Farewell to my youth: Selling my vinyl
Over the past couple of weeks I've begun selling my vinyl records. It feels like I'm saying farewell to my youth—although clearly my youth said farewell to me quite a few years ago.
The symbolic meaning of getting rid of my vinyl seems inescapable. My records represent a decade-plus in which I spent literally hundreds of hours haunting used record stores. I did so not because I was a record collector, but because music was such a huge part of how I defined myself. To say goodbye to my records is saying goodbye to the person for whom each record purchase was a vital selection because it expressed a part of who I was, or wanted to be.
Like every addictive substance, vinyl records were expensive. Being perpetually underemployed I could only afford new ones on very rare occasions, so almost always when there was a record I wanted I had to hope to find a used copy. I was also fastidious about condition, which made my search even harder. Fortunately the Bay Area was home to some great record stores: in Berkeley, Rather Ripped, Universal Records and the Mint Platter; in San Francisco, Recycled, Reckless and Streetlight. (All are now closed.)
I was fortunate to spend my record-hunting years around the time of the emergence of CDs, when vinyl was being significantly devalued. Back then the list price of a new vinyl album was typically $14.98; I generally paid a budget-friendly $3 to $5 for my used finds (about $7.75 to $13 in today's money—then as now about the price of a burrito. Yes, that meant I sometimes sacrificed lunch or dinner to my music habit).
I also sought out a lot of punk and post-punk music that was issued in limited pressings on small labels. Those records, I now discover, have become collector's items. As an example, in 1983 the scene-leading DC hardcore band Minor Threat issued a nine-song 12" EP, Out Of Step. The EP contained an unlisted final track, "Cashing In," that ended with lead singer Ian Mackay singing "There's no place like home. . .so where am I?" It was a moment of naked emotional vulnerability that resonated with my own feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.
On Out Of Step's first pressing that question faded into an echoing silence. But (as I discovered when I brought home my brand-new copy of a later pressing) on subsequent pressings the band added an overdub of an orchestra tuning up. I thought the added orchestra was horribly pretentious and ruined the song. But the first pressing had sold out almost instantly and was unobtainable. So I had to search for nearly two years before I could find a used copy of the first pressing (identifiable by its black, blank back cover).
Out Of Step sold for $3 when it was released. Later I bought my used first pressing for $5, which was then the list price for a new copy, but I thought it was worth it to lose the orchestra. I note that the current median sale price for a first pressing of Out Of Step on discogs.com is $325, and one intrepid (or delusional) dealer has a copy listed at $1200.
It's prices like these that have convinced me that we are near the peak of the market for used vinyl. Sure, there are a lot of techies in my town earning six-figure salaries; perhaps they wouldn't think twice about spending $1200 on an easily-damaged artifact of a culture they are too young to have experienced in person. (Not to mention that spending $1200 for this record is antithetical to everything that Minor Threat stood for and expresses in their music.)
But I also suspect that the time of vinyl-as-fetish-object will be coming to an end in the next few years. None of my friends or relatives with kids in their twenties report that they own records (or any physical media), and almost everyone I know that's my age or older is either in the process of getting rid of their records, or got rid of them long ago. They're certainly not buying new ones.
So it seems as though it's primarily people in their 30s who are buying vinyl; will they continue to do so for another decade? I'm thinking not; the disadvantages of vinyl records—they're easily scratched or warped, they're heavy (an album in its sleeve typically weighs half a pound or more), they require a lot of room for storage, they need to be cleaned before and after every play, and they only provide 20 minutes of music at a time—will ultimately spell doom for the vinyl revival.
On the other hand, this is a prediction from a person who didn't think tablet computers would go anywhere, didn't see the point of smart phones, and didn't think that anyone would want to give up ownership of (and resale rights to) their music and movies in place of perpetual subscriptions. So what do I know?
But I've decided to sell my records now not so much because of their renewed value (although that sure makes it easier), but because I've stopped listening to them and need the space that my vinyl collection is taking up. As part of my grieving process I'm going to offer five songs from vinyl albums that I no longer own. Pretty much a random choice, in no particular order:
1. Buzzcocks: "I Don't Mind" from Singles Going Steady (1979). The Buzzcocks wrote songs about romantic misadventures and the minor humiliations of daily life. Instead of turning their anger outward they turned their dismay inward:
"I used to bet that you didn't care / But gambling never got me anywhere / Each time I used to feel so sure / Something about you made me doubt you more."
2. Descendents: "Suburban Home" from Milo Goes to College (1983). What distinguished the Descendents amid the noise and rage of other Southern California hardcore bands was their humor and their ability to write irresistible, almost Buzzcocks-level pop-punk melodies:
"I want to be stereotyped / I want to be classified / I wanna be masochistic / I wanna be a statistic / I wanna be a clone / I want a suburban home."
3. The Smiths: "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" from The Queen Is Dead (1986). In my discussion of lead singer Morrissey's Autobiography (the "biggest disappointment" in my Favorites of 2014: Books), I wrote that The Smiths "gave expression to certain inchoate feelings of loss, regret, and lack of direction in my post-collegiate 20s. Johnny Marr's crystalline guitar was the perfect accompaniment to Morrissey's arch, funny, and bitterly true lyrics":
"Take me out tonight / Where there's music and there's people / Who are young and alive / Take me anywhere / I don't care, I don't care, I don't care."
4. Prince: "Anna Stesia" from Lovesexy (1988). While I never could pretend to (and fortunately never tried to) carry off Prince's air of omnisexual magnetism, his albums were always sonically compelling. Just listen to everything that's going on in this track. And if even Prince felt lonely, perhaps I wasn't as alone as I thought:
https://youtu.be/SaFv9lBy-Mo?t=990 (song ends at 21:30)
"Have you ever been so lonely / That you felt like you were the only / One in this world?"
5. The Velvet Underground: "I Found A Reason" from Loaded (1970). Like many people, I'd guess, I had favorite sides of all my albums, and would often just repeatedly play my favorite side instead of flipping the record over. One thing that would condemn a side to rarely being played was a lame song in the middle (at the beginning or end it could be skipped). I often wished I could take a hot knife and just carve a groove right through the offending track so that I wouldn't have to listen to it ever again.
The second song on Side Two of Loaded was "Lonesome Cowboy Bill." How the band that created "I'll Be Your Mirror," "I Heard Her Call My Name" and "Pale Blue Eyes" could have committed this utter throwaway to vinyl escapes me. (I blame John Cale's replacement Doug Yule.) But its presence on Side Two of Loaded, and that of "Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll" on Side One, meant that Side Two almost never got played.
But perhaps a decade after buying this album I rediscovered the second side, and in particular the songs "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" and this one, which despite the smirk in Lou Reed's spoken-word interlude is still delicately beautiful:
"I found a reason to keep living / Oh, and the reason, dear, is you."
My reason to keep living is still the same as it was then, but my musical cravings have shifted. So I'm bidding farewell to my vinyl, and farewell to my younger self. I can only hope that what comes is better than what came before.
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