A Big Yes and a small no, The TVD First Date

“There are VERY few things I did when I was 5 that I still do now. I still brush my teeth. I still tell my mom I love her. And I still buy vinyl. “Take it Away” on 45 by Paul McCartney was my first. “A Brief History of Amazing Letdowns” on 10″ by Lilys (after quite a search) was my last.”

“Around the time I bought my first, my sister got “Thriller” on 45 and because it was so long the grooves were TINY. And if you even breathed on it, it would skip. My dad said, “I’ve got a song longer than that on 45” and showed us Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which was so long it faded out halfway through on side A and faded BACK IN on side B!

My dad was into building speaker cabinets and he let me hold a speaker that was producing sound before he installed it. I still remember watching the needle tracking on the grooves, my eyes following along the wires to the speaker cradled in my hands. Seeing it move. Feeling the air and the vibrations. Hearing it create MUSIC. It absolutely enthralled me.

People assume I’m into vinyl because I’ve been a hip-hop DJ since the mid ’90s, but they’re wrong. I was already into vinyl long before I was a DJ. The reason? Because vinyl is inherently social. All of my fond memories of vinyl involve other people.

You can’t crowd around a playlist like you can an LP, divvying up the liner notes and the sleeve like it’s the Sunday New York Times, or rolling a cigarette on the jacket of a record while you play it for someone you just met at a show. Even the releases are more social. I have a split 7″ of Tuscadero and Jet Lag—2 different bands pooling their money so they can afford to release a side! That’s amazing! The community aspect of it is beautiful. Digital releases just don’t bring artists together like that.

Now that I’m older and I have released my own records, I have a new appreciation of vinyl that comes from knowing more about it. It’s best to put your loudest tracks earlier on a side and quieter stuff at the end because the groove is moving faster against the needle (due to the physics of the spiral) on the outside, so I pay particular attention to sequencing on other records.

Did Fleetwood Mac really WANT “Songbird” and “Gold Dust Woman” to be at the end of side A and side B on Rumours from a musical standpoint, or did they do it to make the record sound as good and loud as possible? Those early Guided By Voices 7″s are so quiet because the songs are well over the optimum length, and knowing that those guys decided that they were unwilling to shorten the song for the sake of making it louder is inspiring to me. The song IS the most important thing. It can get easy to forget when you are obsessing about mixing and mastering.

My collection would seem funny to a lot of people, because it is mostly obscure underground hip-hop, soul, pre-war blues like Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis, Detroit Techno, a sprinkling of garage rock, and then a bunch of amazing Nashville stuff from the ’60s-’80s that a friend gave to me when he moved back to Memphis to get himself together.

There are some real gems in there like Gary Stewart’s “I’m Home Getting Hammered (While She’s Out Getting Nailed).” I don’t get that excited about things like a first pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or other famous recordings like that. I like really unknown and independent things. And not for any “rock snob” sort of reason. It’s because I’ve put out records. I know how hard it is; how much work and sacrifice it is. So it means a lot to me to put on a record and think, “Nice work, ladies and gentlemen. I see you. I hear you. I know you moved that mountain, and I’m glad you did. It’s making my night.”
—Kevin Kendrick