Now Playing
Gave my Albums away the other day. Pastor Matt Staniz from @saintlukedevon had built a two shallow shelf Now Playing display in his home and posted about it on Facebook.
I’d been looking for a home for my meager vinyl collection that I’ve been dragging around for 50 years; well, it’s been stationary in my basement for the past 20 years. During the early February snow storm I messaged Matt. He got here as soon as the roads were clear.
First album I ever bought? Probably The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. In the 1960s J.M. Fields department store in the Riverdale Shopping Center on Mercury Boulevard was the place for Baby Boomers living near Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia to buy albums. Just as you entered the store, to the right, was the record department. Sporting goods, specifically baseball gloves and bats, fishing poles, and camping gear was on the same side of the building but in the rear. Albums sold for $2.77-or at least that’s the sticker price on the cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walking” that is now in Matt’s collection. I was a morning route Daily Press Paper Boy, so I usually had a little pocket change and could afford the occasional album, lefty baseball glove, fishing pole and tackle.
We could ride our bikes to the shopping center, or walk; it was only a mile. Once when my Mom’s father, Papa Merck, was visiting from Birmingham, Alabama he wanted something or other from the store and we walked to the shopping center. Papa Merck was in his early eighties yet thought nothing of walking a mile each way in the summer heat. Papa Merck was a John Phillips Sousa era musician who thought Star Dust was the perfect song and that Rock and Roll would be better titled Repeating and Monotony. He had a big influence on my eclectic musical taste - I’ve always sought out complex compositions and shied away from most pop music that had little more than a beat.
Over the 1960s and 1970s, my vinyl collection grew to a couple of hundred records. Not really a large collection by any standard and yet large enough to be a significant chunk of cargo in many moves-Hampton to Williamsburg (3) to Croaker to Lake Tahoe (2) to Williamsburg (3) to Reston (3) to Tampa to Wynnewood to Wayne to Chesterbrook. The stereo system-turntable, amp, speakers, and eventually a tape deck-was always the first thing moved in and the last thing moved out.
The far less romanticized Compact Cassette was a music life staple almost immediately upon its invention. With cassette tapes you could be mobile. More importantly, you could record albums onto cassettes. Everyone became a DJ making mix-tapes for their friends and lovers. In the late 70s, after graduating from William and Mary, I was a bartender at the infamous Green Leafe Café in Williamsburg, VA. Perhaps, the most important part of bartending at the Green Leafe was keeping the music going. Life in those days consisted of making mix-tapes, riding my bike around town or, later after moving to Croaker, sailing my 16 foot homemade wooden Windmill class on the York River (or motoring around with a 5HP outboard attached to her stern).
With cassettes you didn’t have to own the album from which you were recording. Of course it didn’t occur to anyone outside the industry that you were stealing the music. Maybe it did, but no one seemed to care. A lot of albums didn’t get sold and a lot of royalties didn’t get paid back then.
I wasn’t the only person making mix-tapes and playing them for the crowds at the Green Leafe. Between working at the Leafe, or the Grief as it was known in the vernacular of the day, and listening to WCWM I came to know Tom Waites, The Talking Heads, Dire Straits, as well as native sons like Lewis McGee and Bruce Hornsby. I’ll have to pull out my cassettes next and see what all’s on them. I imagine the purging of the cassettes won’t be as sentimental as gifting my albums has been. My collection of cassettes is comprised almost entirely of bootlegged copies recorded from someone else’s album. Cassettes demagnetize over time and become unplayable even if you manage to find a player. It’s worth looking them over though on their way into the trash bin; they are, literally, a recording of what we were listening to at the time.
Before Matt could get through the snow to pick up my vinyls, I took a picture of each album cover. As I went through the stack, I realized a lot of recordings weren’t there. Maybe I already gave them away, maybe I never owned but had borrowed them, maybe they got left behind in a move. I have no idea.
Later that night, after Matt had driven away, I made a video from the cover’s stills. And so here it is, a Ken Burn’s effect rich video of the surviving albums I acquired forty to fifty years ago. The audio begins with a couple of Across the Universe soundtrack selections, jumps into a slice of Little Feat’s Willin and wraps up with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Find the Cost of Freedom. Enjoy.