Eric Hill
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Jun. 01, 2009 12:00AM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 09, 2009 12:10PM EDT
"I love the sound of vinyl.”
The bed-headed 15-year-old slaps down a battle-scarred copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon rescued from the 99-cent bin. I prepare to engage in the oft-repeated litany about the “warmth” of vinyl and how it's closer to how the ear hears than anything digital, etc. etc. etc.
But then he follows up with, “I really like all the ticks and pops.”
I've been working in record stores and radio for 20 years now, so I fall into that age bracket of people who started their music collections with vinyl, watched it all but disappear and now become, for some, the format of choice once again. But vinyl left my shelves in 1994 and it's unlikely to make a comeback.
At a Black Mountain show a year ago, a friend and customer quizzed me about whether I had bought a vinyl copy of the Vancouver band's tour EP. When I admitted I didn't have a turntable, he reacted as if I had spontaneously given him a disease. The notion of a record-store manager who doesn't collect vinyl seems to trip folks up. Like being a lactose-intolerant cheese-shop owner. I feared for my credibility.
It seems sacrilegious to say these days, but I'm okay with CDs. I own a lot of them. Growing up when iPods were called Walkmans, mine was the first generation who expected easy portability for their music, so the CD was revolutionary (no pun intended) compared to the warbling, heat-stretched, non-indexed cassette. Imagine being able to get to a song without fast-forwarding!
Understandably, today's twentysomethings would find vinyl sexier. Their early music collections consisted of spindles of stuttering CD-Rs labelled Trevor's Mix 2004 (if labelled at all). Just as twentysomething me with his decreasingly satisfying and increasingly scratched Alice Cooper records would be seduced by a shiny silver (and allegedly indestructible) disc. But I fear this new generation of vinyl fetishists is in for a bumpy ride.
For instance, another bit of in-store drollery came courtesy of a young couple who had regularly been purchasing not-inexpensive new releases on vinyl for more than a year. One day the woman, preparing to pay for her new Metric album, furrowed her brow and asked for advice. She said the flea-market turntable she'd refurbished with a new stylus was still emitting much unwanted noise. There was static and a low humming, making it difficult to enjoy her music. When I suggested it might be the ground wire that had come unscrewed she got this puzzled look. She asked if I meant that fork-looking thing on the plug-in, because she hadn't been able to find a purpose for it and so had cut it off.
The 20 years between vinyl's all-but-extinction and rediscovery has rendered many of the basics of turntable operation arcane. The generational hand-me-down of how-to instructions that we once counted on has sadly dried up. I've routinely received fish-eyed stares when, asked why a new record skips, I've used such terms as “anti-skating” or “counterweights” or asked whether their stylus is an “S” or “P” mount.
But then how to explain our fickle sentiments toward format? In our brief lifetimes we've been vinyled, reel-to-reeled, 8-tracked, cassetted, compact disced, DATed, minidisced, SACDed, Betaed, VHSed, DVDed, DVD-Aed, HD DVDed, Blu-rayed, MP3ed and on and on. Is it just another example of consumerism gone amok? Or is it that some of us, because society says we must possess music, feel more comfortable discussing “how” we possess it than analyzing what we gain by its experience?
My 3,000-plus compact-disc collection dominates a room. It's almost embarrassing. It creates arguments that are logically indefensible. I've never bought a brand-new sofa yet I have entire discographies, not only of several artists but of a few labels. All my moods and their subtle variations are covered. And despite the sprawl I can still pull out any disc and, even before I hit play, it will conjure memories of the wheres and whens of its discovery, recollections of the first listen, the impressions of those I shared it with. Almost like, no, exactly like it was back when I collected records.
To be clear, I'm not against vinyl. In many ways it is a purer and more involved way of listening to music. The carved topography of the record that agitates the stylus that sends its impulse electrically through the stereo and vibrates the speaker's paper cones and travels through air to vibrate the bones in your ear, back into electricity and bang into your brain. Rock 'n' roll. It's just that the zeroes and ones have become better at simulating that physicality since their early prototypical tinfoil failures. And I've put 20 years into amassing more CDs than I'll probably ever have time to listen to. I can't go back.
Meanwhile, I try to explain to the 15-year-old Floyd fan that his love of vinyl noise is akin to me saying I enjoy the sound of CDs skipping, and warn him not to play his bargain-bin record with a good stylus.
“That's okay,” he says. “I don't have a turntable. I just want the cover. All my music is on my computer.”
Eric Hill lives in Fredericton.
Illustration by Paddy Molloy.
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