Old Records Never Die (6 page)

I sat in a booth at the Eat Rice Chinese restaurant, next door to what used to be the Record Swap, and made notes on a cocktail napkin, listing every record from my former collection that I was reasonably certain I could identify by sight. Or in some cases, smell.

Exile in Guyville
, Liz Phair.
With a store sticker still on the front sleeve, priced in UK pounds, bought during a summer backpacking trip to London and northern England. My intention was to purchase a Smiths record in Manchester, which I felt was significant, like buying a Beatles record in Liverpool or a Nirvana record in Seattle. And I came very close. I had
Louder Than Bombs
in my hands, and I was en route to the register at Piccadilly Records on Oldham Street. But then I talked to some guys with thick British accents who were really, really into Liz Phair, and they made a convincing case that Liz Phair was the most important artist in our lifetime, certainly the most important artist making songs about being a blow job queen. So I bought
Exile in Guyville
instead. I essentially traveled thirty-eight hundred miles to pay three times the amount for an album that was recorded in a Chicago studio located six miles from my apartment.

Let It Bleed
, the Rolling Stones.
The cover sleeve contains the radio station call letters WBCR written in big black Sharpie. Also, a muddy boot print. Doc Martens, I'm pretty sure. The boot print was not accidental, but a very earnest attempt by a college radio station manager to destroy the record. It was unsuccessful.

Alive II
, KISS
. In ballpoint pen, written across the band's name, it reads: “HANDS OFF!!!” A warning from Mark, my younger brother by two years—when he was approximately seven and I was nine—that any further attempts to lay claim to his vinyl property would result in swift and merciless vengeance. I remember very explicitly that there were three exclamation points. Because one would not be enough to convey the full force of his threat. This was no joke.

I don't know if my brother even remembers this—not just writing a cryptic warning on a KISS record, but owning a KISS record at all. He's a very different person than he was when we were kids. For one thing, he's filthy rich.

Mark wasn't born rich. If he was, I'd be rich too. He got that way because he's very good at making bad bets. He's what some people have called a “doomsday investor.” He bets on market calamity, the financial disasters that nobody expects to happen. Every time you turn on the news and the stock market has taken another hit and the federal debt ceiling is on the verge of caving in, Mark just made another million.

Mark and I aren't just in different tax brackets—we're in different universes.

When I tell people that my brother is rich, their first question is usually: “So you guys probably don't get along anymore, right?” Which is a weird thing to assume, especially the “anymore” part.

If I'm being honest, okay sure, my brother and I aren't as close as we were when we were kids. But that's inevitable. You'll never be as emotionally connected to somebody as you were when you lived across the hall from them, and his unfairly bogarting the KISS record seemed like the only thing in the universe that mattered. He wasn't just my brother, he was my nemesis, somebody I thought about constantly, mostly about how he was a dick and was always hogging the cool records.

The last time I visited my brother, I had dinner with him in his gigantic backyard, and we stayed up far too late drinking Scotch that cost more than my electricity bill for a year. We talked about the recent happenings in our life, and pretended our lives weren't different in every fundamental way.

KISS
Alive II
isn't a good record. It's a pretty shitty one, if memory serves. You realize that almost immediately, before the first song even begins, when a tour crew member opens the record by screaming at the audience, like a toddler having a meltdown: “You wanted the best and you got the best! The hottest band in the world! KIIIIIISS!!” But I remember weekends spent just staring at the cover, listening to every song in chronological order, and being utterly hypnotized. I'm not sure if I ever made the conscious decision “This is music that aesthetically appeals to me.” But it felt important somehow. The same way it felt important to stare at the hot girl in chemistry class in high school, the one with the amazing black hair that she'd twirl around her pinkie finger in an absentminded sort of way that felt weirdly intimate, like I was witnessing something I wasn't supposed to. That's what listening to KISS's
Alive II
while looking at a grainy photo of Gene Simmons gurgling blood in the rain felt like.

But more than any of that, I wanted my old copy of KISS
Alive II
for the threatening graffiti on the front sleeve—irrefutable proof that my brother and I used to be the most important people in each other's lives.

Band on the Run
, Paul McCartney and Wings.
Contains a large sticker on the front sleeve that reads
PROPERTY OF RICHTON
PARK PUBLIC LIBRARY
. The last person to have listened to this record, before I stole it from the library, was a guy named Steve, who went to my high school.

I knew this because I'd tried to check it out from the
Richton Park library, but the librarian told me that Steve had it. And then he returned it, and the librarian called to tell me it was back. And then I heard that Steve killed his mom.

The details were pretty grim. He shot her during an argument at their home, and then dragged her body into the trunk of his car, intending to bury it in a nearby forest preserve. He almost made it, but a cop pulled him over for having a busted taillight and noticed the stench of death. Whenever I get together with my friends from back in the day we still talk about it. “Remember that guy who killed his mom?” one of us will say. And then we'll all solemnly nod our heads, like matricide was just a normal part of our day-to-day lives.

In the months after Steve was caught, I listened to
Band on the Run
a lot. I became obsessed with it. I wondered, was this what did it? Is this what drove him to murder his own mom? And when it came time to return the record to the library, I hid it. First in my closet, and then in the basement, tucked into the bottom of a box filled with blankets. I couldn't take the chance that it might be discovered and returned to the nonprofit lending institution that couldn't possibly understand the value of what they had. I had no interest in Paul McCartney, and even less in
Band on the Run
. But this particular record, which was probably still smeared with Steve's fingerprints, was like owning one of John Wayne Gacy's paintings. It was like owning a document of madness. I paid the fine, made some excuse about having lost it, and it was mine.

Rain Dogs
, Tom Waits.
With red lipstick smeared on the cover, over the lips of who I thought at the time was Tom Waits but apparently is just a really old photo of a sailor being comforted by a prostitute. I don't remember whose lipstick it was. Probably somebody I was dating, or just sleeping with. Was it her record or mine? I don't have any recall of those details.
Since then, I've lived with many roommates, and a few girlfriends, and every time we parted ways, and it came time to divvy up our respective record collections, I could say, “My
Rain Dogs
is the one with the lipstick on it.”

New York Dolls
—but with Prince's
Sign o' the Times
inside (or maybe vice versa). I never really got over making a monumental ass of myself with Abby or Abigail—the girl with the purple dreadlocks who assumed I had any idea who the New York Dolls were, because she confused me with somebody she might feasibly have sex with. That's not something you just forget. It's not a “learn from my mistakes” moment. It's an “I need to buy and study the New York Dolls immediately just in case lightning strikes twice” moment. But there was a problem, in that I was concurrently in a pretty heavy Prince period. I was much more interested in listening to
Sign o' the Times
than an androgynous junkie glam punk band that'd broken up when I was six years old. But a guy hoping to have sex with girls with a punk sensibility can't be openly expressing a Prince fandom and hope to reap sexual rewards. So I hid my
Sign o' the Times
in the New York Dolls record, and the Dolls record ended up in the
Sign
o
' the Times
sleeve. I'm almost positive both records were sold or given away before the records were reunited with their correct packaging.

Let It Be
, The Replacements.
Of all my old records, this is the one I'm most confident I'll be able to find again. It was the last record from my collection that I gave up, so the law of averages is on my side. It's only been in wide circulation for sixteen or so years. How long do they wait before giving up on a missing child? At least twenty, right? Maybe never.

If it's still out there, if it's findable, I'll smell it before I see it. I don't care if it's buried underground like a cemetery under
the
Poltergeist
house, those pot resin fumes will come bubbling to the surface like angry ghosts.

I wasn't just doodling. This was a battle plan. A declaration of intent.

I wasn't about to give up because the record store where I'd sold the majority of my records was gone, out of business and with no forwarding address. My records were still out there. They had to be. Unless they'd been melted down to ash in a warehouse fire, they at least still existed. Somebody owned them. Maybe the people who had them didn't even know they had them. Maybe they were in a basement, shoved into the bottom of a water-damaged Meijer's wine box, or in a friend's attic, in a stack of high school yearbooks and letters from dead relatives that nobody remembers were left up there. They were gathering dust in some dark corner, waiting to be rediscovered.

Was I just being stupidly nostalgic? I'd considered that. But it's not like I wanted my floppy disks back. I wasn't on a mission to find old AOL sign-up CDs, or those Nintendo cartridges that could be “fixed” by blowing in them. If I could find these records again, it'd rewire my brain somehow. I was sure of it. It'd be like hitting the reset button.

It was raining when I left the restaurant. I let it drench me as I walked too slowly back to my car.

A good Chicago rain reminds me of that John Cusack movie
Say Anything
, when he's in the backseat of a car with his girlfriend, or the girl he wants to be his girlfriend, and they've just had sex for the first time, and they're listening to Peter Gabriel and shivering. I always thought that he was as much in love with the music as he was with the girl. Because the music captured his emotions at that exact moment he was feeling them, and reflected them back to him
perfectly. That kind of connection happens so rarely, almost never between two human beings, and only occasionally between a person and a song. You can't really wrap your head around what you're feeling, but then a song comes on and you're like, “That's it!”

Cusack's character in
Say Anything
is going to remember that moment for the rest of his life. He may not remember the girl; he probably lost touch with her, or he's Facebook friends with her. He may not even remember her name anymore. But he remembers that night in the rainstorm, listening to Peter Gabriel in the backseat of a car, holding on to a girl and shivering because he was so overcome with feelings that Peter Gabriel helped him feel a little more beautifully.

That's everything I've ever wanted from any song. I just want it to make me tremble while I'm falling in love in a car during a rainstorm. But not every song can be that perfect.

I climbed into the Honda and flipped on the radio, hoping for something goose bumps–inducing, something that would make me want to just sit there with the car off, clutching the steering wheel, watching the rain beat out a gentle rhythm on the front windshield as I thought about life in some profound new way.

It was Bon Jovi's “Livin' on a Prayer.”

Again.

For the second time that day.

I know it was my own fault, for leaving it on the eighties station, but it felt like the universe was making fun of me.

W
hen Charlie, my baby boy, was just a week old, he was perched like an inchworm on my stomach, as I softly sang to him what I hoped was becoming his favorite lullaby.

Normalize the signal and you're banging on freon

Paleolithic eon

For the nine months leading up to Charlie's birth, friends and family members—both with kids and otherwise—told me repeatedly about all the terrible children's music I'd be forced to endure in the coming years. And they always said it with a smirk, like they could barely suppress their schadenfreude at the inevitability of my musical suffering. They'd tell me about Thomas, the anthropomorphic and underachieving British train engine; and
VeggieTales
, with their not-in-any-way subtle proselytizing; and
Yo Gabba Gabba!
, whose name sounds like the frightened last words of somebody having a stroke. Well you know what? Fuck them.

Long before I had unprotected sex with my wife, I was
determined to never, ever learn the lyrics to songs like “Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Big Red Car,” unless it's performed by Iggy Pop and the “big red car” is a metaphor for Iggy's penis.

I don't believe in children's music. It's unnecessary. Because every artist has at least one baby-appropriate song. Take the Pixies. Obviously you shouldn't play “Wave of Mutilation” or “You Fucking Die” for a newborn. But what about “Where Is My Mind?” It's only creepy because you associate it with
Fight Club
. Or that time you bought hash from that albino guy in Bucktown and got way higher than you should have. But in the right context, the lyrics are innocuous and sweetly poetic, like something from a Shel Silverstein book. “I was swimming in the Caribbean / Animals were hiding behind the rocks.” Adorable!

About five minutes into listening to Soul Coughing's
Ruby Vroom
for the first time, in a Chicago apartment across the street from the bar that blows up in
The Untouchables
, and I'd made up my mind about “Sugar Free Jazz.” I knew instantly that I'd be singing it to my child someday. There's just something about the melody that sounds like a children's song. I may've been stoned, and almost two decades away from reproducing. But I could see it all so clearly. This was the song.

I announced this to everybody. Which always made people uncomfortable. Usually because when you're listening to music in your early twenties, you're not also having a discussion about babies. Girls, unsurprisingly, never responded positively to this unsolicited piece of information.

My future wife—who, in the late nineties, was just a girlfriend who stuck around longer than the others—was more tolerant when I made these proclamations, although she also wasn't afraid of making fun of me.

I remember one night in particular—I was smoking cigarettes
out the window of her studio apartment, while wearing a single rubber, yellow dishwashing glove because it was frigid outside. As I smoked, I told her how I'd be singing “Sugar Free Jazz” to my infant child someday—boy or girl, it didn't matter.

“So you're going to show off for your baby?” she asked.

“What? No. It's a sweet song.”

“You're like the delusional old guy in that Randy Newman song,” she said.

I knew what she meant. All Randy Newman songs are essentially about delusional old guys. But she was referring specifically to the delusional old guy in “Memo to My Son,” with the narrator who chastises an infant for not being more impressed with his father's knowledge.

Wait'll you learn how to talk, baby

I'll show you how smart I am.

It was just accurate enough to shut me the hell up.

At the time, it seemed inconceivable that my future son or daughter wouldn't share my musical obsessions. I didn't care if they looked nothing like me, if their physical features made us look like strangers. But obviously, my child and I would cry at the same records. Why would you even have a kid if this wasn't something that happened? Sure, I never had that connection with my dad. But that was his fault. He just listened to the wrong music. If his record collection had been a little more eclectic than Willie Nelson and Cat Stevens and Jim Croce, we might've had a chance.

Age brings at least a little wisdom. As I held my son and at last sang the gibberish lyrics from “Sugar Free Jazz” to him, as I always knew I would, I could feel in my gut that the gesture was fleeting. By the time he's old enough to have a musical point of view, our personal
tastes will be so incompatible that I'll start to doubt whether we actually share DNA. I could fill his baby head with as many of my songs as I wanted, but it won't make a damn bit of difference in the long run. When he's sixteen, he'll be listening to acid robot hip-hop, or whatever the fuck is popular among teens in the future, and he'll roll his eyes when I remind him of the songs I used to sing to him as a baby.

It doesn't matter. The lullabies are for me.

When Charlie was born, I felt love like I've never experienced before in my life. But by day two, I was in free-fall panic mode. What chance did I have of raising this tiny, fragile human being without fucking him up? Some people are born to be parents. They can change a diaper with the precision of a sushi chef, or carry the numerous baby apparatuses on their backs like Sherpas. I still think getting day drunk on a weekday and waiting for a “final notice” bill from the electric company sound like good ideas.

When the baby anxiety gripped me, I would sing to him. I don't know if it calmed him, but it definitely calmed me. It was the same reason why I sang along to the Replacements' “Unsatisfied” as a teenager until I got hoarse. Because it made me feel, at least temporarily, that I had life in any way figured out.

It's also the reason why Kelly and I put so much thought into the labor soundtrack for our son's delivery. We spent weeks arguing about it, bouncing song ideas back and forth. We devoted more time to creating and fine-tuning playlists than reading baby books. We once wasted an entire evening debating whether Ani DiFranco's “Dilate” should be included, despite having nothing to do with cervixes, and ended up missing a birthing class. The only song we actually agreed on was the Foo Fighters' “Razor,” which was lyrically perfect without being too explicit. “Wake up it's time / We need to find a better place to hide.” Maybe Dave Grohl wasn't talking about a stubborn womb-squatting baby, but he might as well have been.

A few verses and my son was gurgling happily.

Fossilize apostle and I comb it with a rake

You can't escape

And I swear to you, right around the lyric about bombing schools, little, innocent, pink-faced Charlie smiled up at me. I know it was probably just a fart, but to me, it felt like a victory.

I was at the Chicagoland Record Collectors Show in Hillside, a western suburb of Chicago. The gathering of record sellers, held every other month at a Best Western hotel off the Eisenhower Expressway, has been called the “largest vinyl show in the Midwest.” I don't know if that's in any way impressive. It could be like saying, “We've got the best shrimp in Michigan!”

Within a few minutes of walking inside, I'd uncovered treasure. In a booth near the front entrance, I'd found a copy of the Soul Coughing “Sugar Free Jazz” twelve-inch—with the four useless remixes and no actual album art, other than the bloody Slash Records logo. I was practically trembling. It had to be mine, I told myself. Everything about it looked exactly the same. It had the
FOR PROMOTIONAL USE O
NLY—NOT FOR RESALE
sticker. The sleeve looked a little warped, suggesting that its previous owner took a lackadaisical approach to caring for it. Bingo! Guilty as charged!

But then I slipped the record out of its packaging, and my heart sank. It was in pristine shape. The grooves were so clean and shimmery, they almost reflected the light like a disco ball. It had clearly only ever been held correctly, on the outer edges, to prevent thumbprints and fingernail scratches.

The guy behind the card table—lined with dozens of boxes of
vinyl records—caught my eye and gravitated toward me from his stool. He had long hair, white as a department store Santa's, pulled back into a ponytail, and he wore a Rush T-shirt that looked like it'd been ironed. He smelled like Pert Plus and peppermint gum.

“Never been played,” he told me, snapping his gum. “That's a mint-condition item right there.”

I slipped it back into the sleeve. “Thanks,” I said, handing it back to him. “Not what I'm looking for.”

White Ponytail narrowed his eyes, sizing me up. “Okay, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I'll give it to you for ten.” He looked over my shoulder, like he half expected the crowd to come lunging toward us, cash in hand, when they overheard that he was discounting records.

“I appreciate that,” I told him. “But I'm not interested.”

“You're not going to find a better copy of that record anywhere,” he said. “These are really rare, especially in this condition.”

“I believe you,” I said. “I'm just looking for something else.”

“There was only one pressing of this single,” he said, growing impatient. “If you're looking for a different catalog number, I don't think—”

“I'm looking for a copy with scratches.”

He paused, midchew.

“A very specific scratch, actually,” I continued. “Somewhere on the ‘Molasses Dub.' Which, you know . . .” I forced a laugh. “No big loss, right?”

White Ponytail said nothing, just watched me.

“You want me to scratch it for you?” he finally said. “I'll scratch it for you. Or scratch it yourself, I don't care.”

“No, thanks. I was kinda hoping for a scratch from 1998.”

He waited silently, perhaps hoping that this was just some joke he didn't understand, a preamble to finally pulling out my wallet and
paying for the damn record already. And then, satisfied that I was a lost cause, he drifted away, moving on to the next customer down the line.

No matter, there were plenty of other dealers here. I gazed out at the sea of heads, all faced downward, their thumbs busy flipping records, filling the room with a faint drone not unlike chirping crickets. But these insects weren't looking for mates so much as Beatles forty-fives.

These records I'm trying to find, it's reasonable to assume they were still in the state. If not within the city limits, at least a morning's drive away. I could go from store to store, thrift shop to yard sale, hoping I'd be able to piecemeal together my collection. Or I find their ground zero—a record fair that all the dealers and sellers and serious addicts attend, their vans filled with records, ready to unload their stock in a hotel banquet hall that smells like cheap wedding cake.

But what if some of my records had crossed state lines? I'd thought about that possibility. But the guys selling records at this Best Western weren't just locals. They came from Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado. These weren't people making their first trip to Chicago. They'd been here many times—maybe they make a pilgrimage to the Record Collectors Show every year. They could've bought one of my records a decade ago, brought it home, listened to it a few times, then decided, “I paid too much for this piece of shit. It's got Sharpie all over it, it skips at all the best songs, I'm going to see if I can get another sucker to buy it.” So they brought it right back to where they found it.

I knew a guy once, a former federal marshal, who said that when you want to find an escaped con, check out the bars in the next town over. They're not on a plane bound for Mexico. They're at the next exit off 94, drinking with Schmitty.

When I walked into the main hall and saw the endless rows of
records, which seemed to stretch on for miles, it was exhilarating. I felt lightheaded and giddy, and I had this weird urge to just run through the tiny rows between tables, knocking crates over like Sting did to candles in that video for “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” But my enthusiasm was premature. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Did I assume all the sellers had gotten together before the doors opened and said, “Okay, fellas, let's make sure everything here is alphabetical. You got any R's, put them on that side of the room.”

Many tables seemed purposively designed to be as confusing as possible. Some dealers separated their stock into categories that were either laughably broad (“twentieth-century pop”) or needlessly amphibological (“popcorn titty shakers,” which even after searching its stacks, I still couldn't tell you what genre it was jokingly trying to define). When they did have a category that offered something approaching clarity—good old-fashioned “rock”—the contents were usually nothing of the kind. In a single “rock”-labeled crate, I found George Burns's
I Wish I Was Eighteen Again
, Sheila E's
The Glamorous Life
, Elvis Presley's
Let's Be Friends
,
Champagne Jam
by the Atlanta Rhythm Section, Betty Wright's
Danger High Voltage
, Gary Marshal's
Show Stopper!!
, the Eagles'
Greatest Hits
, something just called
Funny Bone Favorites
,
Best of the Beach Boys
,
The Secret Value of Daydreaming
by Julian Lennon, and a forty-five of Jim Foster's “X-Ray Eyes” (edited version).