Old Records Never Die (7 page)

I don't know if it would've made a difference, but I was kicking myself for not coming for the early-bird hours, starting at 6:00 a.m. That's when the professionals were here, the lifelong crate diggers who are like gold prospectors but for vinyl. The guys who showed up with their own bags, who may've forgotten their IDs but never leave home without a carbon fiber brush. They've met new people, made new friends, but haven't yet made eye contact with anybody. I'd heard that Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore came to a few of these
shows. He was probably one of the early-birders. He found what he wanted, cherry-picked the good stuff, and then got the hell out.

I guess it helped that the records I was looking for didn't count in any conventional sense as “the good stuff.”

I was singularly focused, looking for my records. But every so often, I'd happen upon something that caught my eye. I paused at something called
Signs of Life
by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. I'd never heard of the band or the record. But the front cover was a painting of totally naked people with penguin heads. I just stared at it for several minutes, wondering what I was looking at. There was also a monkey with a penguin head riding a minibicycle and waving a gun. I mean, what was I supposed to feel about that?

And then you get something like Queensrÿche's
Hear in the Now Frontier
. While flipping through records, I ignored hundreds of albums and artists I knew I didn't like. But I stopped on this one. I've never been a fan of Queensrÿche. But something about this cover gave me pause. It was a desert scene, with five disembodied, pickled ears in mason jars. I stared at it, contemplated it, even pulled it out of the crate for a better look. I knew what Queensrÿche sounded like. I knew that buying this record—even at four dollars—was a mistake. I'd take it home, give it a listen, and somewhere around the first song think, “Well, this is ear rape.” And then I'd put it away and never touch it again. But holding the record, without any of that information—inevitable though it might be—I was too transfixed by the ears in jars to think of anything else. I was fooled by possibility, which is exactly what a great record cover should do.

That was how it used to be, back when you couldn't listen to music before buying it. You sometimes had to make decisions based solely on cover art. Imagine having to look at the cover of the Dead Kennedys'
Frankenchrist
and decide whether this was music you needed to hear when the only criteria you had was that image of a
Shriners parade. You had to ask some tough questions—is this album cover being ironic or sincere? Is this a random art choice, or does it have some thematic parallel to the music? You have to trust your gut, and sometimes your gut can be very, very wrong.

My gut was right when it came to Jane's Addiction's
Nothing's Shocking
—turns out naked twins with fire hair is a good indication that you're about to have your musical mind blown—and sometimes it's very, very wrong: never trust an Assyrian lion, even when it's on a late-period Rolling Stones album.

“Do you have the Band's first record?” the albino man next to me asked, looking agitated.

Maybe he wasn't albino, but he was very, very white. Like translucent white. If his eyes had pupils, I didn't see them. He had long, stringy hair and a jean jacket, and he looked like Johnny Winter if the guitarist had been really, really into mac and cheese.

The guy behind the table frowned deeply, thinking. “You mean as the Hawks, or with Dylan, or what?”

The albino man snorted, like an angry bull. “The one with ‘The Weight.'”

“
Big Pink
,” the dealer said, smiling, and then paused to consider this. “No, I haven't seen that one for a while.”

The albino man groaned. The exaggerated, melodramatic groan of somebody who'd been told no too many times.

I'd been eavesdropping on his plight. He was just ahead of me in the current, the assembly line of bodies, lurching slowly forward from table to table, box to box, flipping and moving on, flipping and moving on. I'd heard him ask this question to at least a half dozen sellers. And every time, they just shook their heads. He seemed resigned the first six or seven times, but he was becoming increasingly irritable. This, his pupilless eyes screamed, should be easier.

He was right. And the crazy thing is, there was an easier way.
There were literally hundreds of less time-consuming ways to find a copy of the Band's
Music from Big Pink
. He could go on eBay and find many copies for sale, on various formats—vinyl, cassette, CD, even eight-track, if that was his thing—selling for far less than anything he'd find here. Or, if he wanted to hear the album quicker, there were numerous places on the Internet where he could download it in seconds, at a cost of exactly nothing.

Surely he knew this, right? He wasn't unfamiliar with how the world worked. He knew he didn't have to drive out to a suburban Best Western off the Eisenhower Expressway to find an album he could buy at home, on his computer, without even putting on pants. This wasn't just the hard way; it was the stupid hard way. It's a harrowing moment when you realize that the only thing separating you and a Civil War reenactor is better underwear.

And that's when I saw him, out of the corner of my eye, rounding a corner and weaving through skinny-jeaned legs. My son, Charlie, was dressed in an ironic cardigan smeared with chocolate thumbprints and doughnut crumbs. He'd been given a perilous dosage of sugar—which, full disclosure, was probably mostly my fault. I wanted him to be as excited about this adventure as I was. And sugar seemed like the fastest and least complicated way to get to the same mental space. It's roughly the same reason I did coke—my first and only time—before a Garth Brooks concert. I didn't want to be there, but I thought, hey, maybe some cocaine will help.

It worked with Garth Brooks. I was a cowboy-loving, honky-tonking dance machine. I think I even cried a little at “The River.” But coke to me was not sugar to Charlie. He was just bored and wired, a dangerous combination.

“Charlie, no,” I said calmly, without looking up from a Bob Mould record in my hands. He scurried past, narrowly avoiding puncturing his head on a crate with sharp metal corners.

Kelly was right behind him. But just barely.

“Are you going to be much longer?” she asked.

I gave her my best “Are you kidding me?” look. But she never saw it. She continued in the foxhunt for our son, pushing past bearded men in Pavement T-shirts and muttering apologies, trying to remind herself why being a single parent would somehow be less annoying than this.

I hadn't meant to bring them. I mean, that wasn't the original plan. The original plan was to come alone. Or, barring that, come out with some guy friends, some other dudes who didn't see the social awkwardness of driving an hour out to the suburbs only to ignore one another and look at records for six hours. They all backed out at the last minute, claiming they had “a thing” that they'd completely forgotten about, or their respective wives had surprised them with weekend obligations that couldn't be wiggled out of.

I was resigned to going by myself, until Kelly decided that this would be a great chance for a family outing. It wasn't, of course. This was immediately apparent to me, but she'd made up her mind. It only became clear to her during the long drive out to the suburbs that this wouldn't be like one of those quick trips to the Gap or the Apple store. This wasn't an “I'll just be a second” type of shopping venture.

“How many records are you planning on buying?” she asked, with the nervous dread of somebody on the slow climb upward on a roller coaster.

“I don't know,” I said, shrugging. “Whatever it takes.”

We both watched the road, and I could almost feel the air change as her shoulders tightened.

“Where would we even put them?” she asked. “We don't have that much room in our apartment as it is. Are you just going to start piling things in a corner?”

“No.”

“It just doesn't make sense to me. You're going to buy a bunch of records that we don't have space for. And we don't have a record player. You're just going to look at them?”

“I'll get a record player,” I said.

“And where are you putting that? Our bedroom? Tell me where this magic record player is going.”

She was in full panic mode. An emotion I rarely saw in her. Even Charlie, distracted by his little portable DVD player in the backseat, could tell that something was wrong. Mommy was upset, and it was Daddy's fault.

She launched into a familiar routine—telling me why I didn't need to worry about music, or losing music, or whatever it was that was compelling me to fill our small city apartment with more objects, bulky disks with too much cardboard from another era that took up space in her home and meant there was less room for other things. Also—and this was the point that made the veins on her neck start to throb—having things when you didn't need those things was madness. We already had music. We had all the music we'd ever need—everything we'd ever owned or listened to—and it didn't require having enough room in a closet. It was in a cloud.

This is where she lost me.

I don't understand clouds. “It protects all of your music,” she told me, not for the first time. Not by a long shot. “You don't have to worry about crashing and losing everything.”

Crashing. I was never what you'd call a technophile when it came to record players—I don't know a damn thing about frequency extension or tonal correctness or the best way to reduce relative distortion during playback—but I know that a record player, any record player, would never do something as apocalyptic as “crashing.” Nothing could happen to a record player that would cause everything you owned, every piece of music, to just be . . . gone.

Which is kind of ironic, if you think about it. Because all those records that couldn't be destroyed, that I could play forever on even the shittiest of record players, which were virtually indestructible, all of those records were now just . . . gone.

When I was briefly, unwisely, considering handing over all evidence of my music to an ethereal, intangible lockbox that exists only in theory, I called Glenn, an old friend who knows his way around computers. I just needed some guidance, or maybe some reassurance.

“So all my old music just disappears?” I asked him, my voice hitting a panicky treble.

“No, no, no,” Glenn assured me. “They just store an identical version in iCloud, but it's got a better sound quality.”

“What about album art?” I asked.

“All your metadata is transferred to the new audio files. Everything.”

“What if, say, my cover art for Tom Waits's
Swordfishtrombones
is the Japanese import with a record-store sticker on the front written in kanji symbols? Will that be transferred too?”

This gave him pause. “Is that important to you?”

It most certainly was.

“And what about genres?” I asked. “Are my files going to revert back to those boring iTunes genres, or do I get to keep my own grouping system?”

I'd put a lot of effort into coming up with more descriptive genres than iTunes provides. “Alternative & punk” and “rock” doesn't tell me anything meaningful about my music. So I've organized my MP3s into categories like “androgynous pop-rock” and “mildly annoying baby boomers” and “indie rock that I'm marginally interested in” and “alt-country songs about booze, sad sex, and Jesus.”

“I'm pretty sure you could keep that stuff,” Glenn told me unconvincingly.

“So if iTunes classifies a song as ‘folk,' they'll let me change it to ‘nasally musicians I adore unconditionally'?”

“I suppose so, sure.”

“And even if they want something to be ‘blues,' I can insist on calling it ‘white guys playing the blues that seemed more interesting when I was smoking pot in high school'?”

“I really don't know for sure. Why do you even care about this stuff? As long as the music sounds good, who cares how it's labeled?”

I cared. I'd spent days—literally twenty-four-hour days—obsessing over this stuff, scouring the Internet for the perfect cover art, a reproduction of a water-damaged vinyl sleeve with the Tower Records price tag still in the upper corner, or trying to decide if the Gaslight Anthem qualifies as “unironic working-class anthems” or “Springsteeny.” If iTunes Match erased all that useless minutiae, then it would confirm that it was really just useless minutiae after all.

There was a time not so long ago, in the latter half of the twentieth century (and maybe before that, I don't know), when you had to be careful about who you invited to your house. Even the most sane-looking person could have dark impulses, an inexplicable and insatiable need to fuck with the CD collections of strangers. If you left them unattended for even a few minutes, you might come back to discover that your music had been unhelpfully realphabetized. Or worse, separated by genre or time period, or arranged in aesthetically ornate piles. They were always so pleased with themselves, like they were providing a valuable service. “I noticed that some of your CDs were in the wrong jewel cases,” they'd say. “
Daydream Nation
was in the case for
Doolittle
. I mean, how ridiculous is that, right? You never would've found it.” The only thing to do was smile tersely and make a mental note never to let meddling idiots near your music again.

My music isn't on any clouds, and it probably never will be. Because I want my music to be flawed. I like the hisses and pops of
my old records and CDs. And I like that if somebody picked up my iPod, they'd probably be confused and angry by the asinine way that the songs are organized. But I'd rather risk losing it all in a hard-drive crash than have my music library become just another homogenized collection of songs.