“My earliest memory with vinyl is somewhat foggy and not as ‘cool’ as stories others might have.”
“It was 1988. I was 5 years old. I don’t know why I had money to spend but I did. Maybe a distant relative sent me birthday money in a card or something? Anyway, I knew what I wanted, it was only one thing: “Mercedes Boy” by Pebbles on vinyl. I grew up in a small town in Arizona, but Flagstaff had a record store downtown called Bookmans that always smelled like a mix of fresh popcorn and the new and used books they sold.
There was also a chain record store, The Warehouse in the mall. At the ripe old age of 5, I preferred the mall because they also had a pet store where I could go look at the animals. Who knows why my mom thought it was appropriate for her young daughter to listen to a song with the lyrics:
“Do you want to ride in my Mercedes boy? / Tell me what you’re gonna do with me. / ‘Cause if you want to ride in my Mercedes boy. / There are so many things that I’m gonna do to you.”
What do girls do with boys in cars anyway mom? The only thing I did in cars was sit in the backseat and stare out the window while singing along to whatever my mom and dad had on the radio. I remember getting home and being so excited to put my very own record on the turntable.
Luckily, my parents both had really great taste in music and a pretty great record collection to boot. I would often lay under the glass table that held the record player and I would thumb through the records, open them up on the floor, look at all the pictures and lyrics. My favorites to pore over were the cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s, Some Girls from The Rolling Stones where you could pull the inside cover out and swap the faces, but my most favorite was Led Zeppelin III with the die cut cover and the wheel you could spin to make the cover change.
Then of course there was our local hero Stevie Nicks and her band Fleetwood Mac. My mom would pull out Rumours and listen to it while she was cooking dinner and I would lay there on the floor underneath the glass table absorbing all of it in.
The day I brought my Pebbles record home I remember feeling so proud that I finally had something to contribute to our family record collection. My album could live in the crate among the other records I so loved. It didn’t have a die cut psychedelic cover but it had the rainbow MCA center label and at 5, I thought that was pretty cool.
Years went by and eventually my parents decided to get rid of their turntable and get a CD player. I of course immediately rescued it from the trash and brought it into my pre-teen bedroom along with all of the records that had been collected over the years. My parents never asked for their records back but I was happy to be their new caretaker. I still have almost all of those albums—although sadly, “Mercedes Boy” is somehow lost forever.
My favorite of all of them is my mom’s copy of Rumours that Stevie Nicks signed for me years later when I was grown and recording albums of my own. It says simply, “Michelle, So I’m back to the velvet underground, Back to the floor with some lace and paper flowers…Back to the gypsy that I loved, to the gypsy that I was. It’s your world now, you are the gypsy, good luck sweet girl. Love, Stevie Nicks”
—Michelle Branch
Michelle Branch’s brand new full-length release, Hopeless Romantic is in stores now.
