Friday, June 17, 2016

Vinyl Lost, Vinyl Found - Some Memories, and a Plug for Eric Spitznagel's Event for "Old Records Die" at Acme in Bay View, next Thursday, June 23, 7 pm.

Memory #1: Can it be that cartoons are my gateway drug to music? But it might be true - at E.J. Korvettes, the Walmart of it's day, my father let me pick out, over time, albums that celebrated the exploits of Magilla Gorilla, Secret Squirrel, and Touché Turtle. Each included an adventure, the theme song, and generally at least one exclusive to this recording ditty. You probably didn't know Morocco Mole had a song, but he did.

Memory #2: I buy my first grown-up LP with my own money from Larry's Record Shop on Horace Harding Boulevard in Oakland Gardens. It's The Partridge Family Album and we have to special order it because it's so popular. 

Memory #3: Music turns out to be cheaper in Manhattan. I shop at a store I think might have been called Disco Mat. I bring my albums to parties and to make sure I get them back, I put animal stickers on them, as well as writing my initials. Most come back. Some come back scratched. Sometimes I scratched them - I'm a bit of a klutz. 

Memory #4: At college, I volunteer at the radio station, where we get three copies of each of some labels promo editions while other divisions won't send us anything. I listen to a lot of obscure music, much of it on Atlantic, as they send us the most stuff.

Memory #5: I take a job in New York, where every Friday, my friend Thom and I (sometimes joined by my friend Lonnie or another music aficionado) would trawl East and West Village and surrounding area for new releases. I obsess over Prefab Sprout, who once released a motorcycle shaped single. And you wonder why I wound up in Milwaukee. 
Memory #5: I visit Milwaukee, where I walk into Radio Doctors and see the best vinyl single section I have probably ever seen. It turns out that this is due to their business racking jukeboxes. There are probably a lot of good reasons why I moved here, but that might be one of them. Needless to say, it didn't last.

Memory #6: Vinyl dies a slow death, first facing cassettes, which actually did more damage to singles than to albums, and then CDs. I can't pinpoint when exactly I gave up, but I know that by 1990, I was already having trouble locating the vinyl versions of albums I wanted. I remember this because I went to France and they still had much larger vinyl collections, including singles, so I came back with a trunk full of music. I bought Niagara's "Flammes de L'Enfer" in multiple formats because it was my favorite.

Now there's a vinyl resurgence, but a lot of folks have sold off, or even dumped their collections, and some people want them back. I can understand this, though I kept a good bit of mine. I'm a hoarder. But I still took to Eric Spitznagel's new memoir, Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past. Spitznagel (at left), who decided that he was not only going to rebuild his collection, he was going to find the exact copies he lost. He thought it was possible. Whether it was possible is beside the point. It's all about the quest. I loved the book and passed it to my fellow Boswellian, Conrad Silverberg. He felt the same way.

Here's part of  Conard's rec: "Old Records Never Die is about the author's singleminded drive to recover his record collection twenty-some odd years after unloading it in favor of CDs. He doesn't want to simply replace his old vinyl with new copies. He wants the exact ones he got rid of all those years ago. He will know them from the scratches that he remembers with precision ... he will know them from the ex-girlfriend's phone number scrawled across the dust jacket ... from the partially torn sticker that identified it as a radio station's promo copy (not for sale!)... from the boot print on the cover from that all too wild party. Is this crazy? Sure! Funny? As all hell! This is a unique and infinitely entertaining little masterpiece about finding what you've lost and coming to grips with at long last becoming an adult."

I was exciting to realize that most of the book takes place in Chicago, and I've fund that it isn't very hard to convince Chicago writers to drive up to Milwaukee for events. Well, it's hard to get the famous ones to come, but the developing writers seem more amenable, and once they've gotten in the habit, even the bigger names will accommodate us, as long as we do a good job.  But at the end of the book, he moved his family to Pennsylvania for a job. So no deal. But then later, Mary at Blue Rider/Plume contacted me and said he was moving back.

How exciting! And I knew just where I wanted to host an event, Acme Records in Bay View.They have an event space and chairs. And well, I used to work with Meg, who is married to Ken, who owns the shop (at right). I worried that if I walked in blindly it would seem like a ridiculous idea.

Ken worked at Farwell Records, which I think was the legacy of the other record store I visited when I first came to Milwaukee. It had a lot of imports, which as I mentioned above, made me swoon. He used a lot of reclaimed wood, giving it a true vintage feel, while warming it up. And his inventory is a true joy to browse through - full of surprises.

Speaking of surprises, I asked Ken about the Dirty Joke Machine. Was it popular? Indeed it was, though kids were disappointed when their parents wouldn't let them play with it. I suggested a second not-so-dirty joke machine. We'll see how that goes.

I bet you're thinking, hey, this is something I want to go to! Our event is on Thursday, June 23, 7 pm, at Acme Records, 2341 S. Kinnickinnic Ave. Should be fun!

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