Author Archives: Special to TVD

The Brummies,
The TVD First Date

“Vinyl is a ritual. It’s a smell. It’s warmth and nostalgia wrapped in a tangible package. Something you can hold in your hands and be transported anywhere—any point in time, any period of your life.”

“My earliest memories of vinyl will always be waking up at my Mawmaw’s and going to yard sales with her looking for old albums. Flipping through the dust and deterioration, hit with the scent of bygone decades, enveloped in those weathered covers of artists I’d never heard of stacked out in someone’s front yard. Or in my dad’s workshop where George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn hung without fail watching over him on the walls, singing their heart-wrenchingly genuine sort of country as he worked.

My own collection began with what was to become my favorite record: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’ Whipped Cream & Other Delights. I’ll never forget the day I first saw it. The back of some thrift store in Birmingham, and of course a beautiful woman covered in whipped cream caught my eye. Looking out at me mischievously with her finger in her mouth from the wooden bins.

I loved the production and arrangements, the melodies and overall feel of that record so much. Now it’s one of the most parodied album covers of all time—Sweet Cream, Sour Cream, Clam Dip, Spaghetti Sauce and all the other delights. I collect them all now. Any time I come across one, you better believe it’s leaving that record store or front yard with me… if it’s less than five bucks at least. Even more recently, when he was still a puppy, my dog Merle used to howl at the string section of “Lady Fingers.” And it’s memories like this that instill in something such a sense of significance in one’s life. These are the things you remember.

It goes without saying these encounters left a lasting impression on me. They propelled me into a life of music. From trumpet in the band in high school to shows at the Bottle Tree in Birmingham to see Beach House, St. Vincent, The XX, and Blitzen Trapper, to the development of my own career as a songwriter and musician in Nashville.

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Hi-Tide Recordings,
The TVD First Date

Hi-Tide Recordings is an international record label and lifestyle brand based in Freehold, New Jersey, USA. Partners Vincent Minervino and Magdalena O’Connell tour the world as vinyl DJs and event curators, and produce their very own Hi-Tide “Holiday” series of music and cocktail weekenders.

VINCENT: We think quite a bit about where our records will end up in 50 years. Just like we light up with excitement when we uncover an old Link Wray 45, we wonder when and where a dusty Surfrajettes record will bring that same excitement in the future.

MAGDALENA: Both of our parents had extensive vinyl collections, wide-ranging in genres that made up our childhood soundtracks. I remember my dad spending hours digitizing our family’s favorite LPs to play in the car on family road trips to Wisconsin. These playbacks always featured the crackle-hiss-pop of the original platter, and were especially magical against the moving scenery of the midwest highways. At home, there was always a record spinning on the Linn Sondek. It was my Dad’s pride and joy, purchased after his first big job as an outdoor advertising painter in New York City.

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Arsun,
The TVD First Date

“Records have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, even prior to knowing I wanted to be a musician.”

“My parents used to play Abbey Road on vinyl a lot when I was growing up and I remember that we’d always have a quarter balanced on the needle cartridge because it wasn’t weighted correctly, which I always found to be funny. They used to play records often, but even after being exposed to them as much as I was, I never really had a collection of my own.

By the time I had reached the age to have my own money to pour into a collection I wasn’t stagnant enough to sit at home and enjoy the records, so I didn’t consider it. I spent too much time outside running from place to place. Whether I was going to some party or some park or getting into trouble with my friends, I just wasn’t home or even indoors all that much.

But in between all the running around I’d always stop by record stores, hi fi shops, and guitar shops and bother the people by sampling everything in the store. Most of the time the owners would find a soft spot for me after I had bothered them enough though!

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margø,
The TVD First Date

“My grandma was an incredibly special lady. While in grade school, I didn’t have to load into the daycare bus like the other children—every day she was there to pick my brother and I up and care for us while my parents worked. Visits to her house were a delight—she spoiled us with ice cream, pastries, and the best homemade Ukrainian food nearly every time we were there.”

“I had such an admiration for her home; it was one of the first standing houses in her neighborhood—complete with the most adorable pink walls, little doilies on nearly every tabletop, and an oven that I’m positive would be considered a historic artifact today. My grandma also had quite the record collection—shelves full of her old-time country music albums that were meticulously organized and stacked. I don’t know how old her records were (I’m guessing VERY old), but she took such great care of them that not a single record had an imperfection.

My grandma hadn’t owned a record player for quite some time, so my family had the idea of gifting one to her for Christmas. My mom found a record player that was perfect for her—it was this charming little wooden box that looked like it had been revived right out of the ’60s. I remember how excited she was— and from that day forward how nearly every time we visited there was a new warmth in her house in the form of her records playing softly in the background.

I was delighted to learn about the world of vinyl records through visits to my grandma’s house—it always felt like an art to place one of the records onto the spindle and carefully lower the needle. I was raised on CDs and mp3s, so this was a new type of magic that I absolutely cherished—all the more special that I was introduced to it in a place that I loved.

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Brother Oliver,
The TVD First Date
and Premiere,
“Command Shift EP”

“My first experience owning albums was a result of my trumpet teacher sending me home with jazz CDs every week. After lessons he’d burn me a CD of some iconic jazz player, whether it be Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, Dizzy Gillespie—or my all time favorite, Maynard Ferguson. I didn’t have a portable CD player so I’d stand next to the radio we had in our living room that had a CD player attached and just listen to it there. Every week I’d have no clue what I was getting so it was like unwrapping a present each time I’d pop one in the player.”

“From there I started wanting more CDs and I remember going to Walmart to get To The Sea by Jack Johnson on its release day. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I asked an employee about it and they found an unopened box that had just arrived and they cut it open for me and handed me a copy. I was pumped because I felt like I was the first in the world to have that album.

From there I kept getting more and more CDs and I was intrigued by vinyl, especially because it was starting to get popular again, but I didn’t have a turntable and I didn’t have a lot of money growing up so it wasn’t something I thought too much about getting. But then one year for my birthday, I was surprised when my best friend got me my all-time-favorite album Narrow Stairs by Death Cab for Cutie. And they got it for me on vinyl. I was pumped. It felt like this massive piece of music in my hands, almost like it was bigger than life. It felt like a piece of art, and I was hooked.

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Katie Kuffel,
The TVD First Date

“My first date with vinyl followed the arc of a classic ’90s romcom. A series of almosts and missed connections before finally we each turned the corner, caught the other’s eye, and fell in love.”

“Like most folks who have a dad with a garage, I unearthed his high school and college collection of records while exhuming my family’s Christmas decorations. I was a braces-laden eleven year old, and though I theoretically knew what the records were as objects, the band names within bands ‘The Temptations’ and ‘Marvin Gaye’ were entirely alien to me. My family didn’t own a record player, so they stayed in the box, forgotten.

It was many years before vinyl and I crossed paths again. I was in my early twenties and just played a gig with Drew Martin, a local in the Seattle music scene who lived most of the year in Hawaii, but would manage to sell out venues like The Sunset simply by sending out one group text message. He’s a mythic underground figure, to say the least. I don’t drive, so he was carting me to and from the venue.

We were loading my gear into his car and he had some left over merch in his trunk. A home-printed T-shirt, and a deluxe vinyl of his record The Valley, an invaluable object only available in physical form since he hadn’t bothered with streaming sites or digitizing his music at all yet. He offered them, and I happily accepted both proffered gifts. I’d conveniently forgotten that I didn’t own a record player.

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Me Nd Adam,
The TVD First Date

“We grew up in Austin, a music-obsessed town where respect for vinyl runs deep.”

“Austin is home to one of the most iconic record stores in the world, Waterloo Records, which is where we each bought our first album. I think Vince’s was Kiss’s Double Platinum—he doesn’t like people to forget that—and mine was Willie Nelson’s Stardust, a Texas classic.

We love vinyl. Our forthcoming debut, American Drip Part 1, is available exclusively on vinyl and via your preferred streaming service.”
Adam

“When I was 22, my girlfriend’s sister moved into a fixer-upper where the previous tenants had left all of their collections behind.”

“One of those collections was thousands of records, including some of the greatest orchestral and operatic pieces (think Stravinsky and Beethoven) recorded by the greatest symphonic orchestras in some of the most iconic locations, including the Taj Mahal and Sistine Chapel.

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Sam Roberts Band,
The TVD First Date

“Every fall, in Montreal and the nearby Laurentian mountains, people come from all over the world to see the leaves change colours. We call them Leaf-peepers… I think… At any rate, it really is a spectacle worth seeing, the leaves, that is, not the peepers—one of Mother’s Nature finest from her deep bag of tricks.”

“To a kid growing up in the area, however, the same leaves represent a very different beast. The changing colours are seen for what they truly represent, the death-throes of summer before the long, dark winter sleep. And where do dead leaves end up? The lawn, the flower beds, the driveway…like water, they will find a way into and through and under everything. On precious weekend afternoons, it is the sacred and unpleasant duty of every Canadian kid to rake these leaves—“bag ‘em and tag ‘em.”

My dad used to offer us financial compensation but my brother and I saw through the scheme…10 cents a bag, seemed easy enough—could be looking at a dollar for an hour’s work. Not so fast! A bag is never full until dad has given the OK. Which meant passing the compression test… which meant him taking what looked like a full bag of leaves and standing in the bag until the leaves had been squashed to a near-atomic level! Then came the inevitable judgment, “That’s not full…”

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Ruby Mack,
The TVD First Date

“The first LP I ever purchased was Brandi Carlile’s Bear Creek at a rare solo show in Northampton, MA in the fall of 2011. I didn’t even have a record player at that point, but it meant so much to purchase that album and wait for the day I could take it out of its sleeve and play it the way Brandi wanted people to hear it.”

“I didn’t grow up listening to vinyl. I am, however, the daughter of HUGE music lovers—particularly my father. From Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and The Police to The Beatles, Madonna and ABBA, I had an eclectic childhood filled with music. The only thing to rival my Dad’s love of music is his love for technology. He will always be the first person in line when Apple releases their latest gadget and will probably be reading nonfiction iBooks from his iPad on his death bed. Because of this, we always consumed music in the newest way possible—first tapes and CDs, then the first iPod and beyond. I knew vinyl existed, I guess, but it was considered the “latin” of music formats—a dead format.

So how did I ever get into vinyl? I like to think the journey started when my Dad asked me if I wanted this new thing called an iPod and I said, “heck no! I want a Walkman!” I went back in time from there.

No, but really, I started getting into vinyl when I got to Smith College in Northampton, MA. If anyone knows the folk music world, you know that Western Mass has a strong and thriving scene. My goal when I first got to school was to see as much live music as possible—alone or with friends—but to get out and experience the artists coming through town. I noticed many artists started selling vinyl at their merch tables, and thought it was pretty cool and unique, so I started to investigate. (I like to stay hip, who doesn’t?!) I was simultaneously learning the difference between analog and digital in my courses at school, and knew I needed to get my hands on the way music was originally produced.

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Professor and the Madman, The TVD
First Date and Premiere “A Child’s Eyes”

“As a kid in the early 1970s, I was surrounded by vinyl. My three older siblings were all major music enthusiasts, and so were my parents.”

“Mom was all about Eydie Gormé, Vicente Fernández, and Harry Belafonte. Dad loved the Irish Rovers, the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, and Eddy Arnold. My eldest brother, Rikk, was already deeply involved in the Orange County punk scene while I was only in middle school. He played bass in Social Distortion, guitar in the Adolescents, Christian Death, and D.I., and he released a solo album, All by Myself, for Frontier Records in 1982. My other brother, Frank, also played with the Adolescents and many other groups on the scene.

Some of my earliest vinyl memories are of the U.S. versions of the Beatles albums (The Early Beatles, Something New, Beatles VI), and also the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack! In my household, there was also a big box of 45 RPM singles covering a wide range of genres.

Once I started school, I would come home every day and the first thing I would do was play records. Taking after my brothers and sister, I quickly became a collector, myself—my birthday and Christmas “wish lists” always had a long list of desired vinyl releases. Our favorite record store was Music Box in Fullerton. We would ride our bikes down there, go through the used section, and maybe grab an ice cream cone at the nearby Thrifty’s Drug Store, if we had enough pocket change left after our spree.

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Tyrone’s Jacket,
The TVD First Date

“My love for music developed well after my formative years, and for the most part predicated my creative participation as opposed to being a consumer.”

“I purge melody, dance, and lyric from an internal feeling more than strictly the mind, though the brain is a necessary tool for articulation once the connection is made. The term “channeling” is how I would best describe it. I have created music without having an extensive musical education, I’m not classically trained and there is a lot of music people would be surprised to know I’m ignorant of. I don’t like the idea of certain influences clouding my spirit, however over the years I have increased my knowledge.

Perhaps my father’s success with The Commodores desensitized me to an appreciation of music early on—I was more into sports back then, however eventually, like for most of us, music found its way to my heart. It wasn’t until late in high school that I started to pay real attention to music. Tupac was first, Nas shortly after that, then Bob Marley. I remember it clearly.

I used to live a few blocks away from Tower Records. Back then Tuesdays were the day of new releases. Every Tuesday after school I would swing by that yellow and red building and spend hours. I felt like I was part of a club because we were all there for the same reason. Varied genres attracted a variety of outspoken attitudes from the expressions, struts, spiked mohawks, dreadlocks, tattoos, jumpsuits, velour suits, and tattered rags. There was culture and it was a scene.

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Life in a Blender,
The TVD First Date

“I was sucked into the spinning vinyl vortex through my older sister. Irene was heavily into The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, and Queen. When she was out, I would take her vinyl into my room and listen to her albums. “Killer Queen” especially grabbed me. I mention “Killer Queen” in a song I wrote called “Falmouth.” I figured why not listen to her records , then I can save money and maybe buy my own albums later if I absolutely had to.”

“The local radio station WPDH in Poughkeepsie played more fringe music than other stations at the time—so some of my earliest vinyl was Tom Waits and Randy Newman, but I was also into 10cc, Jon Anderson, Pink Floyd, and Crack the Sky.

Album covers loom large in my mind because they are so large. Getting vinyl was getting a work of art—CDs could just never compare. That’s a major reason for buying vinyl still today. “Killer Queen” had all the cool glamour with the four longhaired Brits–some shirtless–draped in a circle on a black backdrop. Jon Anderson’s Olias of Sunhillow scratched the sci-fi/fantasy nerd itch with some sort of elaborate flying contraption from another dimension on the cover and its overly ornate typeface.

Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief stands out as a vinyl wonder because of the three sides. Side one would play a whole different bunch of skits depending on where you dropped the needle, so the A side really gave you two sides in one.

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The K’s,
The TVD First Date

“There’s just something about going into a record shop, searching through thousands of LPs—most older than us, passed through generations and hoping you bag a limited edition copy that no one has spotted.”

“The first vinyl I came across was News of the World by Queen—it was handed down to me by my dad. I remember him saying, “Keep hold of this, it’ll be worth a bob in a few years time.” 20 years later, worth a whopping £30, I should be able to retire from it in the year 100,000. The favourite records in my collection are probably Graceland, Paul Simon and Parallel Lines, Blondie.” —Jordan

“The first time I remember seeing records I must’ve been about 6 or 7.”

“My dad had cases and cases of them in various wardrobes throughout the house. The one that sticks out in that memory is always Never Mind The Bollocks… by the Sex Pistols. I thought the cover was cool as fuck before I’d even heard the music! As I got older I started buying my own records, there’s just something about vinyl that nothing else comes close to. In the end we got so obsessed with vinyl we even ended up naming our band after our local record shop!” —Jamie

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Charlie Kaplan,
The TVD First Date

“My father died on November 29th, 2013, two months before I turned 25. My partner Emma and my birthdays are just two days apart—January 23rd and 25th—so the day between has most years been the date of a joint party. January 24th, 2014 was no exception. I had barely begun grieving. Still shocked and blinded by the seismic event that had befallen me. Still numb with denial each day when I woke up.”

“We decided to host it in the basement of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called St. Mazie. That spot has a street-level floor where local groups play. Some nights you might hear gypsy jazz, some nights you might hear a jug band. But below is a low-cap subterranean basement space, maybe 50 heads total, with a bar and eight or ten tables. We chose it because it’s just small enough where with enough friends, you can turn it into a de-facto private party. A year into my first job and with no money to rent out a venue, this struck us as a pretty ingenious approach and we sprung the idea on our guest list to a lively response.

The night came and our people were filling the space up and claiming tables. I noticed one final four-top of three strangers remaining, working on closing out their bill, with an open seat. I decided to sit down with them to be polite. At the table were two women and a man, and they welcomed me in.

Back then I wandered stunned from place to place, sometimes totally numb, but periodically—and inevitably—crashing down to earth in realization of my wrecked present. It felt like that fleeting moment after you’re slapped in the face, before the sting sets in. I felt the lightness and levity of freefall. A month or less later I’d find myself in darkness after the daze wore off, but for that moment, this stupefaction, mixed with the buzz of a room full of friends and a few drinks, had me whirring, ready to stick a straw in a world disappearing down the drain.

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Conclave,
The TVD First Date

“I first came into contact with records at probably 5 or 6. My dad had his small collection of Merengue records in the closet where we kept our winter wear. My parents never played them because they were very much in the home entertainment era of the ’90s, and in typical Latin household fashion they had a drawer with probably 300 + CD’s with salsa, merengue, all types of Latin music which had a profound effect on me and thus on Conclave.”

“Later when I got to high school I fell in love with jazz. I played in the school jazz band and combo and formed a side jazz combo. All I listened to was jazz, but it was in the format of CDs, which I bought or burned. This continued until I got to Berklee College of Music in Boston. I was finally living in a space that wasn’t my parents house for the first time and wanted to make it my own, so I did what a lot of millennial art students in college did at that time: I bought a shitty record player. That started my love affair with the vinyl medium. I finally could buy all of the jazz records I’d been listening to all these years in their original medium and could discover more.

Around the corner from the school was a super dope record store called Looney Tunes (RIP). They had two locations—one by Harvard campus in Cambridge, and lucky for me, another one right by Berklee. The guys that worked there were a couple of super nice older white Boston dudes. They were more into rock and probably were in punk or rock bands in the ’70s and ’80s. The store had an extensive rock selection but funny enough they had a jazz selection that rivaled it (probably because of the proximity to a jazz school).

I would go every week, multiple times a week, and buy jazz records from artists I recognized and sometimes a jazz artist I had just learned about in class that day. I would go home, smoke a lil sum’, and actively listen with friends or alone. One record during this era that flipped my shit and a lot of my friends shit was Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. This was a movie in every sense to us and I remember us laying on the ground with our backs on the floor and facing the ceiling and could imagine the scenes that took place in a continent and culture none of us had ever experienced to yet.

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  • SUPPORTING YOUR LOCAL INDIE SHOPS SINCE 2007


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