VINYL

I decided to start converting my LPs to my hard drive.

For the past decade I have neglected my vinyl records, because I had a shitty record player, the all-in-one type that came attached to a double-cassette player and a cheesy tuner. Those players suck. They sound like caca. They damage your records when you play them. Over the years, if I remembered to do so, I would buy a CD copy of any album I owned on vinyl, but I own a lot of records-- there isn't enough time to go out and re-stock my collection.

Last year, The Gypsy sold me a Technics turntable for 50 bones. Now this is a real turntable-- direct drive, automated needle, high fidelity sound... Not only did I instantly hook it up to my receiver, but I actually started buying vinyl again. You see, a few blocks away from my humble abode is a record shop called Atomic Records, and they rule. Of course, the really good stuff is horribly overpriced, but luckily I own most of that stuff already.

I selected six songs from my collection to commit to the computer, as a test run. It will take up a lot of space on my drive after a while, so I want to make sure I can get the songs to sound the way I want them to sound. Then, when I have burned them to CD, I can convert each song to MP3 and delete the WAV files.

The six songs were:

Patti Smith, "Because The Night", "Gloria" and "Rock & Roll Nigger"...

ELO, "New World Rising" and Blondie, "11:59"-- both on 45...

Prince, "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" from Sign O' The Times.

These songs have been swimming in my head lately, and they deserve to be on CD so I can rock them in my ride.

Driving around with the six songs burned onto a CD, I couldn't believe how great they sounded. Snaps, crackles and pops aside, these records sound better than CDs-- which is not to disparage the digital format. These records were mixed with vinyl in mind, so the respective engineers no doubt crafted the mixes to expand dynamically when played on a quality turntable.

I find that records recorded with a digital playback format in mind are mixed to expand dynamically in a CD player, and they sound good because of that deliberate choice to play to digital's strengths. For example, all rap records made after 1995 sound awesome on CD, due to the heavy reliance on digital technology used in making the records.

But when you've got a record like Fun Boy Three's debut on vinyl, the CD version might sound good... but the vinyl sounds better.

I can tune out the scratches and the pops, provided that they are not deep in the groove. If it is ambient and barely noticeable, I can ignore it. In fact, there is a familiarity in hearing the soft crackling, like an old friend is sitting in my room with me, eating potato chips. It makes me feel good, it brings me back to sunless days spent inside my room, poring over album jackets and sleeves, analyzing lyrics, marvelling at the artwork and reading the extensive liner notes, watching the black circle spin like the passage of time, in a spiral, 'pataphysically repeating over itself, like a witch's incantation or a warlock's recital...

Some of my records are worth a lot of money. Others are worthless, as works of art or as collectibles. Some of them are warped beyond repair, while others are in pristine condition. I even own a few albums that-- believe it or not-- have never been opened!

Half of the records I currently own I received from a woman I met about twelve years ago. I was 19, she was 42. She lived in a studio apartment on the 14th floor of a high rise on Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica. The story of how I met her is a long, humorous one that I'll cut for time: she was a friend of Paulie's whom I started a phone relationship with, and soon I was over at her place, having a May-December romance and being instructed in the ways of pleasure.

After each session (that's all I could really call them), she would send me home with as many books and records as I could carry in my arms. I asked her why she was giving it all up, and she would tell me that she wanted to "start over again"... I told her she could fetch big dollars for her collectibles, and she didn't care.

She was a depressed woman, who had lived fast and hard in her youth. She was a faded beauty, who found her grip on reality slipping as her looks succumbed to the ravages of time, alcohol, and sex. She confided to me that she'd had three abortions in her life, and that she didn't mind them at the time but now she regretted them. She told me I reminded her of the Cuban lover she'd had when she was 25, a man who impregnated her accidentally. Of course, his child was one of the aborts, and she told me that she wished she had never done that, because she knew the child would have been beautiful...

These sentiments scared me. All I was looking for was a good time, not boozy recollections of a woman past her prime. I wanted to have sympathy, but what she wanted was a second chance, and I couldn't give that to her even if I tried.

I broke it off, and she called me for three straight months non-stop, until Paulie and I finally moved out of North Hollywood and into Sherman Oaks.

She was a writer, and I wonder if she ever got that non-fiction book about Los Angeles finished. Alas, I wouldn't know if she did, because she said she was going to write it pseudonymously. I wonder if she's still there, in that rent-controlled studio space on the 14th floor, overlooking the beach and the ocean, the waves of the Pacific...

Because of her, I own ten Bob Dylan records (the classic ones), five Roxy Music albums, a slew of New Wave titles, an original mono pressing of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, countless 45s, and quite a number of books on any number of topics, including some poetry volumes and photograph anthologies.

I bought vinyl before and after her, but I still recall which ones were hers. They are the ones that are nearly perfect in their packaging; the titles are the ones that I lusted after for years before I met her.

She gave them to me, even though I refused. I'm glad that she insisted, because otherwise I might have forgotten about that short chapter in my life. Playing some of these vinyl records reminds me of her. She taught me a lot of things in the bedroom. She made me feel like a sex object for the first time in my life, and it wasn't a bad thing. It increased my poor self-esteem, it gave me perspective... and it made me sad.

How many women will end up like her, drinking wine out of ceramic bowls because they are too tired to go out and buy wine glasses? How many women like her will latch onto a young man like myself so desperately that it sends them running in a beeline out of their abode? How many women will wind up relying on their sexual prowess to compensate for the loss of their external beauty?

I sat in my apartment and smoked a cigarette, and thought about her as I was converting the Patti Smith songs-- those were her albums also. She gave me an education, in music, poetry, sex, and life. Koo koo kachoo, Mrs. Robinson...

Knowing how my life is, I will probably run into her again sometime in the near future. I hope she found a reason to keep going on, because Lord knows I wasn't the reason at all. I would've destroyed her, with my narcissism, with my insolent youth, with my arrogance and detachment...

In my mind, she is vinyl-- she was in vogue for a long time, and then she became obsolete, and she became devalued. And, like vinyl, I still thought she sounded great, even if she didn't believe it herself.

I think the next song to bounce to my hard drive will be "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart.

Long live vinyl. Vinyl forever and ever.