Finding My Grooves
For the love of vinyl
My parents’ turntable was one of my first and best friends. They gifted me with a Holly Hobbie suitcase record player for my 5th birthday!
Throughout most of my formative years, there was a turntable in my living room, and our house was always full of music.
While I was in college, it was very much the same. My first husband and I shared a love of music. We had similar tastes and mutually supported each other’s tastes when they differed. We both had crates of LPs, boxes of cassettes, and stacks of CDs.
Music was one of the things I sacrificed in my second marriage. He had little tolerance.
So, I played music sometimes when he wasn’t home, but for the most part, I got out of the habit. I wasn’t exposed to much new music in my preferred genre. Didn’t bother with a turntable. I had even left my remaining crate of albums at my mom’s house when I had initially moved in with him.
One year, for Christmas (2009?), he got a nice-sized bonus check from his job and said we could each get ourselves something. I had seen a friend posting on Facebook about getting a USB turntable to digitize his albums, so I got one of those and arranged for my stepchild’s mom to bring my crate of albums up to Wisconsin when she brought her child from Iowa to visit for the holiday.
I still have that turntable in an unopened box in my basement storage. With toddlers and the desktop computer in the living room hooked up to the TV, there really wasn’t a “safe” place for me to put it.
During the summer of 2020 (after being separated for a couple of years and filling the house with streamed music on the regular), I bought one of those cheap suitcase record players with one of the stimulus checks. I got out my crate of records and played them a bit. There were a lot of other things going on, and the record player ended up getting put into a closet when I had the living room re-floored a year later. It didn’t have a good permanent place to be used. The shelf I put it on was a little too small, and it was always a bit tenuous when in use.
A few months before Christmas this year, my middle son asked me about the record player and mentioned he was interested in vinyl. I wanted to get him his own record player and an album for Christmas, but it was another Christmas with little to spend. I considered giving him the one I had since I hadn’t used it in a few years. That was my intention.
In the meantime, over the past year, I’ve been going with a friend to a brewery that does vinyl nights every Wednesday. They have two turntables (and no microphone), and people can sign up to spin 20-minute sets. They call it “Wax on Wax Off.”
My friend, Lisa, inherited her father’s extensive vinyl collection, and started playing them (along with her own old and new records). I started going and listening. Every week I would say, “I really need to get my records out and come spin one Wednesday.” And Lisa would say, “Yes, you do! Just do it!”
We had this exchange pretty much every Wednesday for about a year.
They have theme nights once a month or every other month. One month, they had a covers night. In June, it was colors of the rainbow to celebrate Pride month. One week in July, they announced that the following week would be the theme “Femme Fatale.” And I decided it was time to finally drag my vinyl out!
The first thing I did was reach out to a guy who works at a local record store sitting at the bar and ask him to see if they had a copy of Sinéad O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra on vinyl. I went and picked it up a couple of days later. If I was going to play a female set, it had to include Sinéad O’Connor. Also, it’s one of the albums that I originally had when it came out. I loaned it to somebody and never got it back. I replaced it on cassette instead of vinyl because I wanted to listen to it in my car.
I dug my record player out of the closet and placed it prominently on the kitchen table. If I was going to spin a set, I had to make sure the tracks I wanted to play did not skip.
I started going through my vinyl collection to see what female artists I had. Surprisingly, not many! But, it was really the 90s that saw the big female boom of artists, and my collection is mainly from the early to mid-80s.
What I found in my collection was The Eurythmics Touch, Romeo Void Benefactor, Altered Images' Happy Birthday, the Cocteau Twins' Victorialand, the March Violets (on the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack), and Madonna’s Like a Virgin.
I ran to the brewery at open and signed up for a time slot.
A month or two prior to this, in a conversation about DJ names with a couple of friends, they decided that my DJ name was K-Dawg.
I went home and painstakingly finalized my setlist. It reminded me so much of those mixtape days and figuring out what would and wouldn’t fit into the time limitations.
I ended up with a few extra minutes from the person who played before me, and ended up not playing The Cocteau Twins, but adding “Like a Virgin” because so many of my friends were in awe of my Madonna album hahaha!
When my kids got home from their dad’s on Friday, I still had the record player on the kitchen table. I was showing them some of my albums. At one point during the past year, Beatrice had gotten obsessed with early Madonna — tracks from this exact album (which I had no idea I still had! I can’t believe it made all the sales cuts from my college days.).
Also, within the past few months, my youngest had taken to playing some Tears for Fears songs from Songs From the Big Chair, which I had in my collection! I played those two in their entirety. That’s when my daughter messaged me this picture, saying to add this to her birthday list!
My middle son flipped through my albums and requested that I play Elton John. We had a great night just sitting around listening to my old records.
The following two Wednesdays, I signed up to spin and had a great time figuring out what kind of set to play with what I had. I did my own little themes because it felt a bit too overwhelming otherwise. Not that I have an extensive collection — I probably have 50 or fewer albums. I suppose I should probably count them at some point for a better reference. But even just going through my albums brings back so much nostalgia. It’s been a nice reconnection with my younger self in so many ways.
After spinning for three Wednesdays in a row, I had to take a few weeks off. The first Wednesday was because it was my daughter’s birthday. I had ordered the album she wanted from a local record store. They couldn’t get the pretty collector vinyl, but my daughter didn’t care. Her reaction while opening the album… this photo series is everything:
She was beyond thrilled!!! We opened it up and played it immediately. I have to admit, she’s got pretty good taste in music! I enjoyed the album, and we played it quite a few times throughout the next couple of days before I had to take the kids back to their dad’s house.
The following Wednesday, I loaded up my oldest and moved him into his Iowa State dorm room.
I’m so glad I dug out the record player, and it led to some great music-filled family nights for a few weeks before I took my oldest off to college. I hope some of those nights stick in their memories of some of the great times we’ve had.
Before he comes home for his first visit back, I hope to have a more permanent location figured out for the record player.
Originally published at https://kristinwritesmuch.substack.com.
