The Old Record Store

I just read an article I had saved from the January 21, 2006 edition of the LA Times called "It has bins; don't call it a has-been". Written by Robert Lloyd it is a commentary about the death of the independent record store in our modern age. Being a lover of music, with a collection of 800 vinyl LPs, it hit a soft spot.

I can remember visiting LA when I was 14 and spending a lot time in a record store because we didn't have one back home in small town PA. As I got older and went to college I found myself searching them out. I still go to flea markets today looking for someone who has old LPs I can hold.

"Some say that in the future, the near future, there will be no records, and so no record stores of any kind to sell them. All your music will arrive sucked through a cable or beamed from a satellite or by some means not yet imagined. (Pill form, possibly.) You will never need to leave the house. In fact, that pretty much has already happened".

Nothing wrong with the change .... Changing world and all. It's not necessarily worse. Just different. My son is seventeen. He likes to pick the box up and read it, look at the back, and read the notes. Thing is chances are he is holding a PC or video game in the local BestBuy store.

"I know that for some, and not only of the X, Y and Z generations, cyberspace is as authentic a marketplace as any other, but I am old-fashioned enough to want to get out of the house once in a while, into real three-dimensional spaces stocked with things you can see and smell and pick up and turn over to see what they look like on the other side".

I myself like to "cruise" through Amazon looking for music I never would check out anywhere else. And a few times a year I head to Renninger's (a local antique and flea market) where I know there are a couple of sellers of good old vinyl.

"Proust had his madeleine, but nothing unlocks the seven volumes of my memory so much as handling some LP I bought when I was 13 or 14 years old. There are those of us for whom music is a fetishistic activity, in the primary meaning of fetish: "an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers." Can one fetishize an MP3 file? I haven't been able to yet. (You can fetishize the player, as Apple accountants can attest, but that is a different thing.)"

There is still nothing like going thru the bins of LPs. Big envelopes with big pictures and lots of liner notes. Maybe the change is for the worse after all!

"You can still find me there among them, going through the bins, still trying to work out my future."

LA Times - It has bins; don't call it a has-been
LA Times
Musicstack.com Vinyl Records