Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
If you’ve been around the sun a few times, you’ll no doubt remember that slightly bent device that looked a little bit like the magazine from a semi-automatic pistol, with a hole drilled through it from top to bottom.
In ancient times (are they really that long ago?), before everything was digital, there existed an entire world of music, analog music.
For those of you who remember, and for the growing majority that don’t. Analog was the recording of natural sound. No artificial enhancements, no digital editing, no voice commands, just you, a turntable, and a record, either 45 or 33 1/3 rpm.
The generations before us had 78 rpm records, but since the advent of stereophonic sound in the late 1950s and early 60s, the medium was 45s with a song on each side, or LPs (Long playing) with up to a dozen songs depending on their length.
I’ve read that LPs are making a comeback.
It’s not surprising. They sound better than MP3s, CDs, or online digital playback.
What’s not making a comeback is the local record store where you could browse the stacks, listen to whatever the kid at the register wanted to hear, and pick out your favorite artists.
In Lander, you can still get a taste of the old days (and a nice selection of local brews) at the Pushroot Brewing Company on Main Street. They have an old-style turntable in the corner behind the bar. On the right warm afternoon at the foot of the Wind River Range, it can be magical.
There was a record store across from the dormitories on the University of Wyoming campus. They had the same thing at CSU, Stanford, and Cal when I visited those campuses. From the 1960s to the mid-1980s, every college town in America, 18,000 in all, had a record shop just off campus.
The one in Laramie on Grand Avenue was nestled into the same building as Upper Crust Pizza, and the Little Brown Jug bar and liquor store.
Two generations ago, this combination was a license to print money. All three were packed.
The record shop had double rows of albums stacked vertically on opposite sides of four aisles. Sometimes alphabetical, sometimes by genre, and in our favorite section, the discount rack, they were flung Helter Skelter. (Not a tribute to Charles Manson, but it’s a delineation for an aging generation.)
I was on a budget, everyone I knew was aside from a handful of rich kids who were drunk 24/7, never went to class, and lasted less than a year.
The best place to buy discounted albums in good shape was the Curiosity Shop on Ivinson Boulevard between Second and Third Street.
It was an eclectic mix of antiques, consignments, and a thrift shop all rolled into one. An LP in those days sold for $5 to $10 retail, depending on the artist. The Curiosity Shop albums were 99 cents to two bucks. A steal, and the owner let you take the album out of the sleeve, hold it up to the sun and check for scratches.
Kids today will never know the joy, or the lack of it, of the hisses, pops, and occasional skips on an LP. Sometimes the scratch created a new groove that played a section of a song. (AKA the broken record.)
Today’s youth don’t know what it means when their grandparents, or occasionally their parents, tell them they sound like a broken record. Oh well, the English language is constantly evolving.
One of my favorite albums was the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, released in early 1976. I splurged with the $5.38 an hour I was making at the Louisiana Pacific Mill in Riverton the previous summer and bought it new in the spring of 1977.
When I opened the album, it was in pristine condition, but on the inside was a handwritten engraving. “Merry Christmas 1976 – Happy New Year.” Someone at the factory had taken the time to scratch out the message on one of the hundreds of thousands of records produced.
It takes you back.
Did anyone ever notice that every record shop in the 60s and 70s smelled like incense? Most of them had a “special section” as well, where they sold Zigzag cigarette papers, roach clips, and every other variety of marijuana paraphernalia you could imagine. It was a different era.
The year after Sue and I were married, we made a summer trip to California to travel with my cousin Mike and his new wife, Rosie.
We headed south on US 101, “The Coast Highway” after leaving their place in San Bruno, just off San Francisco Bay. The views of the Pacific Ocean as we curved in and out of the coastal hills above the ocean were tremendous.
We found a record store in Los Angeles, a huge one. A college-age kid came up to help us and asked who we were looking for.
Sue said, “Anything by Petula Clark.”
“Petula Clark? Who is that?” the puzzled kid asked.
We tried to explain that she had dozens (ok, 15) top 40 albums in the 60s and 70s, but it didn’t trigger a memory in the guy who was at most five years younger than we were at the time.
Art is in the eye, or in this case, the ear of the beholder.
I never got into the 45 craze as a youngster. The girls I knew sure did. They’d talk about parties they had where their friends would bring over a stack of their favorite 45s, they would pile them on top of the turntable, and the turntable would do the rest. You could sometimes get 10 straight songs if the mechanism was working, but it was just as likely that two or three of the 45s would fall at once, cutting your listening time.
I still have Cosmos Factory by Creedence Clearwater Revival, the best of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Tommy James and the Shondells Greatest Hits, and albums by John Denver, the 4 Tops, the Temptations, and Lobo. I look at them more than I listen.
It’s just too easy to say, “Alexa, play Fortunate Son.” In a few seconds, John Fogerty is wailing out the lyrics against privilege that helped stop the insanity of the war in Vietnam.
Albums are a link to the past, an atavistic connection to a simpler time when the joys of life, and life itself was a road leading to an infinite future, waiting for you to travel it.
Being easier doesn’t mean it’s better.
Just don’t stack too many nickels on the stylus to prevent the record from skipping. You’ll cut grooves that won’t go away.
And that’s no way to groove.