Vinyl: Once and Future Music

I was surprised to read recently that the vinyl analog record is making a comeback in this digital age.

It was in the late 70s in New York City when I first heard an album (I think it was one of the Talking Heads’ LPs) that bragged it had been recorded digitally.  It wasn’t many more years until digital bypassed the old form completely and vinyl records became as unlikely to find in a modern music store as 8-track tapes.

But they’ve always been made, even at their lowest ebb.  And now, with the CD withering, people are playing vinyl records again at home and putting mp3 tracks on their iPod when more portability is required.  The new turntables have USB ports and can be plugged into a computer, perfect for making mp3 tracks. 

The new vinyl records are heavier, with sound reproduced more faithfully.  The records may even turn at 45 rpm rather than 33 1/3, which apparently also improves the quality.

Audiophiles have always preferred the warmer, more real sound of the analog LP to the crisp (brittle?) sound of digital recordings.  CDs have apparently fallen victim to what’s been called “the loudness war” in order to make an impact, and as they get louder, their dynamic range decreases.

I’ve missed the liner notes and the artwork from the old LPs.  It’s just not the same in the smaller CD format, although some artists have tried valiantly, enclosing booklets and posters, tightly folded, inside.

Apparently Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd have started releasing vinyl.  A new release from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, is available as a vinyl LP as well as a CD.  (That unusual collaboration, Led Zep and bluegrass, really sounds good by the way.  Krauss has a beautiful voice and it blends surprisingly well with Plant’s.)

All of this gives me an opportunity to reminisce and wax nostalgic over my own LP collection.  I’ve never got around to moving them over to digital, but now with these new turntables it could get much easier.

Many of us, I’m sure, if we’re of a certain age, will have an LP collection dating back to highschool and college.  In my case, I still have some of the LP’s my mother loved, and that her three boys listened to at the threshold of our teenage years.

In our move to the wilds of northern British Columbia from Washington State when I was eleven years old, my father even saw fit to take up several boxes of fragile 78s, old even then.  Of course to play them we lugged along an ancient wind-up Victrola with steel needles and a sound trumpet.  We were nothing if not completists.  I still have a few albums of those 78s, full of foxtrots and Josh White, 45 years later, somehow gathering them to me though I live now in southern and urban British Columbia.

But it was the 33 1/3 LPs that we played on a small battery operated record player in a log cabin during long nights of 30 below weather outside that I remember well.  After my father passed away in the early 60s, the records helped to mitigate our brand-new condition: what would happen now?

 What happened was we listened to The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (from 1956), and the enthusiasm they pumped into The Rock Island Line and Good Night Irene.  The folk music revival was full upon us, and so we had LPs from The New Christy Minstrels, The Limeliters, and Harry Belafonte at the Greek Theatre in 1963.  Belafonte sang that immortal classic, Zombie Jamboree:

Back to back, belly to belly
I don’t give a damn, I done dead already
Oho back to back, belly to belly
At the Zombie Jamboree

The brothers and I enjoyed chanting that one a lot.

My mother liked an odd assortment of music from My Fair Lady to PDQ Bach to Paul Horn’s Inside.  The latter, especially, of the jazz flutist’s soulful playing inside the echoing acoustics of the Taj Mahal, was a favorite until she died many years later of multiple sclerosis.  It always moved and even, perhaps, spiritually sustained her.

She especially enjoyed Anna Russell, the comedic classical pianist and singer, who seemed to be almost always as out of tune a singer as my mother agreed she herself was.  Another classical comedian, Victor Borge, was also on a LP we listened to often.

Another favorite were the Swingle Singers who won a Grammy in the Sixties for a swinging jazz choir rendering of Bach and baroque composers, and who are still performing today.

If you’re old enough, you may remember how incredibly popular Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass were for a few years.  They were popular with us, too.   I am still the proud owner of A Treasury of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, a multi-album set in a presentation box by The Longines Symphonette Recording Society.  This was a music label owned by the Longines watch company which hawked its wares as kind of a high class LP of the Month Club. 

Of course, as my brothers and I entered our teenage years, what my mother liked became much less important to us.

The Rolling Stones and the Moody Blues, along with the Beatles, began to appear on our little turntable, with Neil Young and Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks not far behind.

We never thought in those days that technology would pass us by — we were modern, after all — although our grandmother talked about having lived from the horse carriage to the moon walk.

Perhaps horse carriages are in our future now as well, given the coming energy crunch.  But I am looking forward to buying my first LP in many years, whatever it turns out to be.

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