Author Archives: Special to TVD

“In 1969, in Montreal, my father purchased a Lenco L75 turntable and a Sony Amp (STR 6050). Sound quality has always been of the upmost importance to my Dad, whether he was at one of my shows critiquing the sound-man, or choosing the best speakers or headphones for listening to music. The turntable was set up in the living room of my childhood home in Calgary and my Dad more than likely told me not to touch it. Both of us vaguely remember a time when I was around four that he showed me how to play a record but it turned into a scratchy noisy experience and that was the end of that!”

“While my Dad was the sound quality expert, my mom had the music collection. Nancy Sinatra records, The Jackson Five’s ABC, a favourite was Elton John’s 2 record set of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. On my mom’s particular copy, the song “Bennie And The Jets” had a certain point where it would skip because the record was scratched—I still think of when I listen to the song.

One of my favourite memories is of a show I played where a fan brought a gift for me and it was a gorgeous vinyl record of Judy Garland’s Collectors Items. I don’t have a record player so I still have yet to listen to it, but it’s one of my most treasured gifts!

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“I’m alphabetizing my record collection.”

“This means monopolizing the living room floor with stacks laid out in a chaotic miniature skyline, the urban planning of a madwoman. A bowl of popcorn, handwritten sticky labels and a Sharpie populate the streets of this makeshift megalopolis. Sweet men chatting on the sofa tip-toe through my record heaps when making trips to the kitchen for more snacks. It feels familiar, ritualistic, and focused… all that vinyl embodies for me.

This reorganization is shaping up to be a long night. Would filing by genre be the superior formula? Too late now. I’ve painted myself into a corner, stranded in the middle of a township I rashly built in the spent embers of a Friday dusk. Taking each album into my hands, I consider its origin. Time capsules like these recall the vanities of adolescence, the giddiness of long-lost intoxications and the creak of derailed lust. They reanimate ideas hidden away in storage.

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“Listening to vinyl has become “holy” ritual, a personal passion, and even a part of my profession.”

“Touring around America, I have been able to listen to vinyl in various environments on many different systems. When the right environment, a good stereo, and the perfect record all come together, it’s like time stops. I’m forced to put aside what I’m doing, be in the moment, and just listen. George Jones and Hank Williams on a Silvertone in Joshua Tree, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones through an RCA console in Austin, Clyde Murphy (The Gospel Singing Coal Miner) on a Califone in West Virginia. These experiences, and many of my most profound music listening experiences, have centered around vinyl.

My earliest memories of vinyl are from my childhood, when my mom would play records from her collection on Sunday mornings. I would wake up those Sunday mornings to Jazz or Classical music coming from our living room. The sounds of artists like Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz, or composers like Bach and Dvořák would fill our home.

My interest in music started as early as I can remember, and I recall laying on our living room floor and listening with curiosity while pouring over the artwork of these records. Though I grew up in the Bible Belt of Tulsa, Oklahoma, we were not a particularly religious family. But through this weekly Sunday morning ritual, I began to associate vinyl with a holy day, as something special. While many people were sitting in church, we were listening to records. And these listening experiences became to me “holy” ritual, a ritual that has continued on for me into my adult years, as vinyl developed into a personal passion, and even a part of my profession.

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“…Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself has this upbeat sort of charm to it, but dives into this murky, almost oceanic, orchestral thing he does with his loops. The recordings are so honest, that you can hear the clicking as he builds the loops at the beginning of some of the songs. He has this ability to jump from a classical violinist to a foot-stomping fiddle player, all the while staying classy as all hell.”

“Since it’s release, I’ve spent a lot of time with this album. The crispness is a sound that wanted to emulate at some on The Rattling Arcade, and I feel we’ve touched on it with “Steady Loaded People,” but especially in the single “Way of the Future,” recorded in the same session.

Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House is one of those albums that for me, changed my entire outlook on music. The songs are so strange, but still have this buried accessibility. The vagueness of the lyricism acts like free-agents, allowing the terms to stick in the mind, allowing the listener to paint their own portrait in their mind. I feel that when songs are specific as to meaning or narrative, they lose an amount of adoptability to the listener as far as ownership. Yellow House has so many dark undertones that fill out the album.

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“When I was 19 I was a student at the New School and I was living and working at the Marlton Hotel, an old Greenwich Village SRO on 8th Street that was infamous for (among other things) having been the place where Valerie Solanas lived when she shot Warhol. The Village had already changed a lot when I got there, but still we had a few old-timers from the factory days hanging around at the Marlton, mostly decomposing on their feet. I lived on the second floor and had one window with a heavy-duty burglar gate on it that looked out onto a side alley with the next building six feet away. When I moved in, my girlfriend gave me a fern that I hung from the burglar bars. It was dead in a month. As fall wore down into winter and the days got shorter it felt like I was living at the bottom of a stagnant pond silting over from the top down.”

“We broke up that winter. I was in love with this girl–we’d known each other since high school and we both moved from California to NYC at the same time–but I fucked it up bad. She was uptown having an IVY league experience at Barnard while I was living very, very downtown. She was a genius scholar, a good writer, and MTV-gorgeous. I was new in town, zealous, looking for beatnik adventures. This 30-year-old Argentine fashion designer who lived across the hall took an interest in me and I got all wrapped up. I cheated on my hometown girl. I was just mannish enough to come clean, but in the most pitiful whimpering way you can imagine. That was the end of all that.

So a bad fall moldered into a bad winter, and I was digging way down into a self-flagellating depression that was amplified by everything about my living situation. The room was so small I put my mattress underneath the bed-frame and laid cardboard over the springs so I would have a space to work, prepare food, and for the beat-to-shit thrift-store turntable I dragged with me across the country. The only place to sit was a ramshackle leather office chair I found on the street that I leaned up in a corner beside the window cause it was missing a wheel and would tip over anywhere else. I would just sit there all night listening to Leonard Cohen Isle of Wight, smoking out the window in my dirty salvation-army coat, pretending to read, but really just staring.

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“I didn’t listen to vinyl when I was growing up. I listened to the Beatles on cassette in my Dad’s car. I listened to Jimi Hendrix on CD in my room for hours trying to learn how to play guitar. Then when I was about 16 my friend showed up at my house with a copy of The Police, The Singles on vinyl that he had bought at a garage sale for a dollar. He knew I was a big fan of Sting and The Police, and he just handed it to me and said, ‘Check this out, it’s a REAL album!’ In my head I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard about these.'”

“We took it over to my grandfather’s house (the only person we knew who had a record player) and cranked it up. His 1950s California ranch-style home had a speaker in every room; when the drums kicked in on “Roxanne” I felt like I got punched in the chest. The sound had this richness and texture I had never heard before…I fell in love right away.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I got my own turntable and started buying vinyl of my own. I bought a fresh new copy of OK Computer (one my favourite albums of all time), but otherwise it was all thrift store finds: Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, Pink Floyd The Wall, Tom Petty, some Bjork, some Tom Waits stuff.

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