The Greatest Three Seconds of Silence in the Universe

I bought a turntable this weekend! I don't know what it says about my life, but this is easily the most exciting thing I've done in a while.

I've been meaning to buy one for a long time, and now and again I'd stop in at various secondhand electronics stores looking for a good used one, but I could never find one that wasn't outrageously expensive given its condition. Apparently the hipsters are digging vinyl now, which I guess is driving up the cost of "vintage" turntables. I finally figured that function mattered more than form, and decided to just buy a new one. You can now get turntables with USB connectors and audio-editing software for digitizing vinyl records, which I thought was a nifty idea, so I went for one of those.

Now, I haven't actually owned any vinyl in nearly 20 years. You may have heard the sad, sad tale of how my entire collection--well over 300 LPs--was stolen from my apartment when I lived in Camden, NJ in the late '80s, a psychic wound from which I'll never recover. Since vinyl was putatively moribund at the time, I switched to buying cassettes (possibly the worst medium ever concocted for transmitting sound) and eventually, with deep reluctance, CDs. (Over the years I've come to a grudging accord with CDs, but my experience of them will forever be colored by the first one I bought: 10,000 Maniacs' In My Tribe. I remember bemusedly staring at my speakers as I listened to it, trying to figure out what was wrong. It sounded airless and cold, like each band member had been hermetically sealed in plastic during recording. And that possibly the recording had been done on the space station from 2001.) But I've been looking forward to the day when I could start amassing a collection again.

I've read that some bands are now forgoing CDs altogether, and releasing their new material on vinyl along with a code that allows the buyer to download the record in digital form as well. May I say that I am kind of in love with this idea? It's absolutely the best of both worlds, and I plan to buy all my new music in that form if it's available. (May I also take a moment to delight, as others have, in the fact that it appears vinyl records will outlive CDs after all, and the sweet, sweet irony therein?) But for the time being, all I really want to do is haunt every record store in Portland and sort through the bins of used LPs.

In fact, after setting up my new turntable, I immediately made a beeline for Everyday Music, which, along with Music Millennium, is where I generally do most of my shopping. I had $20 in cash on me and I made a deal with myself not to spend more than that, but considering that the average cost of a used vinyl record seems to be about two to six dollars, I figured I could get five or six albums with that. I started flipping through the stacks, and instantly I was flooded with memories of the endless hours I'd spent doing the exact same thing as a teenager. Just the sensation in my hands as I held the upper corners of the records and flipped them forward one after another made me weirdly happy. Real records!

The first thing I came across that I wanted was the Allman Brothers Band's At Fillmore East. Ooooh, how long has it been since I've heard "Stormy Monday"? Gregg Allman can sing the blues like no other white dude, and his brother Duane was one of the few guitarists who could make a ten-minute jam seem too short. Alas, it was new and not used--and "audiophile quality" at that--and would have taken all of the money I had to spend. I was too excited about leaving with an armful of records, so I moved on.

I made it up to "H" before I reached my spending limit, and here's what I walked away with:

-The Association, Greatest Hits. I've recently become interested in baroque pop--in fact I'm listening to Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra as I write this--and someone recommended the Association as worth checking out. I know their big radio hits--"Cherish", "Never My Love", etc.--but I'm looking forward to digging a bit deeper into their catalog.

The Bangles, All Over the Place. This is one that I used to own. The tale of the Bangles is a sad but all-too-typical tale: this, their first album, was a flop, and after it flopped their record company gave them a makeover (by putting them in garish outfits that were hideous even by 1980s standards, which is really saying something), pushing Susanna Hoffs as the main focus onstage and onscreen, and "polishing" (read: crapping synthesizers all over) their sound. I hate everything the Bangles did post-makeover, but I love this record. It's a great hybrid of garage rock and jangle pop, and would be worth buying even if it only contained their dreamily sublime cover of Katrina and the Waves' "Going Down to Liverpool".

Blondie, Eat to the Beat. Another one from the old collection, and probably my favorite Blondie album. "Dreaming" is such an incredible pop song, and--speaking of dreamily sublime--"Shayla" still kills me every time I hear it. I'm so glad to have this album again.

Ellen Foley, Nightout. Foley was known, if she was known at all, as a musical foil to the likes of Meat Loaf and Ian Hunter rather than for her own work. I've never heard this record but I've always thought she had one of the most amazing voices in rock. More on that in a future post.

Heart, Dreamboat Annie. The Heart that I knew growing up was the '80s Heart, with their gross power ballads and videos that used camera tricks in a vain and sad attempt to hide Ann Wilson's weight. Classic rock radio played their earlier hits from the '70s, of course, but it was impossible to extricate that past from the then-present, and...well, long story short, I never liked Heart. Then one day, several years ago, I was at a vintage clothing store in Berkeley and I heard a beautiful song playing. I asked what it was, and turns out it was the title track to Dreamboat Annie, their 1976 debut. I've had a mental note ever since to pick it up when I got the chance. This was the record I put on when I got home, and I must say it makes a perfect accompaniment to an autumn afternoon in the Northwest.

I never realized how much I missed the ritual of putting on a vinyl record. Pulling the sleeve out of the cover, slipping the record out of the sleeve and balancing it with my thumb on the edge and fingers on the label, slipping it over the spindle....

And then, lifting the needle. Hearing it drop with that deeply satisfying ka-thunk, followed by the greatest three seconds of silence in the universe. The silence in which I wait, electric with anticipation, for my soul to be filled with real music once again.

The Pros and Cons of MP3ing

My commute to work is not terribly long: it’s a 10-minute walk from my house to the MAX station, a 10-minute ride on MAX, and then another 10-minute walk to work. Add in a few minutes’ waiting time for the train, and it takes me about 35 minutes all told to get to work. So, not terribly long. Still, it’s nice to be able to listen to music on the way, especially if the weather’s really crappy and I decide to take the bus instead, which means less walking but usually more waiting, since the buses always seem to be running late.

I have a portable CD player, but it has a tendency—a very, very strong tendency—to skip a lot, especially if I do anything that involves any sort of motion. So last Christmas, I asked for and received an MP3 player. Notice I said “MP3 player” and not “iPod”. I specifically did not want an iPod, not only because they, like Macs, cost significantly more than anybody else’s products, but because those annoying commercials for Mac make me never want to buy anything from Apple. They also make me want to punch that goddamned scruffy-faced hipster pitchman in the nuts. But I digress.

Because of the whole skipping issue with the CD player, I went for a flash-based player rather than a disk-based one, which means no skipping but also a lot less space. My Sansa e260 only has 4 megabytes of memory, but since I have no intention of being one of those people who store their entire music libraries on their players, that’s fine. The Sansa is also black, and has black wires and earbuds (gross word), so when I see everybody—frakking everybody—else with their white iPods, I get to feel like less of a sheep.

For some reason it took me a while to get around to loading it up, but it’s about half full now. My original intention was to fill half of it with music I already owned, and the other half with downloaded stuff. I’m still feeling uneasy about the whole downloading thing, though. I mean, I clung to buying LPs well after their demise became a fait accompli, and moved to CDs only reluctantly. I still miss the more substantial…thingness of the LP. And downloaded albums have no thingness at all. I did, however, recently download my first album, so I could see how I felt about it. And then I immediately burned it to CD. (By the way, it was Lady Sovereign’s Public Warning. Highly recommended.)

The wonder of the MP3 player is, of course, its size. Mine slips easily into my pocket. And when you slip those earbuds in, you barely notice they’re there. The other day after work I went downtown to do some browsing at Powell’s (and may I just say that having the largest independent bookstore in the world at my disposal has to be one of the top five things about living in Portland). It had been sunny most of the day, but towards the late afternoon clouds rolled in from the west, and as my train crawled over the Steel Bridge, a light rain started to fall. My player was kicking Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. When I got off the train I flipped my hood up, and it was weird…all of a sudden, I felt like PJ Harvey was inside my head. Walking down the rain-slicked streets of downtown Portland, I felt like I was in a movie, with “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” as my soundtrack. And then, as I waiting to cross Burnside Street, who should walk right by me but Gus Van Sant. It was, like, this perfect Portland moment.

If there’s a downside to portable music, it’s that I tend to get very…involved with my music. It leads me to forget sometimes that I am, in fact, in public, where air drumming is more likely to be identified as mental illness. It can occasionally even be dangerous, like yesterday when I was walking home: I was listening to Sahara Hotnights, and I always get very hepped up at the end of “Only The Fakes Survive”, with its repeated chorus with the gang vocal. I love a good gang vocal, especially a girl gang one. “Aren’t you getting sick of being so polite?” ask the ladies. Yes, goddamit, I think, I AM getting sick of being so polite! And in my rocking-out, sick-of-being-so-polite state, I very nearly walked into an SUV that was backing out of a driveway. I guess I’ll have to learn to pay a bit more attention.