“Vinyl, it’s cumbersome, it’s expensive, it breaks easily, it cracks and pops. If it was a new format just launching it would be a tough sell, but it’s now apparently set to outsell CDs for the first time since the mid ’80s.”
“When the CD was released I was around ten and was impossibly excited by this futuristic slab of metal—music played by lasers. Who wouldn’t be? At one point more people owned Brothers in Arms on CD than actually owned CD players, that’s how excited we all were.
Before CDs, my only real experience of building a music collection was, once in a while, spending my allowance on the 99p ex-jukebox 45s they kept on a rack by the magazines in my local convenience store. Of course, I had no idea what any of these songs were. I would go home with Kylie Minogue one week, Jackie Wilson the next. In some ways this was the precursor to experiments later in life where I would buy second hand records from bargain bins based only on the way the sleeve looked or the name and hope I hit gold. More often than not I did.
So, CDs came along and temporarily rendered vinyl obsolete, but twenty years later when I packed up and left the UK for the US, my CDs went to charity. My record collection is still being held on to for me by a close friend a decade later until such a time as I figure out how to get it to me here.
I guess I should at least have him send me the rare ones. Like the Island records Tom Waits releases…Bone Machine, Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones, all out of print all hard to find these days and all formative. The first time I put Rain Dogs on the record player everything I thought I knew about recording was undone—it practically leapt out of the speakers—it sounded alive in a way I didn’t know music could.
There’s a lot of other great stuff in that UK collection too but a lot of it I’ve been able to replace over the years. I spend an almost embarrassing amount of my income on vinyl to be honest, and Amoeba (sadly never reopening in its original location) has become my happy place over the years. Because, although you can buy records on Amazon or Discogs, the real fun is in finding something whilst flicking through crates that you didn’t even know you needed. That’s one of the reasons vinyl has become so popular I think—people crave experiences in the real world, a little inconvenience from time to time
As a sound engineer and musician, a lot of my days are filled with music and, because of this, over the years I found myself listening to it less and less for fun; that’s just the way it went. I found that Spotify etc didn’t really inspire me to pull up a chair and actively listen. If anything, having every song in the world at my fingertips only made me itchy to hit the skip button and see what else there was. Seinfeld once said “men don’t care what’s on TV, they only care what else is on TV”—that’s Spotify. With vinyl you lower the needle and just commit for the twenty odd minutes it takes to play a side. It’s a cure for that kind of cultural ADD.
Sound wise, there’s nothing close—it puts the music in a different space. There’s some magic about it. I’m not going to argue with the people who want to claim it doesn’t sound as “good” as digital music because they are wrong. By good they mean accurate, they mean if you put a series of zeros and ones into it they will come back out in the same order. Music has nothing to do with that, our brains love inaccuracies and color more than we realize; that’s the human part
Vinyl only compilations have often done a better job of introducing me to new music than the internet. For instance, I’d caught the occasional Yé-yé song and liked what I heard so, a few years ago, I put the compilation album C’est Chic on my Christmas list, now I’m in love with the genre. Similarly a guy in a Portland record store once recommended to me a $10 record called, Guitar Mood (singular I guess) and it was amazing—lots of psychedelic guitar based instrumental tracks from Japan and South America. There’s a lot of music you’re not aware exists and people working in record stores or curating vinyl compilation albums are there to help you
One other thing lost to digital is that a lot of great albums were sequenced to be listened to as A and B sides. Lots of artists would load up the A side with the immediate tracks but often the ones that stayed with you were on the B side. Like Born to Run which kicks off its A side with “Thunder Road” but closes its B side with the ten minute “Jungleland.” Or the Velvet Underground and Nico which lulls you in by starting with “Sunday Morning” before getting to the really out there stuff like “The Black Angel’s Death Song” on the B side. And there’s Brian Eno’s Before and After Science which splits its songs down the middle, uptempo art rock on the A side, ambient stuff on the B side. Basically, If you really loved a record you had a favorite side and, quite often, if you knew that record inside out it was the B side.”
—Daniel Knowles
The Know’s debut EP “wearetheknow” is in stores now. Its limited edition gold vinyl pressing is … well, sold out.
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PHOTO: JOE RUBINSTEIN
