“When I was growing up in Northern California, the record store was the best place to hang out.”
“We’d dig through the used record bins (Streetlight Records, Logos, Metavinyl) for hours in hopes of finding stuff that nobody was listening to at the moment. I have a very fond memory of a friend who bought a record called A Rare Sensation by a band called The Chinese Stars. My friend loved the album art and the title so he bought it on a whim, and was surprised at how great and weird a band they were.
We were all psyched on them for that entire summer. It’s stories like that, which got me into collecting vinyl.
One of the first records I bought was Raw Power by Iggy and The Stooges. I heard “Search and Destroy” in Wes Anderson’s movie The Life Aquatic, and immediately bought the record from a local shop in my hometown of Santa Cruz. That was the start of it, I got into ’70s/’80s stuff like T. Rex, The Velvet Underground, The Modern Lovers, and Sonic Youth. Those albums were basically the soundtracks to my high school years.
The vinyl revival kinda started happening when I was in high school, and us teenagers started inheriting our parental record collections when they noticed us purchasing new turntables. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, and every Bob Dylan record up to his born-again Christian phase I inherited from my stepdad.
There were even a few weird albums like Maggot Brain by Funkadelic and Atomic Heart Mother by Pink Floyd. That was the period in high school where experimental music was all I listened to. I had a tiny Neumark portable turntable that I could put batteries in and bring into my backyard on sunny days.
Vinyl is a living thing, just as the music that is pressed into it. It has a lifespan and the record’s quality degrades as time passes. I heard a great quote recently that pretty much sums up why I still buy records, “The beauty of listening to records is that it will never sound as good as the first time you put it on.”
—Jordan Topf, lead singer/guitars
Mainland’s “Shiner” EP hits store shelves on February 25th.
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