“The worst record player money could buy changed my life.”
“I was given my Fisher-Price record player sometime around the age of five, and somehow never received the bulletin that it could be used to listen to music. Instead, I was content to listen to my Batman album several thousand times (a scintillating caper in which Batman slowed his heart-rate down just enough to fool a diabolical scientist into believing he was dead).
If I wanted to listen to music, all I had to do was leave my bedroom, make my way downstairs, and sure enough beautiful sounds would be wafting through the house—my parents had an extensive vinyl collection, and on any given night you could depend on the living room speakers to be pumping out a comforting mix of classical music, Broadway show tunes, and ’60s rock-and-roll.
By the time I was half-way through elementary school, good ol’ Fishy was collecting dust. Yet, in a telling display of what would prove to be a lifelong habit of resisting even the most minor change in my environment, I could never bring myself to banish him to the shadowy depths of my closet. He sat above my bedroom radiator for years, nestled between a stack of Hardy Boys detective novels…waiting.
On a perfectly ordinary afternoon, my mother knocked on my bedroom door, interrupted my seventh grade math homework, and proceeded to alter the shape of my soul. She’d heard that I was trying out for the school musical (“Bye Bye Birdie”—I was nervous as hell) and she had an idea for a song I might want to sing at the audition.
I looked skeptically at the album cover she was holding. A friendly looking fellow with glasses was smiling at me. I liked that he had glasses—I’d been wearing glasses since second grade, and was at an age where I was beginning to suspect that they were responsible for pretty much everything that was wrong with my life. I turned to Fishy. We stared at each other. Would he even turn on? He stared back at me implacably. “It’s time, little dude,” he seemed to whisper.
The sound that crackled to life would have made a seasoned audiophile break out into hives. But I can promise you that Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be The Day” will never sound finer to my ears than it did warbling out of Fishy while I played it over and over and over, singing along tentatively at first, then louder, fiercer, jumping around my room, oh this is happiness, hope, everything. I had something I’d never had before.
A favorite song.
A month ago, my wife bought me a record player. It’s the first one I’ve owned since Fishy. It’s silver and shiny and I’m in love with it and I have already found myself spiraling happily into what I’m certain is obsession. Songs I’ll one day fall in love with wait quietly within the wax for me, they’re out there right now, they always will be. I have my mother to thank for that lesson. And I have Fishy to thank—for his patience.”
—Spencer Berger, Auditorium
