This past weekend Stephanie and I went to the storage room and grabbed 5 boxes worth of stuff, including the two boxes full of records that have been boxed up since 2021, and maybe even earlier. I have a old stereo system with a phonograph that I got for my 13th birthday, so the thing is 38 years old. I also ordered a new Bluetooth enabled turntable from Jenson as part of my employer’s rewards program. I set that up instead and have spent a few happy afternoons and evenings listening to the music of my childhood and teenage years. I really stopped buying records by the end of high school because I had a CD player. The albums I have represent a particular slice of my life.
I had to break it in with Please Please Me, a reprint of the Beatles’ British releases from a box set my mother picked up at Costco sometime in the mid 80’s. I have all the Beatles American releases, some of which are original, and several of the compilations that were produced. I knew there was a difference and my mother and I saw the box set and she obviously noted my sense of longing for the thing. I came home without it. My mother went back that afternoon and bought it. Then she gave it to me later as an early birthday gift. I made a ritual of starting my summer vacations by playing by entire Beatles collection as soon as I got home from school. I played each album in order. The box set I think went through only once, because I recorded them onto cassette. I have since lost the cassettes.
I also listened to my recording (with 12-page booklet) of the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit animated film, which may have been my first exposure to the story. I think I saw the movie in the theater as a kid. The record has some forward skips on the second side. I don’t know how to clean the disc. I loved that movie. It was charming, even if it was pretty inauthentic to what Tolkien imagined.
I listened to Allan Sherman and the Boston Pops send up classical music with Peter and the Commissar and The End of the Symphony. That album also includes the great Arthur Fiedler doing a hiccup solo in variations of How Dry I Am. This is stuff from before my life, but it was what I listened to as a kid. Sherman, Lehrer, and finally Carlin as a teenager. It shaped my sense of comedy and honed my natural sarcasm.
Then I listened to one disc of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which I still almost had in memory. It was an odd choice, as there are other artists I thought I would revisit first. I went with my gut. I was not disappointed. Unfortunately, I still hear Bennie having “electric boobs”, which fascinated me as a kid but I cannot imagine what that would be like.
There is something about these records. It’s not pure nostalgia, but for a brief while I remembered what it was like to think of my life being entirely ahead of me and I had possibilities. Now I look ahead and don’t see a wide open road, but a long to-do list that will never be completed. I should be living for today, and I hope my old music can continue to rekindle my feeling of possibilities, because I’ve lost it, somehow, in the daily grind. I hope to pick up many things I dropped during COVID, and there’s so much to choose from.