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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had to break it in with Please Please Me<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also listened to my recording (with 12-page booklet) of the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I listened to Allan Sherman and the Boston Pops send up classical music with Peter and the Commissar<\/em> and The End of the Symphony<\/em>. That album also includes the great Arthur Fiedler doing a hiccup solo in variations of How Dry I Am<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I listened to one disc of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[59,70],"tags":[171,169,170,168],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternate-uncles","category-armchair-philosophy","tag-allan-sherman","tag-beatles","tag-elton-john","tag-music"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}