Author Archives: Special to TVD

“I was sucked into the spinning vinyl vortex through my older sister. Irene was heavily into The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, and Queen. When she was out, I would take her vinyl into my room and listen to her albums. “Killer Queen” especially grabbed me. I mention “Killer Queen” in a song I wrote called “Falmouth.” I figured why not listen to her records , then I can save money and maybe buy my own albums later if I absolutely had to.”

“The local radio station WPDH in Poughkeepsie played more fringe music than other stations at the time—so some of my earliest vinyl was Tom Waits and Randy Newman, but I was also into 10cc, Jon Anderson, Pink Floyd, and Crack the Sky.

Album covers loom large in my mind because they are so large. Getting vinyl was getting a work of art—CDs could just never compare. That’s a major reason for buying vinyl still today. “Killer Queen” had all the cool glamour with the four longhaired Brits–some shirtless–draped in a circle on a black backdrop. Jon Anderson’s Olias of Sunhillow scratched the sci-fi/fantasy nerd itch with some sort of elaborate flying contraption from another dimension on the cover and its overly ornate typeface.

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief stands out as a vinyl wonder because of the three sides. Side one would play a whole different bunch of skits depending on where you dropped the needle, so the A side really gave you two sides in one.

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“There’s just something about going into a record shop, searching through thousands of LPs—most older than us, passed through generations and hoping you bag a limited edition copy that no one has spotted.”

“The first vinyl I came across was News of the World by Queen—it was handed down to me by my dad. I remember him saying, “Keep hold of this, it’ll be worth a bob in a few years time.” 20 years later, worth a whopping £30, I should be able to retire from it in the year 100,000. The favourite records in my collection are probably Graceland, Paul Simon and Parallel Lines, Blondie.” —Jordan

“The first time I remember seeing records I must’ve been about 6 or 7.”

“My dad had cases and cases of them in various wardrobes throughout the house. The one that sticks out in that memory is always Never Mind The Bollocks… by the Sex Pistols. I thought the cover was cool as fuck before I’d even heard the music! As I got older I started buying my own records, there’s just something about vinyl that nothing else comes close to. In the end we got so obsessed with vinyl we even ended up naming our band after our local record shop!” —Jamie

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“My father died on November 29th, 2013, two months before I turned 25. My partner Emma and my birthdays are just two days apart—January 23rd and 25th—so the day between has most years been the date of a joint party. January 24th, 2014 was no exception. I had barely begun grieving. Still shocked and blinded by the seismic event that had befallen me. Still numb with denial each day when I woke up.”

“We decided to host it in the basement of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called St. Mazie. That spot has a street-level floor where local groups play. Some nights you might hear gypsy jazz, some nights you might hear a jug band. But below is a low-cap subterranean basement space, maybe 50 heads total, with a bar and eight or ten tables. We chose it because it’s just small enough where with enough friends, you can turn it into a de-facto private party. A year into my first job and with no money to rent out a venue, this struck us as a pretty ingenious approach and we sprung the idea on our guest list to a lively response.

The night came and our people were filling the space up and claiming tables. I noticed one final four-top of three strangers remaining, working on closing out their bill, with an open seat. I decided to sit down with them to be polite. At the table were two women and a man, and they welcomed me in.

Back then I wandered stunned from place to place, sometimes totally numb, but periodically—and inevitably—crashing down to earth in realization of my wrecked present. It felt like that fleeting moment after you’re slapped in the face, before the sting sets in. I felt the lightness and levity of freefall. A month or less later I’d find myself in darkness after the daze wore off, but for that moment, this stupefaction, mixed with the buzz of a room full of friends and a few drinks, had me whirring, ready to stick a straw in a world disappearing down the drain.

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“I first came into contact with records at probably 5 or 6. My dad had his small collection of Merengue records in the closet where we kept our winter wear. My parents never played them because they were very much in the home entertainment era of the ’90s, and in typical Latin household fashion they had a drawer with probably 300 + CD’s with salsa, merengue, all types of Latin music which had a profound effect on me and thus on Conclave.”

“Later when I got to high school I fell in love with jazz. I played in the school jazz band and combo and formed a side jazz combo. All I listened to was jazz, but it was in the format of CDs, which I bought or burned. This continued until I got to Berklee College of Music in Boston. I was finally living in a space that wasn’t my parents house for the first time and wanted to make it my own, so I did what a lot of millennial art students in college did at that time: I bought a shitty record player. That started my love affair with the vinyl medium. I finally could buy all of the jazz records I’d been listening to all these years in their original medium and could discover more.

Around the corner from the school was a super dope record store called Looney Tunes (RIP). They had two locations—one by Harvard campus in Cambridge, and lucky for me, another one right by Berklee. The guys that worked there were a couple of super nice older white Boston dudes. They were more into rock and probably were in punk or rock bands in the ’70s and ’80s. The store had an extensive rock selection but funny enough they had a jazz selection that rivaled it (probably because of the proximity to a jazz school).

I would go every week, multiple times a week, and buy jazz records from artists I recognized and sometimes a jazz artist I had just learned about in class that day. I would go home, smoke a lil sum’, and actively listen with friends or alone. One record during this era that flipped my shit and a lot of my friends shit was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. This was a movie in every sense to us and I remember us laying on the ground with our backs on the floor and facing the ceiling and could imagine the scenes that took place in a continent and culture none of us had ever experienced to yet.

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“My parents bought a vinyl player when Sony started doing compact ‘modern’ remakes, it was funny the disc area was minuscule in comparison to the huge speakers that came with it. I still have the photo of it taking up an entire living room wall in our old house.”

“My mum would take me to a record store in Cambridge (that’s unfortunately shut now) and go in the bargain bin area. I always hated that they called it a bin. My earliest memory was her buying Rage Against The Machine’s Sleep Now In The Fire with the huge coin on the front and as a child I never understood the imagery. We took it home and she played it for my sister and I. Some years later I returned to that record to choreograph a dance for my primary school…looking back it was pretty rogue.

As I got older I moved to London in hopes of working as a ‘real’ singer. I spent many an afternoon alone in Soho record stores (before I made any friends here). Sometimes I would look for classics I loved, and sometimes for the cheapest vinyl or weirdest cover I could find. Rough Trade is still round the corner from my flat and the East End has some great vintage markets selling vinyl.

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“When I moved to Boston as a Hip Hop obsessed 18 year old in order to attend Northeastern University, one of the first things I did was start looking for record stores.”

“I had had my turntables for years already, but the few thrift shops in my hometown were far from generous in what they provided a kid looking for breaks, vintage funk and soul, or classic hip hop. I wandered the city for hours whenever I could, between classes and football practice, checking out places I found on primitive websites (2002 style) or message boards, where music nerds gathered and shared tips.

On one such expedition, I came across what will now forever be for me the archetype of the perfect record store. In Your Ear records in Allston was down a flight of stairs into a decent sized underground shop. Stacks of repaired receivers and turntables greeted you to left, and a hardcore and metal section that I always breezed past on the right. Beyond that (where you almost always had to squeeze by someone immersed in their own search) it opened up into the most beautiful example of the balance between disorder and order.

Clearly defined sections guided your search but never so organized that you might not accidentally find something to expand your taste. The daily appearance of unmarked boxes in the process of being organized or priced meant there was almost always something no one else had looked through, and most importantly for a student with no money there was a gigantic stack of unsleeved 45s for 10 cents each.

I remember spending hours and hours in that stack, skipping the train in favor of walking there and back (probably an hour each way) because that 3 dollars in train fare was an extra 30 records! I’d get home and carefully wash each record to make it playable but half the time they still screamed with static regardless.

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“My first records were metal: Judas Priest, AC/DC, Ozzy. It was the music that my friend’s big brothers listened to and therefore, so did we. It was the entire universe, as far as I was concerned. “

“I spent hours listening and wondering what it would be like to go to a concert. Ozzy and AC/DC frightened me at first.. but the more I listened the more I wanted get closer to all of it. I was obsessed.

The first time I heard the Ramones, I was all in. It was the coolest thing I could imagine. It sounded like the ’60s (another obsession that came later) but LOUD and FAST. It was catchy, weird, and simple enough for me to think I could try playing my own music someday.

I gave away all of my metal records the next day. It felt like a line in the sand. I started collecting Ramones records, then the Clash. That led to the Cure and the Smiths—it went on from there and branched out.

I love how vinyl creates its own time and space—it feels like an event. As a kid, I’d study the artwork while listening. It was all so other-worldly, so completely different from anything I knew about in my neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas.

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“I love listening to vinyl and knowing this was the format that it was supposed to be heard; fully encompassing.”

“Vinyl was more than an auditory experience, it was tactile and visual. The image on the album jacket presented artwork giving the first hint of the poetry, the cacophony, the harmony, and the rhythmic musical secrets that lay within. While a book should never be judged by its cover, a vinyl record could often be judged by the form, color, and visual statement of the album jacket.

Then, when you’ve brought your new album home and stripped off the cellophane coating covering the album jacket and after sliding the thin vinyl disc from within the walls of its sides, when the record is exposed to the light of day for the first time, the anticipation rises as you place the record on the turntable and watch it spin.

Growing up, the weekend was for playing vinyl loud. All the songs that we usually listened to on CD in the car were supercharged and richer playing them at full volume… that is the way to experience classic rock and become obsessed with it.

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“Seth and I met at a gig up in the mountains in Colorado when he helped me carry my old Roland keyboard from my 1992 Toyota Corolla station wagon to the stage.”

CHINA: Music and mutual friends brought us together, and I remember thinking that Seth was the most intelligent person at the table later that night when we all went out for drinks. It was the early oughts, before streaming and YouTube, before the internet would take over music listening. I was working 5 different gigs to make ends meet at the time, driving myself all across Denver in that green station wagon, listening to my CDs and the radio.

I mentioned to Seth that first night, that I was obsessed with a song I’d heard on the radio, but didn’t know who had sung it or how to find it. I sang the snippet that I remembered, “In the cathedrals of New York and Rome…” to him, unbeknownst that he was the world’s best finder of random things; that he would research until he found the song, “Cathedrals” by Jump Little Children; that he would purchase the CD it appeared on, and bring it to my doorstep. Thusly, our mutual adoration of each other and of music grew to this full-on collaboration we now nurture, grow and manage together called Alright Alright.

SETH: Yeah, I mean I was a bit smitten when I saw China, then I heard her sing and I was starting to get it bad. Later, in the middle of this dive bar we all ended up at that night, we were drinking martinis to feel fancy, and China asked us about that song. It was so amazing to have this beautiful girl with this big voice just belt a song in the middle of the bar.

Finding that album for her was sorta my foot in the door, and ever since, we’ve ended up discovering a lot of music together over the years. That magic still happens. We were at Americana Fest last year at Jeremy Ivey’s album release in the new Grimey’s, and while we were listening to the music, we kept finding records we wanted. They made some money on us that night!

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“For me, my choice in vinyl comes in two ways, it’s either a must-buy for something I’ve been looking for for awhile and finally came upon, or it comes in taking a risk and buying a random set of 20 records from the bargain bin and hoping to strike gold.”

“My collection ranges from selections of old records passed down to me—like Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland or Deja Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—and then I have many self-purchased that I’ve learned now have accumulated a lot from merch stands at local shows.

One of my current most prized finds is an LP of a favorite Nashville black metal outfit that no longer exists—Alraune’s The Process of Self-Immolation. I had luckily gotten to see them towards the end of their existence and had regretted not buying a hard copy of this record at the time. But on one of Oginalii’s last tours, we had stopped by a record store in Columbus, OH called Used Kids Records and I just happened to run across this exact LP in the metal bin.

I hadn’t even looked at the price and just immediately picked it up and bought it. Of course it had not been a high demand album, but to me I felt like I had hit the lottery. Sometimes you run into what you have been looking for in the most random of places.”
—Ryan

“I was born in 1994, but am lucky enough to have had some time to experience discovering and listening to music before streaming.”

“Both my parents had their respective CD and cassette collections that I couldn’t keep my hands off of. I scoured through both shelves and brought certain ones around with me with my portable players. I started playing piano at a young age and didn’t understand the ‘why’ of it. It felt more like a sport or after school program than anything until going into a record store for the first time. I was 9 or 10 and that trip completely changed my interests for good.

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“You’ve always been such a beautiful way to express and convey the art of music throughout the years and throughout my life, I just can’t imagine any artist (known or unknown) not having been moved to some degree by a great and ever expanding comprehension of value regarding this soft black spherical capture of note and tone.”

“As time drags on and we find the sound growing in accessibility when paired with the wide lens of the cover art to place us amidst the full thought of a complete LP, instead of the broken (yet necessary) compressive claw of downloads and online shares.

Through the turning over of decades and the weight of years, there is a weight to physical things as well that begin to wear on us and bring us to our knees over time, and yet there is no comparison to the perfect cap to a long recording bender by way of morning’s coffee heavy with robe and forest green corduroyed armchair surrounding with the soft sounds of the amazing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” (of course) pouring through the den speakers as the sun rises…

Then after a short nap and I suppose I’m feeling a bit more indulgent (showered and dressed to kill) when I drop into Power, Corruption & Lies with the possibility of inspiration for “1979” by none other than the Smashing Pumpkins, but of course not until after “Age of Consent” and approximately two minutes and eight seconds of “We All Stand.”

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“My introduction to vinyl came, like most, from my parents.”

“They bought me both Sgt. Pepper’s and the “White Album” on CD as a birthday gift, but when I realized that they had their own copies on vinyl, I gravitated to those instead. They came with the cardboard cutouts and all the extra trimmings and that felt a lot more magical to me than a tiny CD!

Growing up in Romford Essex, the music scene consisted of mostly dance nightclubs and techno music, but I managed to find a local record store called BeatRoot records (RIP) which opened my mind and gave me an insatiable thirst for vinyl at the age of 13. They also showed me that my birthplace did consist of great music legends such as Procol Harum, Graham Bond, and Billy Bragg (technically from Barking, Essex, but close enough).

This was the ‘other music’ record store of Essex, with more of a car boot sale vibe, that consisted of older fellas reminiscing about Steve Marriott’s pub years and a collage under the glass counter—consisting mostly of ’60s mod pop stars. My best mate David Woolf (who still has BeatRoot records taking up most of his house to this day) worked there for a time and the day they put a local newspaper clipping of me on the collage was a big moment.

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“I moved to England in 2011 and brought only one vinyl with me; Phoebe Snow’s Against The Grain. My mother had bought it for me a few years prior when I was still living in NYC, and I cherished it. One night, I was at a local bar in Astoria, LIC BAR, where I would perform a lot. The bar had and still has wonderful curated nights, booked by Gustavo Rodriguez. While enjoying a drink, who walked in? Phoebe Snow! I had to tell her that the only vinyl I owned at the time was hers. She was very nice, and it made the vinyl feel even more special to me.”

“My first memory of vinyl was my parents copy of John Denver’s Windsong as it leaned on the corner of our wooden side table in my living room in downtown NYC. My parents were always playing records, ranging from folk to classical, to rock to musical theatre. I actually once wrote a song called “Paper Moon” where I mention a vinyl that I “played so much that I broke it.” I’m not exactly sure what the record was called, but it definitely had the song “Pop Goes the Weasel” on it. (It only occurred to me lately that perhaps I didn’t break it, but maybe my parents couldn’t stand it anymore so that’s what they told me… hmmmm.) I used to run circles around living room and it was very fun!

My parents record player was one that flipped the record from side A to side B without our having to flip it. I was quite young, but I’m almost certain this is true, because I have a memory of watching it in awe and thinking it was cool. I also knew that I was not allowed to touch it, which I did not—but I wanted to. My brother, did however, teach me how to get an electric shock from the volume knobs of our hifi and also make our hair get staticky.

Another early memory I have of vinyl—if you can even call it that—was my Fisher Price record player. I don’t remember what songs it had, but I believe the ‘vinyl’ were primary colors. This was a great toy!

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“There has always been something special about hearing a record on vinyl. When I was really young, my dad would blast Tower of Power and all sorts of other jazz, blues, and funk records on his turntable, but I didn’t have a true understanding or appreciation for vinyl as a medium until much later.”

“CD was king through my formative years. I used to save money so I could go to Barnes and Noble or FYE to buy CDs when I was in middle school, which was at the height of the emo wave in the early 2000s. So you can probably imagine my collection—Brand New, The Used, Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, Coheed and Cambria, you name it. I got really heavy into Bright Eyes around the time Wide Awake and Digital Ash came out, and it was kind of the first time I started paying any attention to lyrics. Nuance was suddenly really important in every aspect of the music I listened to, and when I got back into listening to albums on vinyl, that stuck with me.

When I finally got my own turntable, the first records I bought were Wide Awake and Cassadaga. Then it was Room on Fire (The Strokes), Nevermind and In Utero (Nirvana), and the collection kept growing, but each one felt like it hit different on vinyl, like I was hearing it again for the first time. It felt so raw and real. These records were meant to be listened to that way. And I think that’s how Chris and I both feel about Everything Has to Fall Apart Eventually, especially after hearing the test presses from Third Man. Hopefully other people will feel the same way.”
—Parker Bengry (guitar/vocals)

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“I grew up in the ’80s, so I was very much a cassette kid for a lot of years, but my earliest memories of hearing music were of digging LPs out of my Dad’s closet and playing them on our record player. It was how I first discovered music. My first record store, I guess.”

“The first time I put on “Louie, Louie” by the Kingsmen, I was absolutely hooked. I used to hold my breath for the few seconds of hiss and pop before the intro lick. Another pivotal moment was hearing The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” for the first time. I had never heard anything like that electric guitar, or anybody sing with that kind of swagger. I remember being slightly terrified and fascinated by “Play With Fire.”

There was also Simon and Garfunkel, The Righteous Brothers, The Beach Boys and The Oak Ridge Boys. And while I didn’t listen to the Herb Alpert Whipped Cream And Other Delights album much, I certainly spent a good deal of time looking at that cover. Add to all of this, the sheer mystery of the physics of a record player, and it’s safe to say my little mind was blown.

I remember going on family trips to the mall and getting to go to the Record Bar. I played guitar by then and I’d load up on as many Chuck Berry, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin tapes as I could afford. Sometimes I’d hear a song on the radio and not know who it was, and I’d go to the clerk and sing a little of it for them and they could always find it for you. That level of mystery and engagement in music discovery seems to plant it a little deeper in your soil.

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