First Buys of The New Year

Saturday, January 4, 2014

With my $110 worth of gift certificates in my hand I wondered into the music store to hopefully get a few the records I really wanted. However thanks a certain time constraints and the fact that I wasn't able to get to the record store until about half hour they closed things didn't quite work out as I planned, especially with my youngest crying his head off in the car with my wife and my oldest feeling very anxious and pushy.

To say the least the $110 worth of gift certificates went untouched today, and the grand total of my record purchases came out to less than $10. But I did manage to make some pretty unique and also very nice selections in the little time I had.
 

My first selection was The Pretenders Learning to Crawl. In my personal opinion I believe The Pretenders are probably one of the most underrated bands of the 1980s. For the most part there music has always been upbeat, and delivered clearly and articulately, so as to allow you to enjoy the lyrics as well as the melody. This album had some truly great and memorable songs like Middle of The Road, and Back on the Chain Gang, as well as a few other hits. The rest of the album has non-stop great music on it, which makes it a pleasure to listen too. It was my favorite by today.

My second buy is Elvis Presley's, Blue Hawaii. This is one I actually bought for sentimentality since it was one of my mothers favorite albums as a teenager, and served as the center of a humorous story about her and her little brother. Its not a bad album but not one of Elvis's finest, and keep in mind its from the movie soundtrack for Blue Hawaii. The best song on it of course is also one of Elvis's finest "(I) Can't Help Falling in Love (With You)", so in a way the $2 I spent on this is worth it just for that.

Last but not least is Sammy Davis Jr at The Coconut Grove. What a fantastic buy! This is a two record set from as you may guess a live performance at the famous Coconut Grove nightclub in LA. I love the albums with these type of covers because you always know your going to get a truly intimate performance that could only be delivered in those old nightclubs. I'm not going to go into what songs are on it but its traditional Sammy Davis Jr faire. For me personally this album goes best with a quiet dinner at home over a steak, and a good glass of red wine, and with the lights dimed in my dining room its almost like being there.
 

Overall, these are some pretty good selections and I look forward to the year ahead with collecting new records.

By the way if you are reading this on Wordpress I would like you to know that I will be putting this same blog posts on Blogger as well at http://amateurvinylrecordcollector.blogspot.com/. I am will continue to post my blogs here as well since I have readers here in Wordpress, but if you have a hard time viewing my blog due to the backgrounds please head over there.

The Record Wozzy's

My son and I headed down to the basement to play some video games while my wife went to visit next door. I wanted that real video gaming atmosphere, and popped open the my Targus 320 CD case, and flipping through the binder like 4x4 pages finally found something to listen to. 

So I realize I have 320 cd's, and probably 20+ albums in electronic form, and hundreds of miscellaneous single songs here and there electronic form. Then I suddenly realized that I had this huge buzzing in my head about my need to collect vinyl records. 

You see I just have kind of been aimlessly picking up records here and there just to hear that vinyl sound. But I'm not giving myself any direction, which is leading me to the record wozzy's this kind of dizzy feeling about collecting. 

So I have been trying to sort it out mentally. Do I continue to just collect? Do I pick and artist? A genera? An era? I mean don't get me wrong I enjoy the hunt but knee deep in a pile of records at a resale shop or amongst bins at the record store there is this feeling of being overwhelmed, and often times totally forgetting what I'm looking for. 

Anyone else feel this way when they started?

To Old Tech, or Not To Old Tech

The thing about studying and collecting vinyl records that I've noticed about myself is that it has made me a bit philosophical. I mean I'm sitting here wishing I had just grabbed my grandmothers records rather then letting them be given away, or that I had stopped my dad from giving away his records. I am saddened in a way that I just dismissed them all as old technology, replaced at that time by CD's. 

As we fly swiftly into the era of electronically disseminated music, CD's are now becoming the endangered species. That's something that I have now had to stop and think about. I mean sure about 90% of the CDs I own I can listen to on my iPhone whenever I want, there all there thousand of songs, non-stop days worth in the palm of my hand. But the CDs many with their jewel cases gone now, and are stacked in a huge CD case in my home office. I personally have no intention of throwing them away, but at the same time it seems ashamed to let them just sit there. 

Believe it or not, even though they are CDs they still have memories attached to some of them. The music of my era on the recording media of my era. Memories of CD's given to me as gifts, eagerly buying new CD that came out, CDs bought with me on vacation, played on dates, or evenings out with friends, just the memories that some times come attached to the physically tangible portion of the music, on what ever media it may have been at the time. So in a way CD's becoming endangered is a bit sad for me at least.

So late in the evening a couple of nights ago, I got a little bored with the movie I was watching and decided to head on to E-bay to look at a few things. Whatever it was I started looking at changed and I soon found myself checking out 100+ disk CD changers, and even a duel tape deck. As I was adding these items to my watch list and wishing I could buy them right then and there I had to stop myself. "What the heck was I doing?", I asked myself. I wanted to start out collecting vinyl records now all of a sudden I was going to give a home to all outmoded music media? 

The big question is, to really appreciate music should one be willing to try to adopt all medias of it! Should I not necessarily collect CD's, or even cassette tapes but at least give them a way of being appreciated, rather then wasting away in a box or case? It's a long hard question to ask? But I will let you guys know where I take this later.

Baby-Boomer Podcast Gives Great Tips on Vinyl to Younger Collectors.

The last thirty years have been an interesting time in recorded music. We have jumped from vinyl, to tape, to CD, to MP3/iPod. For music lovers there has been a bit of a frustration in this constant changing of media forms in such a short period of time. Yet at the same time though this constant change in a short time has been a great benefit to the vinyl revival we are now seeing. 

You see with the cyclical nature of vinyl re-emerging, and recorded music technology jumping from media form to media form so quickly there is a tremendous opportunity. And what is that opportunity? It's the opportunity to return to an old technology while having a huge portion of the population aware of the technology and its benefits and downfalls, and familiar with both older technology's and the newest technologies simultaneously.  One of the largest groups in the United States that fit this profile is the Baby-Boomers. 

In my quest to discover more about collecting vinyl records I stumbled across a Baby-Boomer Generation focused podcast called Galaxy Moonbeam Night Site. The podcast focuses on good memories in past pop culture that many Baby-Boomer, and even Gen-Xer’s have, and is a light and fun show to listen to overall. But I was particularly happy with the show when they produced an episode in July of 2013 on “The Return Popularity of Vinyl Records”. Here we see how the quick jump in recording technologies combined with a generation that watched it all happen have come together, the Podcast (a technology of the iPod era), talking about the resurgence of vinyl from a generation that used it. Here we see the cycle of things unfold in a way.

But the episode is fantastic, and a great and informative listen for anyone looking to make the jump back to vinyl. The hosts Mike and Smitty give a fantastic crash course into vinyl record basics with insight on buying record players, and records, and how to care for both. The two talk about the subject not only as members of a generation that’s been there, but with a real love for the subject matter. Even as a Gen-Xer who remembers vinyl as part of a not to distant past there where things I even learned from the podcast. 

I definitely suggest listening if you are making the jump back to vinyl too, especially if you don’t have much experience with vinyl. This podcast would be great for a teenager, or 20-something you know of looking to get into vinyl as well since the show provides a lot of really key information that a novice collector could really use. 

Check out the link below to download the podcast via iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/baby-boomer-radio-tv-movies/id671853175?mt=2

This link brings you to their site: 

http://galaxymoonbeamnightsite.blogspot.com/

Record Revelation

So you may be asking yourself why I or anyone would get into collecting vinyl in an era of iPods, and MP3's. My story about collecting vinyl actually starts in 1996. If you remember back to 96' it was an era of Compact Disks, with cassette tapes slowly but surely disappearing, and MP3's on the horizon  but not yet in a transportable format. 

 

I was in my senior year of high school and part of our English 4 class was giving our "Senior Speech". We all got through our speeches based on a subject of our choice, being 17 and 18 year olds you can imagine it was nothing all that deep. Then one guy gave a speech that has captured my attention ever since. Ben, I think his name was gave a speech about why music on vinyl sounded better.

His reasoning was clear and his speech eye opening. "Vinyl, (and keep in mind I'm completely paraphrasing) sounded better, it was truer to the artist voice, and to the sound. CD's lost a lot of that due to digitalization and post-production, in an attempt to give a clean recording they lost the human elements. Those little mistakes and out of tone idiosyncrasy's indicative of live music are produced out. Oh, and you could get new stuff on vinyl too!". 

After that I gave collecting records a lot of thought, but just never got into it. Especially in a world of CD's and iPods coming to us quickly. 

Now, I was (and am) not a novice to the world of records. By parents had a collection with some good records including a 40's set that I loved, and as a small child I had a portable 45' record player and a stack of kids records (in a yellow Saturday Night Fever box) both are long gone. So I have an understanding of the world of vinyl and the delicacy of records, needles, grooves, and speeds. But what I don't know much about is collectibility, or even what sounds the best. Or to put it another way what records are essential to a record collector, what are those mind blowing records that really make you go "Wow, this what it SHOULD sound like!". 

So here I am 17 years after that speech, and starting to delve into the world of vinyl records.