“My earliest vinyl memories are of me sitting on the floor with my dad’s open trumpet case, an apple crate full of records, and a turntable in the corner of our family sitting room. I was 7.”
“I must have spent hours there, days, who knows how long, and I’m almost certain I wreaked havoc on my parents record collection. Imagine a seven-year old, discovering records, mishandling them, and trying to set the needle somewhere close to the beginning of a song. I was apparently determined, and eventually figured it out. What were my parents thinking? Were they even nearby? Did they know or care about what I was doing to their record collection?
I was in heaven. Listening to music became my great escape. I remember putting the trumpet mouth piece to my lips and blowing to see if I could match any of the tones I was hearing from the great spinning disk. I was mostly unsuccessful with the mouthpiece, but I stayed on and listened intently to the songs. I still remember some of them to this day. Songs like “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now” from the Ry Cooder album Jazz. Songs like, “It’s In His Kiss” by Kate Taylor. I remember albums by greats Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald.
I still have some of those albums today, and my vinyl collection is a wonderful mixture of recordings, from hand-me-downs to rare recordings that I have sought out and purchased as well as modern albums put out by my peers, and gifts that friends have passed on to me. I must have destroyed that Ry Cooder album, Jazz, because it’s nowhere to be found. Writing this makes me want to replace it.
I also remember as a young eager musician trying to record my voice for the first time on a boombox, using headphones in reverse as a microphone and re-recording onto store-bought cassette tapes. I remember making my first professional album with the band Calobo and manufacturing cassette tapes for sale because that was the only option available. Vinyl was not a viable, CDs had not yet become the standard, and well, 8-track cassettes, as cool as they are, were just too bulky and too expensive to make.
Analog music has always had a head-of-the-table seat in my world. In the modern music industry I have not yet embraced the vinyl manufacturing option as I find records to be cumbersome to tour with, and expensive to produce. This breaks my heart because I know it is the most incredible listening experience, aside from listening to the final mix of a song as it goes from the original 2” reels of tape down to the 1/2” master reel. That moment of the final mix play/dump down to the master tape sounds like nothing else in this world. The music just jumps into the air as though it were being played live in front of you, but mixed to perfection.”
—Caleb Klauder
Caleb Klauder & Reeb Willms’ full-length release Innocent Road arrives in stores September 30, 2016 via Hearth Music.
