Vintage Vinyl Mania

A Blast from the Past

Vinyl Mania…

was bound to happen sooner or later. Ed and I grew up as teenagers in the 70s where the music of the times surrounded us. I was at a slumber party when I got my first glimpse of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. I remember riding a bus into town and buying my first record. It was a 45 rpm, Yellow Submarine with Eleanor Rigby on the flip side. I visited my grandparents and played it so much that my (usually mild mannered) grandpa announced that he had heard quite enough of ” yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine.”

Ed remembers loading his record player before going to bed and and being “rocked” to sleep each night.

Something new came out around the time we went to college and we both outfitted our dorm rooms with the latest 8-tracks. No more worries about scratched or warped records or broken needles. Just pop in a cassette and you’re good. To this day there are still places in Carole King’s Tapestry that I expcect to hear the “click” in the middle of the song.

Thankfully, the 8-track craze was short lived and vinyl endured. As a young married couple, we joined a record-of- the-month club and began to collect albums from our favorite artists. We had an impressive turntable with gigantic speakers.

Time Goes By….

and more important things required our attention…got jobs, became parents, bought a house. Our new home was equiped with a built-in cassette tape deck and inter-house sound system. The turntable and huge speakers gathered dust in our basement for decades. When we retired and moved across the country, we sold them in a garage sale. We could’t part with our beloved records, perhaps we were hanging on to the past, so we boxed up the ones we wanted to keep and they moved with us. We stashed the box in a closet.

But Vinyl Lives ON!

I blame our current Vinyl Mania on my son who recently purchased a turntable and began collecting record albums. One night a week, he hosts an “album night” where the TV , phones, and computers are turned off. Each family member gets to pick a song, or a side of a favoite record to play. On a recent visit, we saw this in action and had so much fun!

Vinyl Revival

One thing led to another. Back home, we took our long-forgotten records out of storage and spent an entire evening looking at the cover art and list of songs, sharing memories of each one. The records looked to be in good condition, so we bought an inexpensive turntable to try them out. Boy, did we miss our our stero set and speakers, but we figured out how to hook things up to our television sound bar. The sound isn’t great, but it’s a start. Then we bought a record-cleaning kit, and a wall display system for Ed’s office, and a record storage box, and of couse I had to get a little stand to display the record that was currently playing.

The Music Lives On

Did we go a little overboard? Maybe. But I’m in the kitchen chopping a salad to go with tonight’s dinner and Elton’s voice floats in and before I know it I’m singing:

My Gift is my song and this one’s for you.

Threads of Thought

Ok, now it’s your turn. I want to hear your stories about your favorite song or album. What memories does it invoke? Leave a comment below (remember that comments are moderated, so be patients and it will show up, I promise). Or if you’re connected through my fb page, leave your story there. I know you’ve got one!