“It’s funny how the universe forces you to develop as a person and learn. Keeping you interested(ing).”
“It’s possibly why I started a vinyl collection and why it came pretty easy to get it started. It wasn’t because my parents had an extensive hand-me-down collection in the garage filled with records. In fact, my parents were hardly music fans up until my brother Charlie and I showed interest. CDs had become a mainstay and the standard music listening platform. Along with Napster and Limewire, downloading David Bowie’s discography was a quick “Wam Bam Thank You Ma’am” away. All of which is why it’s so odd that at 10 years old, I had a bigger collection than someone’s Grandpa.
Living in Los Angeles it’s only fitting that it started at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. My Dad had taken Charlie and I to the huge vinyl, video, and CD store off Sunset Boulevard. Not for music I add—he was looking for the 1979 film The Warriors on DVD. After rummaging through a bunch of vinyl, CDs and videos, there was one thing I really wanted, even though I had already downloaded it free, it was the size and grasp of that Gorillaz record on vinyl that was calling my name! I needed to have it! That vinyl was a trophy! A trophy for knowing all of the words to every song on that record.
In my mind it never clicked that it was a vinyl record, because all I cared about was how cool it would look in my room, and how it probably came with a poster and a big lyric sheet. After convincing my Dad that I needed it, he decided he would buy it for me.
I grasped it tight all the way to the underground parking lot beneath the store, and I can’t help but think the universe, the music Gods, the pixies of plastic. decided to step in at this very moment. I’m sitting in the backseat of our car, ripping the clear plastic wrapping off of this new vinyl record when I stepped out to dispose of it. As I stepped closer to the blue recycling bin I could see that the top was being lifted by something, just a couple of inches. I opened the garbage bin and there I found love, a life long obsession, and a way of life!
Without exaggerating, the entire bin was filled with vinyl records! From Bob Marley to Enya, from The Rolling Stones to The Sound of Music soundtrack! I yelled back to my brother Charlie and my Dad to come look at what I had just found. They too were pretty amazed at what couldn’t possibly be in the trash! I started thinking, wait, would this be stealing if I took these records?! Or am I seeing first hand that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure? It felt almost like someone had left a bag of cash for a drug trade and we had found it! It didn’t take long to come to the revelation—finders keepers!
We cleared the entire bin of records and transferred the contents into the trunk of the car! I was now, the rightful owner of over 300 vinyl records! Like there was a sale, buy one get 300 free!
Once I got home all I could do was dissect every single cover, every single plate of wax. One of the reasons being, I didn’t own a record player! My grandmother in New York sent me her old record player for me to have until I managed to save for a more updated turntable. It took about two weeks of studying the lyrics of some of these records before I actually heard what most of the songs even sounded like! My god! Finally listening to “Survival” by Bob Marley and the Wailers on that disc was a revelation! Since then, since that very moment, music has led the way. Its the escape, the goal, the dream and the vinyl record has and forever will be my burning bush, my Rosetta Stone, my theory of relativity.
The world may not revolve around us, but as far as I know, it moves at 33 RPM.”
—Justin
The Knitts’ sophomore EP, “Simple Folk” arrives on store shelves on February 12 via Knitting Factory Records.
