Henry Nowhere, The TVD First Date

“My first experience with vinyl was probably around third grade, listening to my Dad’s old Dr. Demento records. He’s the DJ that discovered Weird Al. I got a real kick out of “Flying Purple People Eater,” “Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” and “Camp Granada.””

“My dad’s collection was largely great bluegrass like Doc Watson, New Grass Revival, and David Grisman along with some country rock gems like The Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach whose immensely psychedelic inner cover adorned my brothers wall for many years. My sister’s room was covered wall to wall with Beatles posters and what seemed to be every album cover of theirs. She was the cool one.

In High School my brother Jack (keyboardist for Day Wave) got turntables meant for scratching and mixing. So many funny, stoned, and ultimately embarrassing freestyles went down over that stack of breaks and beat records. The best beat I was able to make with that turntable was with a break beat and the 16 second intro track on George Benson’s album Breezin’, picked from my mom’s collection. I broke the needle while my brother was out skating one day and that was that.

In college my roommate and good buddy Tommy had a record player and we had a communal stack of records that we played through a cruddy Peavey amp of mine. One of the highlights from that collection was Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, a beautiful, reaching, synthy, groovin’ free jazz album just before he went super funky. Another was Quincy Jones’s Sounds… and Stuff Like That which has some real heavy jazz and funk musicians from the ’70s.

I wish I had the space in my house now for a record player and record collection. The hum and the hiss can make the thinnest album sound full. It also encourages you to sit down and listen to the full album which I think is an important and forgotten pass time. It probably also encouraged artists to make better albums knowing that people really had their ears and attention pressed up to those speakers.”
—Henry Nowhere