“For most of my life, vinyl records seemed as old and foreign as typewriters and telegrams.”
“The mere term “vinyl record” conjured up the dank mustiness of my grandparents’ basement, where they stored a few records and eight tracks amongst a hoard of 1900s furniture and knick knacks. When I got my first jobs in high school, vinyl didn’t even cross my mind. I bought CDs like they were going out of style. Thank God that they eventually did…
The first vinyl record I ever bought was a seven-inch record by Navies–a DC post punk band that blew my mind for a crowd of about a dozen people in Ventura, CA. I was in 9th grade, I bought the vinyl because they were out of CDs, and a couple of years went by before I even played the record for the first time at a friend’s house. He showed me why the 45 rpm seven-inch sounded like dinosaurs when I played it at the wrong speed.
Once I got past that confusion, the medium gripped me. I could hear the music through the speakers and straight off the needle, it was like an amplified hot spring of music… this was how music ought to be communicated. With CDs, it was like I’d drank water out of those terrible opaque plastic jugs all my life, ones that sat in the sun for a few weeks, and then suddenly someone handed me a chilled glass bottle.
Once I got out of school, I made friends with people with record players. LA in the mid-2000s had become a place where people drive around listening to first 30 seconds of all the hot tracks from that week. This musical ADD drove me nuts.
But with my record-collecting friends, we could sit down and absorb entire albums, from classics like Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart and Thriller by Michael Jackson, to deep left-field albums like Autechre’s Quaristice. It’s a much more rewarding immersion into the music–and a deeper connection to the artist–when you spin vinyl and really pay attention to full albums.
I’ve now got a modest collection of my own, one of my favorites being an old pressing of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, which my mom kept in an attic for 30 years. (It still plays great, and the inserts have become posters all around my house).
Living in Nashville, I’ve picked up a lot of amazing, limited-run records by current bands–great music that deserves way more recognition: OGG, Deluxin, Majestico, to name a few. And of course fat electronic records sound even better on vinyl–Tobacco’s Fucked Up Friends goes for $150 on Ebay, but I can never bring myself to get rid of it.
—Kevin Kilpatrick
Bad Cop’S new (free!) three song EP called “Wish You Well … and Goodbye” is available Tuesday, October 28th via Jeffery Drag Records.
