King James & the Special Men, The TVD First Date

“My earliest memory in life is of my grandmother bathing me in a washtub, but my second memory is of my father’s gigantic record collection.”

“A typical young man of the ’70s, my father listened to his vast record collection at home and loud on his floor-to-ceiling hi-fi stereo system with speakers in every room. He even saw fit to put a little turntable in my bedroom with a box of old 45s from his teenage years. He was an audiophile and he wanted me to be one too. I would listen to Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and “Wild Thing” by the Troggs a thousand times a day, jumping off the bed and playing imaginary concerts all the while. I would draw different guitar shapes onto cardboard and rock out with my cut-out. I was obsessed, and when I finally got my first real guitar at the age of four, I played it until I bled the very first day.

What’s significant to me looking back is the fact that my earliest notions of “music” itself involved the act of recording and the art of making albums. I now understand that songwriting, composition, performance, conducting, recording, and the construction an “album” are all distinct and worthy disciplines unto themselves, but as a kid I only knew that you played music in hope of making records, period. Much like a kid today would have a hard time imagining a world before the internet and smartphones, I was unable to imagine a world before records. To me, they were the only reason to pick up an instrument in the first place. You rock, you record, you rock, you record, etc…

I could write a book about the life lessons I have learned from music, and most of what I learned from music I learned from records. I did take enough guitar lessons in the first grade to play “Shoo Fly,” and learned how to read and write music in junior high, but it was the time that I spent digging through old records when I learned the most. That, and actually playing music on instruments with other human beings, of course, but that came later in life for me. Rather than pursuing much of a social life, I found myself spending most of my time researching the records that my favorite musicians listened to before making their own, and repeating this process until reaching all the way around the world and into the past to the first sound recordings ever made.

Another point; records are still the only truly archival medium for sound recordings made. Try and play one of those early compact discs you bought when they first came out. You can’t! And everyone knows what happens to tapes. Grab an old record from a hundred years ago, though, and that sucker holds up great!

There are many, many reasons to make music that do not involve electricity or commerce of any sort, but every time I am afforded the opportunity to hear this beautiful music, all I want to do is record it and press it to vinyl! I will always be that kid that found his calling in life before he was able to read, and will always want to record and listen to records!”
—Jimmy Horn of King James & The Special Men and Special Man Industries