On Playing Old LP’s
I started out buying used books long ago because we were home-schooling our girls. We needed a lot of books on a limited budget. I quickly realized that ‘settling for’ used books stretched my own book-buying dollar significantly, resulting in seriously over-crowded bookshelves.
My favorite discovery about used books is the personality embedded in them: The dedications inked long ago to a husband or wife, a child or grand-child, for anniversary or Christmas or birthday. Underlines and notations. Stains from beverages. Library histories. I can easily imagine this other person in another time and place opening their book for the first time, turning the pages, smiling or laughing or frowning or even crying, getting a pen to highlight a favorite passage. Because they have left a trail, a faint imprint of their presence. Someone who lived and breathed and touched the same pages I am turning.
For decades, I have had a couple of boxes of old LP’s that I shuffled from place to place in the garage, unwilling to let go of a few musical fragments of my past. Finally, after much procrastinating, I purchased a turntable this year: that technology that refuses to die. This was after I had picked up two classic albums a couple of months ago in a consignment store: Carol King’s ‘Tapestry’ and James Taylor’s 1976 Greatest Hits: volume 1. These albums share one song that has a special place in our family history. Karen and I sang ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ at our wedding in 1981. Truly, I had to be in love to try to sing at my own wedding, and Karen had to be equally infatuated to risk joining her lovely voice in a duet with me. I have mostly avoided singing in public since then.
Today, I got out the James Taylor album. Playing a used LP is not unlike reading a used book. There is evidence of someone before. The album cover is faded, chipped. Even with careful cleaning, that old vinyl snaps and crackles as the needle makes its way down the groove. It warbles just a tiny bit because the record is not quite as flat as it was when it came off the press. There has been a skip or two as I have listened. Which is both annoying and amusing. In spite of modern components, the listening experience is not the crystal clear, digital remastered version from iTunes.
This record has been played. Perhaps many times. Which means that someone, somewhere got a lot of joy out of the same songs that I am enjoying right now. They held the album cover, read the liner notes, maybe even sang ‘You’ve Got A Friend’ to that special someone in their life while the album played. In faded ink in the lower left corner of the back cover is a name. H. Dimas, wherever you are, thanks for passing on the music.
