Music Was An Experience
Prickly Platters: Part 4 of the long musical media journey
In Part 3 of this series, I talked about 8-track tapes and how they became my primary listening source, mostly because of 8-track players in cars. But even when buying, collecting and playing those tapes, I was also buying vinyl LP (“Long Player”) albums. I used to love to go to record stores and browse for new or rare records. I would usually head straight for the import section first and look for 12" singles containing B-side tracks that weren’t on the album, or import-only albums by my favorite British artists.
I guess this is what started me on the long, expensive road of having to own everything I liked on multiple formats. I started out having to listen to vinyl on my dad’s stereo console record player in the family room. But eventually after I moved into the basement bedroom vacated by my older sister, I put together a stereo system of my own, which included a turntable. I had some fairly large stereo speakers on either side of the head-end of my bed and I would bliss out to my favorite records quite frequently. I didn’t learn until years later that it’s not a good idea to have the two speakers pointed directly at each other, due to phase issues etc, but I enjoyed the sound well enough. I also had a pair of large around-ear headphones with a coiled cord, for when I wanted to listen really loud and not disturb the household.
I had a good pair of B&W speakers — a brand I still love to this day — and I especially loved the sound of acoustic guitars on them. To be sure, I always prefer electric guitars in my music, but I like it when acoustic ones were used as a “spice” so to speak. I think this is one reason I like Al Stewart so much, there was always a good mix between acoustic and electric in his songs. I was also pretty heavily into pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen and played those records a lot¹. This was around the same time I also discovered my love of Blue Öyster Cult. It was the perfect music for listening loud, lying on my bed in the dark. I was also heavily into Be-Bop Deluxe — their lead singer/guitarist Bill Nelson is one of the greatest rock guitarists ever, IMO.
When I went off to college in Boulder, I maintained my bedroom and stereo at home, and frequently stayed there on the weekends. At college, I lived in apartments with my friends and was exposed to other people’s music as well as forcing mine on them. My big clunky headphones came in handy.
All that music was on vinyl. That was a listening experience. I would plan it all out. I would get my adult beverage of choice (even when underage) or other mood enhancers, find the perfect listening position (or stretch out on the floor with the headphones on), and drop that needle on side one. I would hold the album packaging and absorb the artwork and/or follow along with the printed lyrics. Flip the side and repeat. Those were the days.
I could deal with the whole flipping-the-side thing, that was part of the experience. But what annoyed me was the occasional scratch, causing the record to skip. I remember there was a scratch on the record during one of my favorite Be-Bop Deluxe songs “Quest for the Harvest of the Stars”. I think I only heard that song without the skip the first time or two, and then after that it was always with that defect. When I got the song on CD years many years later (it was a rare track), it was a revelation, and somewhat weird/disconcerting, to hear the song the way it was supposed to be heard. My brain kept anticipating that skip and would freak out when it wasn’t there. It took a long time to overcome that.
The other thing I didn’t like was the distortion on the inner groves. As you got closer to the end of the LP side (the center of the record), the grooves are closer together and the sound gets distorted. The longer the album, the worse it is. And for some reason, my favorite song on an album was often the one at the end of side one. This was another thing that made it a revelation to listen to an album on subsequent formats and not hear the artifacts. And of course there were the eternal pops and hiss. Yet the sound quality was the best that I had been exposed to, especially on a decent stereo system.
Like many people, I babied my record collection in a mostly futile attempt to mitigate the issues. I cleaned the records with a specially made brush and cleaning solution. I used an “anti-static gun” to… I don’t know?… remove static from the record? (These devices were a LOT cheaper in those days.) I would clean the turntable needle and occasionally replace it. It was all in search of the perfect sound. I assume these are all operations that contemporary vinyl listeners also do these days, but probably with even more care/obsession, since now it’s a collector’s thing.
And then there were the tapes. My second car had a cassette tape player. I had a stereo cassette player/recorder attached to my home system and I painstakingly recorded all my albums on compact cassettes so I could listen to them in the car. Mostly I would record full albums, since I have always been album-focused instead of song-focused. But sometimes I would put together mix tapes of my favorite songs. At some point, I think maintaining the tape collection was as important to me as the record collection, maybe more so. As part of my never-ending obsessions, I tried to get the perfect recording of the album on tape, even to the point of buying better and more expensive blank tapes. When the Sony Walkman came out, I got one of those to play cassettes when away from the home stereo. I had some dinky headphones with less than optimal sound quality.
My obsession with my vinyl and tape collections was eventually eclipsed by something new, something which gripped hold of my collecting tendencies like nothing before or since…
Next: Shiny Perfection
¹ My friend Bill and I attended a pretty iconic Springsteen concert at Red Rocks during the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour when we were around 17 years old. I remember being amazed that we were definitely on the young side, most of the fans there were in their 20s or older.
