“In 1999 I was well on my way through a journey of classic rock. I was nine years old, and anyone you might expect to see on a list of “Rock Gods” had become my idols. Bowie, Hendrix, The Stones, and anyone else with tight pants and a guitar were all who mattered. I bought an electric guitar and stopped cutting my hair. At just over four feet tall I considered myself a total badass.”
“Due to my new-found obsession, I took an interest in my dad’s record collection. Unfortunately they were kept at my parents’ cottage three hours north of our home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We only used the cottage during the summer, so I waited for the school year to end, and dreamt of a stockpile of classic rock artillery to blast on the record player.
You might expect a description of me opening a dusty cabinet to find Zeppelin, The Who, Bowie, and the rest of my hero’s records hidden away like treasure. Unfortunately, this is not a Rock’n’Roll fairytale and that’s not what happened.
While there were a couple hundred records in a dusty cabinet, the majority of them were 1940s lounge singers, and a surprisingly large number were Christmas records. I was crushed. Someone should have videotaped my reaction; it would have been Youtube worthy. The more I searched the worse it got and my hopes of spending an afternoon listening to classic vinyl culminated in listening to the Bread album Manna. Not exactly what I had in mind.
I eventually did track down some albums that, at nine years old, I deemed worthy of listening to. Santana’s Abraxas and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush stick out in my memory. To this day “Tell Me Why” is one of my favorite Neil Young songs. The album art alone was incredible and I listened to those records from front to back a handful of times before putting them back in their sleeves.
Not long after finding my dad’s vinyl I discovered Nirvana and the rest of grunge. Classic Rock took a back seat as I found newer music to quench my appetite.
While brief, the time spent at my cottage that summer changed the way I view albums. They were no longer just a grouping of separate songs and pieces. It was one piece (complemented with visuals) that sounded better in its entirety and much better on vinyl. If nothing more, the experience left me with a soft spot for Sinatra’s Christmas album, and every time Bread’s “Baby I’m-a Want You” comes on the radio, I turn it up to eleven.
There’s no such thing as a musical guilty pleasure, right?”
—Philip Stancil
Midnight Faces’ Fornication will arrive in stores on June 18 via broken Factory.
