“My dad sat me down pretty much as soon as I could walk around touching things and showed me the ritual.”
“This is how to pull the record from the sleeve and how to hold the disk without holding it, how to wipe it down, flip it, and gently put the needle in place and reverse all the steps and put it away.”
In high school, I’d walk off campus and a few blocks away to a punk rock record shop at lunch and go through the stacks piecing together some kind of history of rock and roll from the associations and proximity of records to each other, “There’s a band named the Sonics who look like the Beatles but directly connect to Nirvana.”
Buying three 45s a week; One I knew, one I read about, and one picked on instinct having sized up the combination of artwork/bandname/song titles/label. Pleated 45 daydreams.
My first year in New York I got a job at a record store in the East Village. Us clerks lurking like vultures around the used record buyer when a good looking stack came in, driving him nuts. “Don’t touch until I’ve priced it.” When the gems came up, an original VU banana sleeve, Del Shannon 60s psych record, it was always the used buyer who got the score. We fed on scraps of great copies of Odessey and Oracle, MBV, Liquid Liquid, Low End Theory.
There is a certain part of the thrill of hunting down vinyl that has dissipated as drive space has allowed for instant gratification and impossibly dense collections. I have a secret hope that now that vastness of a collection or knowledge can’t be used as status—that people are going to start spending more time with singular records. Sitting with one LP for a good stretch and properly unlocking it, going through the ritual, owning it.
P.S. I pulled out The Vinyl District app when I was in Moscow last week, and sure as shit found a record shop 15 minutes away.”
—Jason Friedman
