Secrets of the City

I personally love vinyl, and some of the weirdest stuff I have found is never going to be rereleased in digital form. I used to post — and make fun of — my favorite covers, including many local records. I sort of miss it. Maybe it’s time to start hitting Cheapo and Hymie’s again.

Vinyl nostalgia is sickening nostalgia

no matter how you slice it

Get over it already!

BYE BYE VINYL

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my parents records. Of course they had to okay all my choices, which meant I could listen to:

a) Free to be you and me
b) American Graffitti soundtrack
c) Any fifties/sixties malt-shop-esque tunes
d) Beatles
e) Elvis

I listened to the Locomotion single so much that it got scratched and I cried. I used to love to dance to the Locomotion…my parents though it was pretty cute.

We had one of the old console Hi-Fi’s with a turntable, tuner and 8 track. My sisters were the big vinyl owners. But it was mostly the Carpenters and the Beach Boys.

Later in life I found a copy of Youth of Today’s Were Not In This Alone at Hollywood Video in the remainder bin. Changed my life! I’m not sure for the better.

I do have an unplayed Nirvana Jukebox 7″ of Smells Like Teen Spirit. I wonder if that’s worth anything?

I have to agree that nostalgia like this is a bit maudlin.

I think Edison himself would agree with that. Learned a little about him this weekend. He wasn’t one to dwell on sentiment. The first light bulb was probably busted up and put under a microscope. He’d be fascinated with CDs.

I bust out my vinyl from time to time. It feels comfortable, but I don’t necessarily pine for the good old days or anything.

My favorite record shops were Harpo’s in Bloomington (where I grew up) and Platters, which was upstairs from Tatters when Tatters and Platters was in the space where the Herkimer is now.

The first record I ever bought was Christopher Cross’ debut. I didn’t buy any more for a couple years. The second was Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits (the red one- I don’t know if there has been another since), which beat out my intended purchase, Anarchy in the UK, at the last second in some long-forgotten chain record shop. That about sums up musical life as I knew it in early-’80s Bloomington.

Since I am an ethical dinosaur and feel guilty about violating copyright laws, vinyl is a good way for me to pick up music that I like (or liked) on the cheap.

My most recent purchase was The Three O’Clock- Baroque Hoedown, import version with different tracks than the US version.

I celebrate the loss of bulky, inconvenient media, but lament the loss of physical ownership thereof altogether.

Is it possible that radio started swirling down the drink in that moment when music lost its tether to nonportable hifis?

I think you can trace the line to this day. The iPod is going get half the radio listeners, if it hasn’t already.

I think stations like The Current could see a resuragance. There’s a subset of people who go for that local stuff. Friends might have started a band or something and they want to hear them on the radio.

My favorite vinyl memory is dancing in the living room to the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas Album. Good times.

Memories? Let’s see, yesterday about 4pm…..In heavy rotation: New Dylan (Modern Times sound so much better in vinyl that cd or a download) new Wilco, and some classic Springsteen.

Best non-record-store vinyl purchase: “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” by Ray Charles, at a thrift store, in 1981.

CD cases today are clutter; the big cardboard album covers were works of art and could actually contain readable text. Still, no going back. Brave new world, blah blah.

My parents still have their record player. It still works, and they still listen to it. They have all their old records too.

Kids in this generation don’t even know what a “record player” is. Technology is changing all the time. Think about it…when we were kids there weren’t even computers! (Or there were those really old computers that had black screens and the type was green? Remember those?)

I have that Ray Charles C&W LP…love the orchestral soul rendition of Hank’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart”…just doesn’t get any sappier than that. I’m pretty sure it’s the inspiration for everything Barry White ever did.

I haven’t bought any vinyl in ~6 years, but my record player is still working, and my son thinks it’s cool to listen to my old Batman, Spiderman and Superman LPs from the 70’s.

I’m too young to really have any vinyl memories, except that when I went through my dad’s records there were actually a couple of ok ones (Doobie Brothers, Earth Wind and Fire). I understand why people like it – it’s satisfying to watch it spin, it has great cover art possibilities, it makes listening more active (no mixes, you have to start it and flip it over, etc.), and it was the medium when a lot of really great music was made in the 60s and 70s.

All of that said, if anyone says that it “sounds better” I’m going to bitch slap them.

Hey jeffk .. take a bit of time and go listen to a quality table spinning vinyl….then play the same song(s) on cd … You’ll be bitch slapping yourself. Audio Perfection in Richfield would be a good place to listen.

Led Zeppelin had the best liner notes and artwork. I still remember being 9 and begging my dad to play “D’yer Maker” just one more time.

Agreed. Vinyl DOES sound better, especially on the highest of high end equipment. When I heard Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue spun on one of these and played through two of these, I figured I’d give up on trying to improve the sound of my home system, as the entire rig cost ~$100,000. I like good sound, but the pursuit of Perfect Sound is apparently out of my price range.

I have three 45s hanging in my office cube.

1. Beach Boys – “Heroes and Villains”
2. Beach Boys – “Wouldn’t it Be Nice”
3. Beach Boys – “I Get Around” b/w “Don’t Worry, Baby”

I had four, but I think someone stole my Beatles’ “Revolution.” Bastards.

acalhoun: Raid your co-workers’ cubicles during lunch.

After all, they stole your Revolution… now you’re stealing it back.

Sweet poetry, Oliver. The revolution will not be televised!

also…try rolling a joint on a jewel case. it’s much easier on 12″ of carboard.

Absolutely, grote. Listening to my parents’ old Simon and Garfunkle LP’s was a different experience from listening to vinyl on my ex’s professional DJ equipment (even tho his DJ skillz are strictly amateur status).

grote, yeah, I know how it works. I’ll even compromise: on any audio system owned by an mnspeaker, it doesn’t make a difference. There are too many other factors that matter *way* more.

Vinyl has natural dynamic range….Most cd’s (because of poor recording techniques) do not. Listen to Steely Dan’s Aja…The cd is lifeless (everything is recorded at the same level) while the vinyl version sounds like you are there….The drums sound like real drums….not some digital garbage that makes the drums sound dull and lifeless.

Its well established that vinyl records have better audio quality than CDs, expecially the 12 45rpm format! The larger cover art is a very nice feature of the LP too. And I like a little crackle from an old record  its funny how often you hear that sound sampled.

My favorite vinyl memories are hardly nostalgic. This February I spent a week in Jamaica and never even put on my swimsuit because I was too busy buying up old reggae 45s. Besides the old stores along Orange Street, Kingston, we found an old guy in Ochi who drives around the country buying them up for resale. We caught a cab to his house and sat in his bedroom all afternoon sifting through 45s, listening and hearing some of his descriptions of the ska and early reggae dancehall scenes. Every little while thered be a rap on his window from a neighbor looking for ganja (his other trade) and hed yell to them that he was busy selling records to some white boys and his supply was downtown. I bought some of my rarest tunes that day and many are in fair condition  almost unheard of! Wish I could find the link to those photos&

While everyone else is drinking and dancing and enjoying a party, the audiophile starts in:

“Original sound is analog by definition. A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate (for CDs it is 44,100 times per second) and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy (for CDs it is 16-bit, which means the value must be one of 65,536 possible values).”

Hey, rock ‘n’ roll is meant to be noisy and distorted. It’s howlin’ at the moon.

pursuit of Perfect Sound is apparently out of my price range.

And wholly not necessary.

I can releate to your Revolution .45 theft, aaron — someone in college (I never found out who) ripped off my prized original White Album!

Sharing the things we know and love
With those of my kind
Libations
Sensations
That stagger the mind

AJa was my go-to in-car makeout music through college. But on cassette, of course. My wife often asks me to play it for her, but it’s just not the same on CD in the minivan with the kids in back.

Which reminds me — I used to have some of Harry Nilsson’s best (1968-1972) albums on vinyl — all lost. sigh….

My dad loved all things vinyl and was an electronic nerd as well. He installed a rockin’ stereo system in our house with speakers in just about every room along with a PA system so he could tell us what he was going to play along with the history of the artist. Did I say my dad was a nerd?

On the weekends he’d blast the blues: the usual suspects along with Son House, Townes Van Zant, Guy Clark and pretend he was Wolfman Jack. The art of the eye roll was perfected in my house, but my dad turned me onto some really cool tunes that I probably wouldn’t have come across otherwise. Plus, all of my friends thought he was The Dude so how can you wrong with that?

I have extremely fond memories of the first time I got my hands on the vinyl for the stripped-down House/Garage track You Got The Love by The Source, featuring an acapella vocal by the gospel singer Candi Staton.

It was in 1991, and I can still remember the irresistible and simple imperfect cadence of the synth line so that the track was always building, and this rich layered voice over the top. It was almost too slow for dancing (about 95-100 bpm, I think) but it was still the perfect tune to capture the musical mood of the UK electronic scene at the time. Especially with its nice and friendly lyrics (”sometimes I feel like throwing my hands up in the air/I know I can count on you/Sometimes I feel like saying ‘lord I just don’t care/You’ve got the love I need to see me through”).

Classic house but with more lyrics than most of us were used to. Most of those tracks offered only a great melodic hook and a nice simple emote in the lyrics. Most house tunes stuck to the KISS rule; just one short phrase and an awesome bass line sufficed more than adequately: “Pump up the jam”, “get up” and “move your feet/body”, or “oh sweet sensation” or “shake that booty/ass”, “true love can be hard to find” and so on.

My friends and I regarded it as the quintessential song about House music (with lyrics and everything), and I think it was only about seven years later that I realized that Candi Staton was a Gospel singer, and that it was a religious song. It is said that she didn’t even know it was a major success in the UK until some years after the track release, but I find that kind of hard to believe.

I still regard it fondly. If you’ve seen the British gangster movie Layercake, you’ve heard the best mix of the track I’m referring to: it’s in the scene when he sees the woman he falls in love with dancing at a night club. Everything suddenly goes into slow motion and that tune overrides whatever was playing at the time as she walks towards him.

Classic. Dance music kept a lot of presses in business, I think.

Rat: “Rock in roll was meant to be noisy and distorted” .. Yes, and why not listen to what the band intended their music to sound like? Analog will get you closer to the original…..An entry level (and quiet nice) audio system will run around $1500-$2000. It will be a good foundation for a HT setup as well .. This gear will last 10-15 years because of superior build quality. So the cost over the next say 10 years is $200/yr .. Reasonable. Look for brands such as NAD .. Cambridge .. NHT loudspeakers .. REGA turntables .. just to mention a few. Stereoland in Mpls is a great place to get started…

I’ve collected vinyl for about 12 years, and have been a DJ for about the same time period. I collect classic soul and funk music. There is simply nothing better than listening to vinyl records with a good stereo system IMO. It’s really not even close. The depth of the music is just so much more noticeable. As for equipment? I use Technics 1200 turntables that are virtually bomb proof. They sound excellent with high end needles. I run that through a Yamaha amp and Klipsch tower speakers. I think my system would probably run a couple thousand, hardly unaffordable considering the speakers and the turntables make up for the majority of the cost.

Is there technology that allows you to transfer and download vinyl LP’s into iTunes? If so, how long and how many steps does it take and what do you have to buy?

The Rat: I think there is such a program offered by Apple, but I’ll be damned if I remember what it’s called…

I don’t expect a musical experience any more sublime the closer I would get to audio perfection. We have a Bose 3-2-1 system (lower end Bose) which more than fills the bill.

It’s like paying $1,500 for a fly rod or $150. If you don’t know how to use it, you’re not going to catch any more fish with the expensive one.

The easiest solution Rat would be to get a USB turntable. However, that could run into money. Another option would be to take your turntable output and plug it into your computer sound card. Using sound recorder, you could turn your albums to mp3s. However, you may need some sort of editing software to smooth out the starts and stops…

I can definitely tell the difference between Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 on vinyl as opposed to that album on a CD.

ok…a little name that vinyl reference tune…I expect that Oliver knows this one:

I can feel the earth begin to move
Hear my needle hit the groove
And spiral through another day
I hear my song begin to say

I always liked Mondays best.

“You talk so hip, you’re twisting my melon man – somebody call the cops!”

I win:

Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums

“Vinyl nostalgia is sickening nostalgia.“

Naw. Vinyl nostalgia means hooking up both of your high-end Technics turntables to your old pre-amp, plugging it into your sound card, and turning everything in a fourteen-foot-long pile into mp3s. Which, if nothing else, is a great excuse to blow days and night listening to everything you bought, borrowed, or stole from age 12 on and haven’t heard in decades. (And which causes your kids to bring their friends over to see “turntables!”, and “records!”, and, unfortunately as an unintended consequence, allows your kids and their friends to see that you, too, own every Black Sabbath disc ever made, which means you own the same music as your fourteen-year-old son and his friends. They all sat for hours going through the albums, and, surprisingly, they had songs off of many of them.)

(ANALOG v DIGITAL: Artists used to mix sound to match the known output changes induced by the analog run-the-needle-along-the-bumps system. Anything mixed for analog is going to sound better played by analog equipment. Digital is laid down exactly as it comes out, with no filtering, boosting, or waveform futzing. It’s like a RAW file instead of a JPEG file for photos – you get all the info that was there, and, while the whole untouched mess is pretty much a mess, you can then do with it what you want. That’s why equalizer profiles are so important for digital. What sounds “better” is whatever you like, but generally, digital gives you way more, and way more accurate, info for rebuilding the sound.)

But how does it sound? That is what counts. An analog signal has harmonics for example, digital has a tough time with this. Listen to a symbal played through an analog system. You hear the intitial strike and then you hear the harmonics slowly fading away…Digital gets the initial strike right, but the harmonics are (mostly) lost. This missing piece (or air around the notes) is what makes digital sound fake compared to a good analog system.

Should be cymbal …. not symbal.

Maybe it’s a symbol…

It could be …

a little name that vinyl reference tune…

Dude, those lyrics are at least as much about heroin as any old-fashioned music medium

Vinyl memories? Nostalgia?

I think most of you are all unaware that bands continue to release albums in this format. In fact, some “indie” labels (Sub Pop, Matador, Touch & Go) offer download codes along with the purchase of your new vinyl, so you can listen to it on your iPod as well as your turntable.

Vinyl sales over the last 7 years have steadily increased, while the floor continues to bottom out on CD sales.

“Progress”, indeed.

What a pointless thread.

Don’t forget the Rhymesayers label, Jeremy. Fifth Element has tons of newly released LP’s as well as used stuff.

Didn’t forget Rhymesayers, just didn’t think of them since I own very little hip-hop.

But yes, Fifth Element, Treehouse, Extreme Noise, and Cheapo all have extensive vinyl selections, among other places. And much of it is new.

Didn’t forget Rhymesayers, just didn’t think of them since I own very little hip-hop.

/faints…