Spitball Army

The last several years have revealed a resurgence of interest in music delivered via the 12-inch, black vinyl, needle-in-the-groove, turn-over-the-platter-midway format.  Not that there have been huge numbers of vinyl records being sold.  They have only been huge in a relative sense, and with the sales of the dominant compact disc format on a steady decline, any jump in sales within the music industry looks significant.

I used to have a voracious vinyl habit, back when I lived in Massachusetts.  There were several great places to find vinyl records of both new and older recordings.  But that was 25 years ago.  When I went to Cambridge last Fall, I ran across only one store that had a vinyl selection worth spending an idle afternoon browsing through, and I did not spend more than half an hour doing so.

The store, In Your Ear, occupies a basement on Mt. Auburn street, right near the heart of Harvard Square.  There was so much used vinyl – multiple copies of many titles, and what seemed like endless rows of classical music – that I was overwhelmed.  The two guys working the store seemed overwhelmed, too, wedged in behind a small sales counter that was piled high with boxes of new vinyl arrivals.  Even more boxes full of records were piled around the counter on the floor, creating a sort of retaining wall leading toward the door and the dank stairway that led up to the bricked sidewalk.  My lasting image of them performing the Sisyphean task of examining the constantly-arriving used records that continued to pile up, stuck at a small desk in a dark corner, hunched over their work like a pair of Bob Cratchits, is admittedly romantic, but not far from the truth.  Only a person of average or less-than-average width could maneuver the narrow path through the chest-high racks of vinyl records that had, most likely, belonged to college-age spendthrifts like me at one time.

Reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running recently, I gasped while reading a passage describing his vinyl obsession and his experiences – so similar to mine – while entertaining that obsession in the Boston area:

My time at Harvard was over at the end of June, which meant the end of my stay in Cambridge.  (Farewell, Sam Adams draft beer!  Good-bye, Dunkin’ Donuts!)  I gathered all my luggage together and returned to Japan at the beginning of July.  What were the main things I did while in Cambridge?  Basically, I confess, I bought a ton of LPs.  In the Boston area there are still a lot of high-quality used record stores.  When I had the time I also checked out record stores in New York and Maine.  Seventy percent of the records I bought were jazz, the rest classical, plus a few rock records.  I’m a very (or perhaps I should say extremely) enthusiastic record collector.  Shipping all these records back to Japan was no mean feat.

I’m not really sure how many records I have in my home right now.  I’ve never counted them, and it’s too scary to try.  Ever since I was fifteen I’ve bought a huge number of records, and gotten rid of a huge number.  The turnover is so fast I can’t keep track of the total.  They come, they go.  But the total number of records is most definitely increasing.  The number, though, is not the issue.  If somebody asks me how many records I have, all I can say is, “Seems like I have a whole lot.  But still not enough.”

In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, a rich man who’s also a well-known polo player, says, “I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable, but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.”  Not to brag, but I’m doing the same thing.  Whenever I find a quality LP recording of a piece I have on CD, I don’t hesitate to sell the CD and buy the LP.  And when I find a better-quality recording, something closer to the original, I don’t hesitate to trade in the old LP for a new one.  It takes a lot of time to pursue this, not to mention a considerable investment of cash.  Most people would, I am pretty sure, label me obsessed.