyl alcohol and it'd be as good as new. Or maybe your needle was the problem. I could replace a turntable needle with one hand and roll a joint with the other. But that all changed with MP3s. You couldn't slather an MP3 with isopropyl alcohol and fix it. You had to call a guy, a smart-ass college kid in a cobalt-blue T-shirt to lecture you about how your iPod is too “classic.”

In my day, if you listened to music under the right circumstances, it might fill your head with satanic messages, ensuring the eternal damnation of your rock-horn-saluting soul. But under no goddamn circumstances did playing the bad music require you to pay three hundred fucking dollars for a replacement stereo system.

As I browsed Reckless, there were albums that were entirely foreign to me, and albums that were instantly familiar. But the old friends, they'd all been given an upgrade. Fugazi's
Repeater
? A reissue. The Smiths'
The Queen Is Dead
? Another reissue. Anything by the Replacements? Only one
Tim
and two
Pleased to Meet Me
s, both reissues. Even the crown jewel of my collection, the record I bought solely because a guy with Elvis Costello glasses and a nose ring behind the counter at Record Swap recommended it, Screeching Weasel's
How to Make Enemies and Irritate People
, was only available as a reissue.

Everything was a deluxe edition, remastered on 180-gram vinyl, now with original artwork. The stickers that used to read
FEATURING THE
RADIO HIT . . .
now promised things like
INCLUDES
A DOWNLOAD CODE AND
HIGH-RES DIGITAL AU
DIO EDITIONS IN 2.8 MHZ, 12
KHZ / 24-BIT, AND 96 KHZ / 24-BIT!
I recognized the covers, but the albums felt different. It's not just that they were new; there was something too slick in the design, too high-definition in the packaging.