“My parents had a Magnovox table top stereo/ phonograph that sat in the foyer of our modest, single-family home, facing out toward the living room where, during the holidays, the Christmas tree stood. Each year on Christmas morning, they would make my sister and me wait down the hall in our bedrooms, brimming with excitement, while they performed their morning rituals and got everything ready for the grand unveiling.”
“When everything was in place, they would call to us and we would rush up to the starting lines, where our bedrooms met the hallway. My dad would turn on the stereo, place a record on the turntable (“On Your Marks!”), start the motor (“Get Set!”), and then place the needle on said record (“Go!”).
Before the first note of A Chipmunk Christmas was finished sounding from the speaker box, we would bolt from our door frames like horses out of the starting gates, down the hall, around the corner, and into the living room, where Santa’s offerings awaited. As we tore through the gift wrap, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore serenaded us from that large wooden box with all those knobs and moving parts that would take me years to fully understand, on a format that, even in the early 1980s, was already outdated: the vinyl record.
The more I think about it, the more I’m surprised at just how much of my childhood I can remember simply by thinking of vinyl records: listening to Disney 45s on my Play School turntable; seeing what happened to my sister’s copy of Men At Work’s Business as Usual when left out to bake in the sun for hours; listening to my aunt Helen’s 45 of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto” over and over again at my grandparent’s house when we would visit; The Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Disney Haunted House and “Monster Mash” at Halloween; hearing AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” for the first time on the jukebox at my swim club one summer.
While all of these moments are ones that I hold near and dear to my heart, none of them answer the question at hand: why, when given so many ways to enjoy music these days, is the most antiquated format the one that I prefer the most?
In high school, that old Magnovox, which once our family purchased a compact disc player had been banished to our basement to collect dust, found its way into my bedroom. I remember one afternoon after school, I went to Ground Zero, a local record store, and picked up a copy of Shellac’s At Action Park, took it home and threw it on. From the opening chords of “My Black Ass,” it hit me like a ton of bricks. From that moment on, I was hooked.
Maybe it was because I had been accustomed to listening to music on cassette tapes on my tiny (by comparison) Sony boombox and when I cranked that Magnavox up full blast and sat three feet in front of it, it was the loudest, most powerful fucking thing I’d ever heard.
Maybe it was the ritual of removing the record from the packaging, feeling the static electricity on my fingers; the tactile experience of handling a record? Maybe it was knowing that the information I was hearing was etched into the grooves of something material that is then read by a needle, transformed into electricity, transmitted to a set of speakers and reborn into the physical world as sonic energy? I’ve contemplated all of these things and I realize that, while these are all things that I love about listening to vinyl, none of them are the one thing I love the most.
So, what is that one thing then? It wasn’t until I started making records that I figured out exactly what it was. For those of you who have never made one, the process involves a lot of listening to the same material over and over and over again. It is a joyful repetition of sound waves, albeit tedious. It is easy to forget, after repeated listens, what it is you’re actually listening for. Over the course of making our newest record The Astronaut, I’ve probably listened to it a thousand times. Easily.
It wasn’t until when, late one night over the holidays with a group of close friends, I put the vinyl test pressing on my turntable and cued it up that I actually heard it the way it was meant to be heard. It was like hearing it for the first time all over again. It was just fantastic. It sounded like an album should sound: big and warm and full of energy. There are a lot of opinions out there as to why this is, but here’s one thing all of us here can agree on: it just sounds better. It just makes my ears come alive in a way that a cassette tape never did, in a way a compact disc never does, and in a way a digital file couldn’t do if it tried (and it tries very, very hard). This, my friends, is why I love vinyl.
Times change. People change. Lovers come and go.
Vinyl is forever.”
—Scott Carney
Wax Fang’s The Astronaut, a space-rock opera in three movements, is on store shelves now. On vinyl.
