RECORD HOLDERS
Dave Doolittle, who is in his early 80s, owns approximately 35,000 vinyl records that he stores in an empty old schoolhouse in the small town of Maymont. But he’s far from the only one obsessed with collecting and playing vinyl recordings.
The collection, the behemoth, the big old beast, weighs around three-quarters of a ton.
It lines a wall of my basement — 3,000 vinyl records, neatly shelved, grouped, alphabetized.
Those plastic circles sing to me, when I want them to.
They’re fun, or they can be. They stimulate the brain’s thrill centres. They provide glimmers of satisfaction. They can also be endlessly frustrating: a chore, a burden, a daunting fixation, a blessing, a curse.
I own a record-cleaning machine. Brushes. A bookshelf groaning with reference books. A package of fresh inner sleeves.
Stacked in my storage room are a half-dozen silver-faced receivers, an armload of turntables and a ’60s-era tube cabinet record player, bought on a whim for $5 a few years back. It needs somebody with skill to give those tubes a going over. I have no skill.
I survey all I have wrought over years of chasing vinyl records and rifling through stacks. Hours of flipping and pulling. A strictly prescribed cleaning ritual. Finds meticulously catalogued in two different databases. I ponder the hundreds of discs still waiting to be cleaned and processed.
I’ve been on the chase for 15 years now. My pulse quickens when that holy grail materializes on a thriftstore shelf. I’ve sucked in my breath hundreds of times.
And now, an unexpected thing happens on my turntable — some sibilance on the S’s, perhaps, or a series of ticks, or surface noise that sounds like bacon sizzling — and I regret it all.
I say to myself: Why did this happen? Look at this wall of records. Am I crazy?
Sometimes, I dream about records. The most vivid was a nightmare: A man wants to give me his jazz records, all of them — an entire collection of rare Blue Note originals. I go to his house, and he shows them proudly — neatly shelved, covers pristine.
My heart’s pounding in this dream. I pick up a sleeve; pull out the record. It’s melting. The vinyl drips all over the table, and the part of the record that isn’t melting has been painted, and sandpapered. I pull out another record, and it’s the same thing — liquid vinyl dripping from my hands. Why would he paint them, I ask myself. Why would he sandpaper them? Why are they melting?
The man looks at me proudly. He’s beaming. He doesn’t seem to notice, or care, what’s happening to the records in my hands, and he tells me that he hopes I enjoy listening to them as much as he has. And I stand there quietly, with these records drip-drip-dripping, not knowing what to say or do.
Perhaps there’s a lesson there, a symbol. Maybe those dripping records are my own collection. Perhaps that dream tells me about the impermanence of all those objects we devote our time to — liquid objects, passing through our fingers.
Or maybe it was just a dumb dream.
I don’t know.
I’ve been on the chase for 15 years now. My pulse quickens when that holy grail materializes on a thriftstore shelf. I’ve sucked in my breath hundreds of times. Disappointments abound — a scratch, scuff or warp on that sweet discovery.
So do joys, like a well-played note on flat, quiet, inky-black vinyl.
There’s an allure to vinyl records. It’s trapped many of us, playing the spider to our fly.
“It’s pitiful, sometimes, if they’ve got it bad,” renowned New York record dealer Sam Goody told the Saturday Evening Post in 1957 while discussing his regulars. “Their eyes get glazed, they go white, their hands tremble. They’re oblivious of everything around them. They take out a record, study it, push it back, move away and then move back to the same record again. As I watch them, I often feel that a dope pedlar is a gentleman compared with a man who sells records.”
It’s a simple vinyl disc. Black, usually, with music and words embedded into one long, circular groove stretching the length of nearly five football fields. An eternal mystery, a tiny miracle, a fleeting pleasure.
“I want to go through every pile of records in the world. That’s the problem,” Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig said in his 2000 documentary Vinyl, which explores his own record addiction while asking tough questions of fellow travellers. “A pile of records that are cheap? I’m there. Say no more. (If somebody says) ‘They’re my father’s and there’s a lot of German sex comedy records’ … you never know. I might want them.”
Zweig, perpetually seeking what he calls “piles o’ crap,” interviews a man who ran out of space and threw 2,000 records into a dumpster, because he didn’t want anybody else to possess them. “I even picked a dumpster that I didn’t think anybody would find them in,” he told Zweig.
Another man is shown holding up various records in his collection: Cocktail Capers; Dream Along With Bozo; a Celine Dion Christmas album; a record called Organ and Bongos. Next to him are two stacks of records: One organ; the other bongo.
“One thing that sort of keeps me optimistic,” the man says, “is there is so much. There (are) so many records. The obscurity is infinite, and it’s huge, and it just goes on in every direction.”
That resonates. Bongo and organ records occupy my own vinyl wall.
Sharing space with the usual record-collecting fare — Dylan, Beatles, Stones, Doors, Led Zeppelin — is an LP outlining the etiquette and lingo of citizens band radio. Another, published in 1977, consists of songs praising the metric system. A train rumbling through a thunderstorm occupies two sides of a 1961 vinyl slab. I can listen, whenever I wish, to The Incredible Sights and Sounds of the Winternationals 1964 Championship Pomona Drag Races — revving motors bounding across my speakers.
Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg read their own poetry, fiery old preacher Billy Sunday delivers a message of salvation, and F-100 supersonic jet fighters make a napalm bomb attack.
I own two long-play recordings made by Saskatchewan Roughriders football players. One is called 800 Pounds of West Country Rock and the other Green is the Colour.
There’s weird satisfaction in knowing I possess that peal of thunder, and the pressed-in-vinyl sound waves created by a singing offensive lineman.
Recorded sound is a new phenomenon, just a century and a half old.
Before we harnessed sound, music had to be experienced directly, and lasted only as long as the hearer’s memory. Nobody listened to Beethoven in the comfort of their home in 1811, unless they physically struck their fingers onto the keys.
But now music floats in the ether, there for the plucking, 5,000 songs in a pocket. It’s also manufactured, packaged, sold, shelved — a common, everyday thing, like soup or soap.
That note Elvis Presley hit on a hot summer night in 1958 can be yanked off my shelf, placed on a platter, and drawn from needle to arm to receiver to speaker to ear. It’s deep-dive mining, 60-year-old sound waves pulled from a groove and reconstructed in my basement.
The chase, like with everything people collect, can turn obsessive. As a kid, I collected rocks, stamps, coins, Hardy Boys books, matchbook covers (even though nobody in my immediate family smoked) and paper diner placemats. Not everybody outgrows that instinct, but now there’s this added dynamic: I have a wife, kids, a dog, a mortgage. This is not a high-dollar pursuit.
Victories come in small things: That bargain obscurity on a thriftstore shelf, the wondrous $3 find at the Saskatoon Symphony’s annual book and music sale, the stack gifted by a relative or family friend.
Those 3,000 records in my home are neatly placed. This is not a hoard, or so I tell myself. More than 2,000 are deep-cleaned, but far too many wait their turn in the queue — and the rule is, they can’t be played until they’re cleaned.
Plenty of enthusiasts, their accumulations much bigger and grander, would see nothing notable about my own assortment. It’s pedestrian, all things considered.
But I like looking at it sometimes, like a crow ogling his shiny object. Like Gollum hunched over his ring. It’s what I have to show for a decade and a half of hard labour, for obsessive digging, for headlong rushes into beckoning vinyl piles.
As a little boy, I trashed my father’s record collection with overeager and careless hands. That spinning record, and the music dug from its grooves, has always fascinated me — even when CDS and cassettes blanketed the globe and pushed vinyl into a dark and tiny corner.
There’s something special about wrapping fingers around those 12- by 12-inch cardboard squares; reading liner notes and lyrics as the disc whirls around and around and around ...
I don’t smoke, drink or do drugs. This black stuff is dope enough.
That note Elvis Presley hit on a hot summer night in 1958 can be yanked off my shelf, placed on a platter, and drawn from needle to arm to receiver to speaker to ear.