Old Fashioned Music

Ohio Sky's new album "The Big Distraction"

 Much has been said about this recent resurgence of vinyl records. My question did it ever really go away? Some might say yes; it was all but extinct. With the advent of Napster in the late 90's, music changed. The way we look at it, the way we consumed it, and the way bought it (or didn't buy it).

Growing up in suburban Cleveland was glorious and one thing I had in the house since I could remember was a record player. One of my first memories about a record player was when my mom was teaching my brother how to slow dance in the living room to a slow song on a record on the record player for his first dance. My younger brother and I sat on the couch and laughed and giggled. After we moved across the street the record player was gone. Where it went I wasn't sure.

My older brother had a record player on his stereo in his room, but he always used the cassette deck, playing Extreme's Pornographitti til it wore out. Then Escape Club. I mean he had a ton of great cassettes. Rarely did the record player get used except on the mornings of our birthdays. You know those songs you could buy on a hair thin piece of vinyl that sang a birthday song with your name in it? Yeah my mom had one for each of us. The morning of our birthday it was our wake up call. The popping and cracking, Zoom would come down to Earth just to since us this song.

When he went to college he took his stereo and record player with him. That's when mom bought a surround sound system. I was bummed. It didn't have a CD player. Instead it has a dual cassette deck and a record player. What the hell? Tastes had changed, even in the early 90's. Everyone started to go digital albeit very slowly. It wasn't until I found old HiFi speakers in the basement and hooked them up to the new system did I really appreciate the sound of it. The sound of the old speakers that seemed as clear as anything you could buy brand new. They looked like crap, but they sounded cool. That's when Mom pulled out the crate of old records.

Among the records, as I thumbed through them, was Michael Jackson's Thriller. I remembered this record in a distant memory. I remember it being propped up next to the record player in the old house. I remember looking at the photo on the inside of the jacket of Michael and a baby tiger. I took the LP out of the jacket, put it on the record player, and dropped the needle.

The sound was unreal. When Thriller came on you could hear the footsteps like they were coming down the hall. You could hear every sound each element of the song gave. It is like I was hearing the song for the first time. I had played this damn thing over and over, but never like this. It was just amazing. My young adolescent ears just heard the clearest sound in the world. I will always remember it fondly. I played that record over and over and just sat and listened.

Later in the 90's Napster happened and it was awesome. You could get this endless supply of free music from anyone you could think of. The sound was good. Hell I even played some of the stolen tracks on CD I burned later on that old HiFi system using a line in and a DiscMan.

Record stores had switched to tapes and then CD's long ago. Those cool little stores that I never went into had records. With that change came the way we listened to music. The Walkman came with the ability to take your personal music with you. Music went from the forefront to the background. It was now the music bed of our montage we called life. When you listened to a record you always had to pay attention to it. Sure we'd put a record on and clean the house, but when the music stopped we would stop and turn it over, then continue on. Tapes had a similar experience, but then they invented a way for it to keep playing without stopping.

When music went to the mp3 not only did it get worse, but artists who would spend a year putting together an album from start to finish with song choice and order in mind, people were picking one or two songs to download off of it and mixing it with other songs from other artists. The listener became their own artist. Sure we did this a little bit with mix tapes in the 80s, but mp3s grew it. For a long time I never paid for a single track of music. Not a single one. Then something changed.

I started taking photos, putting a lot of time into it. I would go out take photos, share them, and do it again. I loved it. That's when people started asking me to come out and do pictures for them, except they expected it for free. I was once asked to send a photo to someone so that they could print it out. In my head I was thinking hell no. I'm not going to give up that kind of control over what I took, and do it for free.

That's when I started thinking, why would I spend all this time making art for them, and then give it away. My time was worth it. That's when I looked down at my phone and looked at all the songs I have. All of them works of art that I had stolen. I was a hypocrite. That's when I started buying music again.

Now that I was paying money for tunes, I was paying attention to the music. I would carefully choose which albums to buy, which ones that weren't worth my time and my money. I noticed a few things. Electronic format is nice and convenient, but it was missing something. A soul. It's cold sterility of a near perfect quality of sound took away the warmth of the sound. Like Agent Smith said in the Matrix, "...it was a perfect reality that our primitive cerebellum kept trying to wake up from."

Records went away but yet they are still here. There is a growing group of 30 somethings buying them and starting to listen to their old collections and look for folks putting out new stuff on vinyl. Why? Because they are music snobs? Probably, but what made me want to get a record player again is that I found a band that I really loved, they put out a vinyl record, and dammit I wanted to listen to it. Just this morning my five year old asked me what this box on the table was. So I showed her. Her eyes wide with wonderment. How could that disc make the sounds it could? I dropped her off at school and she immediately saw her friend. I heard her say, "My Dad got a record player." Her friend responded with, "Cool! What's that?" and off they went into school. My wife said, "wait til she sees a landline phone. It will blow her mind."

When I see someone who listens to vinyl, I see someone who has stopped stealing art and started paying for it again. I see someone who doesn't take the art of music for granted and something that shouldn't be taken or given away. They don't give vinyl out for free. Somewhere along the line someone had to pay money for it. That's why I bought a vinyl record in 2009 and again this past Saturday night from the same band. I wanted to support a band so that they can continue to make art that I enjoy in a format that has more soul than the iWhatever you have in your pocket.