60's Bands & Vinyl Albums - What Were We Thinking (or Smoking)?

[al76slc]

This article from The NY Times
Just Call Them the Basement Albums
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/nyregion/new-jersey/02Rhome.html

about what happens when you have to pack up or give up your vinyl, and reminded me of some of the stuff that came out back in the day, and the "quaint" band names - Moby Grape, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Electric Prunes etc. ....

Don't know what I'd find if I took a tour of the vinyl I have in cartons in the basement....

Just tried to explain to my son (13) that Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones" is not an invitation to snort coke, and Jerry Garcia is not a role model.

Those were the days.

Glad they're gone.


I STOOD in the aisle at Home Depot where the storage units were displayed, shaking the steel supports of the shelves I was eyeing, measuring in my memory the weight of what I planned to put on them, and wondering if they would hold. A store worker happened by, and from the way he looked at the way I was looking I could tell that I wasn’t the first person to stand before these shelves wondering the same thing.

“Moving your vinyl?” he asked in a tone both sympathetic and knowing.

He was somewhere around my own age, from an era when music came as a record — a plastic disc encased in a colorful cardboard sleeve — not a rattly cassette, or a mirror-bright CD, or a notional digital file; an era when music had weight and density and took up space in your life, and in wherever you were living.

“I moved mine, too,” he said, as if it were a somber rite of passage we all must face one day.

Our homes are the private museums of our lives, and we are the curators. The older you grow, the longer you stay in one place, the more decisions you need to make: what to show, what to store, what — if you can bear it — to de-accession by way of yard sale or trash day. The accumulation of goods and time eventually forces you to rank what you value.

I’ve spent 16 years with my family in one old, drafty house, where the dorm-room posters and sprung couches have gradually given way to more grown-up furnishings, but where the vinyl — all the way back to those first Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums bought with lawn-mowing wages — remained stubbornly in place, as fixed and immovable as an anchor, on four sagging shelves in the corner of the living room.

The vinyl had followed me everywhere since high school, hauled up long flights of stairs in scavenged boxes and milk crates to whatever room was home that year. My children, with their weightless and invisible collections of songs, have no idea how much work it once was to keep the music you loved with you. When I finally began paying a mortgage rather than rent, I thought I had moved it for the last time.

But then two things happened at once that made me rethink its place in my house, and my life. The living room needed painting, which meant the vinyl needed moving, at least temporarily. And a friend of mine was retiring, moving to a smaller place that didn’t have enough room for his own collection of vinyl, which he bequeathed to me. His went back even further — to the pristine original Beatles sides on Capitol, Lightning Hopkins, the Velvet Underground, whom he had seen live on his honeymoon — and it more than doubled the amount of vinyl I now had to house, to a volume the living room could no longer accommodate.

Ditching it was not an option. Many of my friends parted with their vinyl long ago, or dispatched it to gather dust in the attic. Some have even mothballed their CDs, after compressing them into digital files. But I still play my records, easing them out of the sleeves and gently dropping the needle, and scanning the liner notes to see who’s singing harmony. They needed to be within reach — maybe not in the living room anymore, but someplace where I could tilt my head to scan their titles, and bump my finger along the corrugated picket-row of their spines, and let their names turn on the radio in my head, one riff after another.

So I bought the shelving units, two of them, set them up in the corner of the basement farthest from where the water steals in during the heaviest rains, and started hauling boxfuls of records out of one room in my life, and down into another. My friend is a librarian, and his collection was ordered by genre, but I prefer the capricious democracy of straight alphabetization, and set about merging my records with his: James Brown shouting beside Jackson Browne, Prince a neighbor to John Prine, Paul Simon looking up to Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield flirting with Bruce Springsteen.

It’s been a few months since I moved them, and they seem safe down there, raised up enough above the level any water has ever reached, but they also seem a little lonesome. They’re a destination now, not a daily presence. I have to make special trips down to see them, carrying a few at a time up to visit their old home, and take a spin around the turntable.

Books have since colonized the corner of the living room, each one taking the place of seven or eight records, and that has inevitably diminished the number of worlds waiting to be entered through the shelves there. I miss the density of possibility the vinyl represented, each slender spine the gateway to a new place, always ready to welcome visitors on the slimmest of whims.

When my children were younger, we had a before-school ritual we called “song of the day.” They would pick a record they hadn’t heard before, and we would play it. One day when my middle daughter was 4, her eye was caught by the red spine of “Elvis’ Golden Records.” She heard the first few bars of “Hound Dog,” and she looked at the come-hither cover photo — that curled lip, that glossy black hair — and she was, instantly and for years later, in love, the way a whole nation was once, back in 1956.

The new shelves have proved as sturdy as my Home Depot compatriot predicted, and I’ve grown used to the idea of the records in their new home. They’ve started to feel as inevitable and permanent in the basement as they once did in the living room, and I don’t want to imagine yet a time when I might have to move them again. I don’t see them as much anymore, but I can feel them, all that reassuring weight sitting down there at the bottom of the house, like ballast in a ship, helping keep the course steady through whatever seas wait ahead.

[Dee8go]

I have a basement full of old rock and roll vinyl, too. I'd love to transfer it to my computer, if I could just find the time and the right software to do the analog to digital conversion.

[Kuan]

I have no desire to transfer my vinyl. I still sit around, drink whisky, and listen to records.

[cscmc1]

Originally Posted by Kuan

I have no desire to transfer my vinyl. I still sit around, drink whisky, and listen to records.

Indeed. If you ever get down to east central IL, stop by. I'll have the single malt ready, and I'll fire up the tubes and have them nice and warm by the time you arrive.

[KarTek]

Much of my vinyl was destroyed in a fire some years ago but there's much more stored in a closet back home.

Speaking of old '60's music, I picked up a "Love" CD the other day...

[PaulC]

I take a more ruthless approach and usually dispense of the old media on a regular basis. I cannot think of more than a handful of albums that I would listen to in their entirety, so my collection is mostly single tracks kept on CD-R or MP3 format.

[cscmc1]

Originally Posted by PaulC

I take a more ruthless approach and usually dispense of the old media on a regular basis. I cannot think of more than a handful of albums that I would listen to in their entirety, so my collection is mostly single tracks kept on CD-R or MP3 format.

A couple of years ago I'd have called you a sellout.

I can understand where you're coming from, though; I haven't been able to sit and listen to an album in full (besides in the car on roadtrips) since last spring. Now that the weather is cooling off, though, I am much more inclined to sit back, fire up the amp, and spin an LP or CD all the way through.

A couple nights ago I turned off the TV and put in a CD I bought in Germany last year -- recordings made in the monastery at Ettal. I remembered I had some liquer from that same monastery, so I sipped on that while I listened to choral works; it was glorious! I need to get the "serious" HiFi organized and set up for the listening season now that it's getting less comfortable to work outside.

[crash9]

Originally Posted by Kuan

I have no desire to transfer my vinyl. I still sit around, drink whisky, and listen to records.

Originally Posted by cscmc1

Indeed. If you ever get down to east central IL, stop by. I'll have the single malt ready, and I'll fire up the tubes and have them nice and warm by the time you arrive.

I'm with you guys

[Mistress]

Jerry Garcia was an excellent business man and would be a good role model for someone looking at a career in business.

[cscmc1]

Originally Posted by HuskyMan

on a perhaps more technical note, I've been told that Vinyl records operate on a continuous sine wave. CD's, on the other hand, use a type of squared off sine wave pattern. someone told me that the CD literally "lops off" a portion of the sound and that Vinyl is somehow superior.....I'm not that technical, might someone with more knowledge comment??

Analong (vinyl, magnetic tape, etc...) is a continuous wave. Digital recordings are samples of that wave at very frequent intervals, so yes, technically speaking, some of the original sound is "lost."

[MTI]

Everytime I fire up the technics turntable and play a LP for conversion to MP3, for a moment I get memories of when I used to play them at my parent's house or during college . . . re-reading the liner notes, musician listing and, of course, all those mixed LP offers on the dust jacket.

[Mike D]

Sigh, Thursday night is my "get back at my neighbors and that silly-assed bass noise they listen to".

Last week it was the "Kinks- live" (Attitude, Superman, 20th Centuryman and of course, Low Budget) and Roy Orbison -Black tie, White night, this week it's going to be BlueOyster Cult- Tyranny and Mutation (City's on flame, Last days of May, The Red and the Black) and some early Bowie, haven't decided which one yet.

Alas, my vinyl has departed but I do have CD's of most of my old stuff.

I disagree with the quality being less. Perhaps on the very top-flight recordings there might be a difference but frankly I find the CD sound to be slightly improved.

[cscmc1]

Any digital format, by definition, is a series of samples of the sound being recorded. The higher the sampling rate, the better the representation of the sound.

[chilcutt]

Originally Posted by crash9

I'm with you guys

Led Zeppelin"Physical Graffiti" double vinyl,or "Hendrix-In The West" would be good w/the single malt(or two)

[Mistress]

Originally Posted by Kuan

I have no desire to transfer my vinyl. I still sit around, drink whisky, and listen to records.

Thank you Kuan.