My Triumphant Return to Vinyl
I recently started buying records again after a 30-year hiatus, thanks to my youngest daughter. She was 9, and I was gutting it out through the implosion of my first marriage. I was invigorated by the challenge of outfitting a new apartment on the cheap. I’d walk the aisles of Value Village in search of serviceable kitchen gear, and she loved to come with me, sifting through used books and house dresses while I assessed the quality of a skillet or stovetop percolator. She’d leave wrapped in threadbare pastel, cradling an armful of books by Lemony Snicket and Geronimo Stilton.
One afternoon, as we passed a stack of George Foreman Grills, she saw the record player, a mottled beige-brown box familiar to any Gen-X kid who spent time in their elementary school library. It had the reinforced metal corners and industrial clasps of a steamer trunk and a thick green handle made of indestructible Cold War plastic. Written across the top in black marker: #0027. How this piece of surplus ended up in the wayward-housewares section of a suburban thrift shop was surely an interesting story but not my concern. There it was, shut tight and resolute, perhaps since the 1970s. The price: $8.
“Dad!” she gasped, “Check this out! I thought it was a suitcase!”
She had thumbed back the silver clasps holding it together to inspect the turntable and tonearm. “You said you used to have a record player, right?”
Her question was transportive. I had had record players, or access to record players, since I could remember—first a bright orange and blue one made by, what, Mattel? Fisher-Price? I had a shoebox of my dad’s old 45s and played Bill Haley’s “See You Later, Alligator,” Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” and the Beatles’ “She Loves You” again and again and again.
My dad had what was at the time a solid home system: Giant (to me) Jensen speakers, a beastly Kenwood receiver with mesmerizing meters, and a thick-sided Fisher automatic turntable that dropped records down on the platter with satisfying mechanical authority. I remember stacking the White Album on the record-changer turntable to play in the proper sequence because sides 1 and 2, and thus 3 and 4, were on separate LPs.
Sometime in junior high, I got my own system, a Sanyo JX 4404, which combined a receiver, turntable, and cassette deck on the footprint of a large pizza box. This was the platform from which my love of music and appreciation for decent audio gear was launched.
My daughter’s question slapped me back 45 years, to sitting on shag carpet scalloped with Zeppelin, Rush, and Yes, the Sanyo in front of me, a sunken-chest geek endlessly flipping sides, lost in liner notes, making clumsy mixtapes for girls he was too scared to talk to.
Thanks again to a musically minded father, I had already amassed (or more accurately could plunder at will) a fantastic record collection. The treasures included that White Album, a first pressing that still had the headshots! There were first pressings of Are You Experienced, Willy and the Poor Boys, and more. There was plenty of Frank Sinatra, along with Bob Willis, Willie Nelson, Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and of course Steely Dan. Blue Note, Motown, Stax, and Atlantic were also well-represented. I absorbed it all and augmented it with summer-job pocket money, walking to the nearby mall at least once a week to hit the arcade, Orange Julius, and record store in that order. I never walked home without an album under my arm.
The collection grew quickly and steadily until I left for college. By then, the world was converting to Compact Disc, and I followed, moving like so many to the new, crackle-free format. In my 20s, with fresh discretionary income, I amassed piles of silver discs and built my own system. The biggest splurge was an elegantly imposing pair of Polk Audio LS70s that would enchant me and infuriate neighbors for a decade.
Then, for reasons intricate and unhealthy, I fell into a marriage that did not condone compulsive music acquisition, regardless of format. LPs were sold to astonished collectors. CDs were boxed and stacked in a damp basement corner. Components and speakers were relegated to the attic with the empty promise that one day they might fit into an interior decorating scheme that would never come together.
Fast-forward a decade, then another. There’s my daughter and that school-library record player serving up a crazy combination of emotions: nostalgia for my lost collection, pride in her observant nature, anger at circumstances that let a stack of good gear gather dust and a massive amount of music get sold off or sequestered.
I bought the turntable, of course. My beaming daughter carried it out of the thrift store. I assured her we’d hunt up some records right away. The next day I found a milk crate full of random ’70s and ’80s LPs on Craigslist for $50. Teaching her to play air guitar to “My Sharona” was alone worth the price. Then the renewal really took hold.
Within a few weeks, I’d bought a rebuilt Sugden turntable and mounted its beautiful wood plinth on squash balls. I bought a used Rotel integrated amplifier. I spirited that pair of LS70s from the attic and brought everything together on cinder blocks and milk crates in the living room of the new apartment. The sound was glorious, liberating, and rejuvenating.
I’ve since returned to the record shops—those that remain—and upgraded the turntable with a Grace 707 tonearm and Sumiko Blue Point cartridge. Each tweak brought a bigger smile to my face. I’m now on the hunt for new speakers. Meanwhile, I’m reliving those long afternoons in my room nearly 45 years ago, lost in Physical Graffiti or Permanent Waves, my face set with the same smile (though I know my face doesn’t look the same), my mind in the same place of engaged ease.
All this because my daughter spotted a piece of once-ubiquitous audio equipment and because of her seemingly innate, perhaps inherited sense of how music can impact who you are and who you can become. It’s a feeling I loved and let slip away. I can never thank her enough for bringing it back.