Old Records Never Die (5 page)

As I put Charlie to sleep later that night, he was still holding on to the Pixies album. Maybe he knew how much it meant to me, and he was determined to find out why. He'd been the same way about
other riddles we'd declined to explain satisfactorily. Like where his Grandpa Spitz was, and what exactly it meant when somebody dies.

I didn't mention that while I was tucking him in, reading him books about hopping on Pop and the Night Kitchen, I could have been at a Pixies show. I didn't want him to feel bad. It wasn't a tragedy. It was a good thing, a lucky thing. Between the two options, I'd made the only choice worth making. But you still feel the loss.

When he wouldn't stop asking, I told him about the Pixies show that was most vivid in my memory. I remember it in Technicolor, like an especially vibrant dream. It was December 1991, at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago. I came to the show with a head full of drugs (I left this part out), two dollars in my bank account, and no idea how (or if) I was going to make it home. I couldn't tell you the exact setlist—I'm pretty sure they played everything I loved, but I wasn't exactly taking notes—but I do know that I've rarely felt so alive and excited and grateful.

Charlie yawned during my story, and then asked, “Were there robots?”

“Yeah,” I conceded. “There were robots.”

“Did they have lasers coming out of their hands?”

“Absolutely,” I said, because in my memory, they kinda did.

Then I kissed him on the head and went out to the living room, where my wife and I polished off a bottle of white wine while watching
Love It or List It
reruns. Because I'm a goddamn grown-up.

The next day, I drove down Lake Shore Drive in our Honda CR-V. It's a tricked-out gangsta ride with gold trim, tinted windows, crushed velour seats, thirty-inch chrome rims, and a custom chain steering wheel. Actually, no, none of that. It's just a standard Honda CR-V with enough trunk room for a stroller. But it did come with
something that Kelly and I, during our twenty-plus years as a sporadically employed couple, have never been able to afford until recently: satellite radio.

“Coming up in the next hour, we've got Def Leppard, Corey Hart, and we'll round it out with everybody's favorite, Hall and Oates.”

Like it always was when Kelly was the last one to use the car, it was tuned to the eighties station. This particular hour of nostalgia was hosted by Alan Hunter, one of the original MTV VJs. But of course, anyone listening to an eighties-themed satellite radio station did not need to be reminded who Alan Hunter is. This was a man who (at least for me) had been in the room—albeit in TV form—for the vast majority of the sexual activity I experienced during the eighties. And he was narrating! He was always in the background, blandly announcing a Spandau Ballet video and totally not judging your futile attempts to find your girlfriend's clitoris over a pair of acid-washed jeans.

“We've got some Bon Jovi coming up,” he said. “Boy, that brings me back.”

It was “Livin' on a Prayer.” I didn't immediately turn the channel, as I usually do when anything by Bon Jovi comes on the radio.

I let it play out. And I listened to it, actually listened, taking in every earnest cliché about working-class kids and their shitty jobs. Even in the eighties, when I first heard it, the song seemed so heavy-handed and self-serious. I believed in Tommy and Gina's plight about as much as I believed that Lionel Richie was capable of dancing on a ceiling.

So why did I ever care? Why do I know “Livin' on a Prayer” inside and out, when I could have just . . .

Oh yeah, that's right, Heather G.

Heather was my first girlfriend. But before that, she was the one
I watched a little too intently from across the band room in high school. She played clarinet, and I played trombone. For that reason alone, she was hopelessly out of my league. (Trombonists do not, historically, get the girl.) To make matters worse, she was also a cheerleader, and showed up for band practices wearing those little cheerleader dresses. My first attempt to impress her musically—which was the only way I was able to impress a girl in my teens, lacking anything like athletic ability or a desirable jawline—was an unmitigated disaster. I'd offered to give her a ride to school, in a maroon Plymouth Valiant whose only redeeming feature was its cassette deck. I popped in
Sticky Fingers
, which I assumed would demonstrate that I was indeed a little sexually dangerous, despite the trombone case in my backseat. I knew all the lyrics to “Bitch” and was capable of singing them with a snarl, which as far as I knew made a pretty convincing case for my bad boy–ness.

But during this unfortunately brief journey, the cassette had been cued to “Dead Flowers,” which didn't have the same menace.

“You like country music?” she asked with a bemused smile.

“This isn't country,” I protested. “It's the Stones.”

She listened for a few more seconds. Jagger's twangy drawl was hard to argue with.

“No, that's definitely country,” she concluded.

For a teenage girl in south suburban Chicago in 1985, nothing was less sexy than country music. For her, it was all about Duran Duran and the Police and Bon Jovi. Especially Bon Jovi. Every person in the vicinity of her social circle was well aware that her favorite artist, the rock performer who truly understood her aching heart, and her personal fantasy paramour, was Jon Bon Jovi.

I had to prove to her that we had something musical in common. I couldn't stand Bon Jovi and his unconvincing “I'm a cowboy” posturing. But if it meant I might have a chance with Heather, I
would have air-guitared along with Gregorian chants. So I bought a copy of
Slippery When Wet
. I didn't get it from my usual record sources. I went to a place that nobody went anymore in the mall where they found that dead girl in the bushes.

I bought the album and brought it to school, and left it casually in my open trombone case during band practice, waiting for Heather to discover it. Which, of course, she did.

“Isn't it so great,” she said, holding the record sleeve like she was gripping a lover's hip bones before climbing on top of him. “What's your favorite song?”

“‘Social Disease,'” I said. I picked this song because it was the non-hit. If I'd learned anything from hanging out in record stores, it's that true fans always prefer the non-hits, the songs not yet devoured by fair-weather fans.

She seemed duly impressed. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she was making eye contact with me.

We made plans to get together later, to play some tunes and talk about all things JBJ. She gave me her phone number, and I wrote it on the album cover. This, I hoped, communicated to her the seriousness of my intentions. I hadn't just written her number on a piece of paper I might throw away or lose. I had tattooed her digits onto my favorite album, made her a permanent fixture on the record sleeve I stared at every night as I fell asleep, humming the lyrics to “Never Say Goodbye” or whatever. I'd look at her number and think, “Oh yeah, there's another lost soul out there who loves the Jov as much as I love the Jov.”

I kept that record when we started dating, and I kept it when she ended it and broke my heart. I took that record with me to college, and to my first few Chicago apartments. I don't know why. God knows I didn't listen to it. But it had her phone number scrawled into it, which made it feel too personal to throw away or sell. I guess
I did cast it off eventually, like I did with all my records. But god, I'd give anything just to . . .

. . . see it . . . one more . . .

There in the car, driving down Lake Shore and listening to “Livin' on a Prayer,” I had a moment of intense clarity. It was suddenly so obvious what I had to do. I needed to find that record. Not just any record.
The
record. The one with Heather's phone number written on it. The exact copy I once owned, that represented something hugely important to me, some rite of passage into adulthood.

I came just short of bringing the car to a skidding halt, turning into oncoming traffic as I changed course.

I headed toward the south suburbs. To the Record Swap. A store I hadn't visited in fifteen years. I didn't know if Heather's record was there, but that seemed like the most logical place to start.

And why stop with one record? Why not get all of them? Not duplicates. Not those reissues that smell like nothing I recognize. Like the
Doolittle
reissue, which was in the seat next to me. It looked like something that used to be meaningful to me, but it was just a carbon copy. Just because it sounded better—with crisper highs and knee-rattling lows—didn't mean it was better.

I wanted my records. My exact records. My literal exact records. I wanted them back.

All of them. Or at least as many as I could find.

It's what Questlove would've done.

I
can tell you many things about the Record Swap, but almost none of it will be accurate.

Here are things that I'm pretty sure are true:

The Record Swap is a record store in Homewood, Illinois, about an hour's drive south of Chicago. It's on Dixie Highway, though I couldn't give you the exact address, even when I was going there regularly. It's next to a Chinese restaurant, across the street from the Melody Mart where I bought my first trombone, long before I discovered how the right music could change everything. What else? There's a Tweety and Clifford the Big Red Dog painted on the alley wall next to the back door, which led up to the all-ages live music club behind the record store that smelled like clove cigarettes.

The sign out front is a terrible drawing of a man in profile, with a weirdly geometric haircut, a business suit, and thick glasses. He's clutching a record in one arm, and running. It's not just a brisk walk; he's definitely running.

That's what I can definitively tell you about the Record Swap.
After that, it begins to get fuzzy. I have this vision of walking into the store for the first time, and I'm pretty sure the Replacements' “Bastards of Young” was playing. But that can't be, can it? It's too perfect, too cinematic. I'm some teenager with a bad haircut and clothes that Rivers Cuomo couldn't make ironic. And I'm carrying a handful of Billy Joel records. That much I know actually was true. I had too many copies of
Glass Houses
, thanks to overenthusiastic grandparents with no other gift-giving ideas. I thought I could make a trade, get some quick cash, and buy something new, something Billy Joel–esque.

I went over to the counter and I gave them my Billy Joel records. The staff—who were all pierced and tattooed, but also had kind faces, and talked in reassuring tones, like you'd want from a nurse or a doctor as they're preparing you for major surgery—they took my records and they put them into a pizza-style brick oven, shoving them into the flames with one of those wooden pizza-loading peels. I tried to object, but they put a finger over my lips, and then took me by the hand and led me deeper into the store.

They picked out records at random for me, records that would change me, that would give me the confidence to realize that I was fundamentally better than everybody at my high school, with their unapologetic lack of originality or musical adventurousness, who would listen to Phil Collins and think, “That'll do.” It wouldn't do for us, goddammit! Because we were different! We felt things! We knew the world in ways they were incapable of knowing the world, even though we'd all seen pretty much the same amount of the world, which didn't extend beyond the Chess King at the mall or the mostly abandoned parking lot near JCPenney, where everybody went to get hand jobs.

But I owned Camper Van Beethoven's
Telephone Free Landslide Victory
. And the Cramps'
Bad Music for Bad People
. And the Dead
Kennedys'
Frankenchrist
. And Tom Waits's
Swordfishtrombones
. How could I have these records and not know more about the world? Other people had based their knowledge of the outside world on things like Bryan Adams's
Reckless
. And Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam's
Spanish Fly
. And that fucking
Miami Vice
soundtrack. And that “We Are the World” record. And Wham!'s
Make It Big
, a band that added an exclamation point to their name, just because they were so excited about their blow-dried hair and white pants. I didn't need to travel anywhere to know that they were wrong. So very, very wrong. I had the evidence in these records.

I went into Record Swap an insecure kid. And I came out just as insecure. But now I was a Lou Reed type of insecure, where your insecurity just makes you cooler.

I know my hindsight isn't to be trusted. It's all overromanticized. A few things are true. I did discover the Dead Kennedys because of a particularly generous sales clerk willing to take Billy Joel off my hands. But I think the ovens were in my imagination.

It was beautiful though. It's what high school was for some people. I didn't discover anything about myself at my actual high school. But in the Record Swap, digging through those bins, building a record collection that was like a never-ending scavenger hunt, getting into afternoon-long conversations about the minutiae of Dinosaur Jr. with twenty-three-year-old guys who look exactly like J Mascis, this is where I felt the most normal, and the most like myself.

I never expected to walk back into it and have everything be exactly the same. There'd be different people working there, obviously. The Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth posters would likely have been taken down, replaced with, I don't know, Animal Collective and the Black Keys maybe? Or something more obscure and confusing to forty-year-old guys? It'd have a fresh coat of paint, it wouldn't smell as much like clove cigarettes, the jazz section would be where
they used to keep the country stuff, and god only knows what they did with R&B. I was prepared for all of that.

I wasn't prepared for it to be gone.

“Can I give you a tour?” the nice guy in the unnecessarily tight karate gi asked me.

I'd just been standing there in the lobby for I don't know how long. I finally found the courage to walk in, after passing the entrance several times. This couldn't be right. It couldn't be the same place. Although the Melody Mart across the street was still there, as was the Chinese restaurant next door. Everything looked right. Except in the spot where the Record Swap should've been, it had been replaced with something called the Draco Academy.

The lobby made no sense. If this was indeed the same building, the walls were in the wrong places. It used to be open, like a loft space, with a curve to the right where the counter was, and rows of records running vertically from the door. This was . . . I don't know what this was. There was a lobby about the size of the bathroom in my first apartment. And a fountain. A fucking fountain.

I just stood there disbelievingly, trying to remember if this was where they kept the new releases or the soundtracks.

The nice man in the unnecessarily tight karate gi—I think his name was Richard—came over and introduced himself. He offered to answer any questions I might have. Did I have a son or daughter who was interested in karate?

I lied.

Well, only partly. I did have a son. But he wasn't between the ages of five and ten, which would qualify him for their junior dragons class. He offered a tour when he noticed me peering over his shoulder, straining to see the rooms down the hall, obstructed by walls that DIDN'T USED TO BE THERE. There were kids back
there—I could hear them, grunting as they kicked at the air. The heavy thud of bodies being thrown against mats.

He walked me back, through a narrow hallway and into a larger room, covered in mats and prepubescents. Parents loitered near the walls and eyed me suspiciously. I felt awkward and conspicuous, very much out of place in my Replacements T-shirt and trench coat. Richard in the unnecessarily tight karate gi was giving me the sales pitch. I pretended to listen, while running a finger across the grooves of a white wall, like I was tracing lines on a map, looking for something specific.

I still remember everything about the first time I heard the New York Dolls' eponymous debut. It was in 1989, in the apartment of a girl I'd just met. What was her name? Abby? Abigail? Abrianna? Something like that. She had purple dreadlocks. I don't remember if she worked for the Record Swap or if she was just a customer, or why in the hell she was talking to me at all.

She made the first move. She made every move. She coaxed me into a conversation about Henry Rollins, because I happened to be holding a Black Flag record at the time. She invited me out to coffee, which was soon aborted when neither of us could think of a coffee place in Homewood, and we both laughed at our obvious lie.

Abby or Abigail, whoever she was, she took me back to her apartment. Which wasn't far from here. It was like visiting a foreign planet. I wanted very badly to sleep with her, which may explain why I agreed to lie on her futon with her and listen to a band fronted by a guy who, to the best of my knowledge, hit his artistic peak with the single “Hot Hot Hot.” I was caught off guard by “Personality Crisis,” recorded almost two decades earlier, which was admittedly catchy as hell. But I couldn't shake the mental image of Poindexter's pompadour, or that album cover of him in a tuxedo, sipping a martini, with an expression of “you caught me” delight.

You don't get to pick a new identity unless you're David Bowie.
He can be Ziggy Stardust one day and then the Thin White Duke the next, because both of those stage personas are fucking awesome. But he's the exception that makes the rule. Everybody else is subject to the rock 'n' roll law of diminishing returns. It's why Mike Nesmith had such a hard time. You start your career as a Monkee, you've made your bed.

“You know what Morrissey said,” the purple-dreadlocked girl told me somewhere around the middle of side one. “Mick Jagger stole all his dance moves from David Johansen.”

As much as I wanted to see her naked, those beautiful lavender locks cascading over my chest, I just couldn't let that ridiculous logic go unanswered.

“How can you say that?” I asked. “It's like saying Muddy Waters learned how to play the blues from George Thorogood.”

We argued through the rest of the record, and by the final crashing notes of “Jet Boy,” it had become painfully obvious that we weren't in any way musically compatible.

“I guess there's no point in asking if you're a fan of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers,” she said with an eye roll.

“Tom Petty's band?” I asked, incredulous. “Well, I guess that explains the Traveling Wilburys. Poor bastard can't keep a band.”

I did not get laid that night.

I love that moment. I love it like I love home videos of my son trying to walk, and falling hard on his face, and then trying to make it seem like that's what he intended all along, that he'd really been reaching for that toy, and walking is—
pfft
—whatever. That's the warm feeling I get when I think about missing my chance with the hot girl with the purple dreadlocks whose name might have started with an
A
.

I was trying so hard to be cool, and failing so spectacularly.

“Are you okay?” I heard Richard with the unnecessarily tight karate gi asking me.

“You know,” I finally told him. “This used to be a record store.”

“Is that so?” he asked. Somewhere behind him, a boy was taking a punch in the stomach. He made a sound that came out like a BLEEERT.

“So,” I said awkwardly. “I guess it, uh . . . I guess it closed.”

He looked around the room, at the kids dressed like Ralph Macchio in
The Karate Kid
, giving each other karate chops. “It looks like it,” he agreed.

He might have wondered why I was smelling his walls, which didn't make much sense to me even as I was doing it.

I could explain it if I had to. It was like when I got my dad's ashes and I immediately took a whiff of the urn. I didn't open it or anything, I just sat on the stairs with it and put my nose just close enough to see if it smelled like anything I recognized. It was totally nonsensical. But I did it anyway.

Or here's what else it's like. When your child is born and the first thing you do is smell his or her head. A newborn's head is just amazing. It's magical, like a Florida orange fresh off the tree. For at least the first year of my son's life, I smelled his head at least twenty times a day. But then that wonderful smell just suddenly stops. You don't know why, it's just gone. But you smell his or her head anyway, looking for some hint of what you lost, hoping it might come back if you breathe in hard enough.

I can't explain it better than that. I smelled the walls of a martial arts school for the same reasons I smelled the head of my non-infant son. Because I was sad about what it used to be.

Richard with the unnecessarily tight karate gi and I made some small talk, about what classes were coming up that might be appropriate for my son that Richard now seemed pretty convinced didn't exist. I took some brochures, and I almost gave him my credit card, if only to prove that I hadn't just been wasting his time all along. And
then, with one more lingering stroke of a freshly painted wall, I got the hell out of there.