Vinyl salute
A music lover searching for lost memories stumbles upon a second-hand stall where records get a second life.
WHEN my family moved back to Kuala Lumpur in 1987 from abroad, our collection of vinyl records had to go amidst the shuffle of moving. I swapped cassettes and CDS for MP3 players and mobile phones. As a listener I sacrificed substance for convenience and music receded more into the background.
To regain my lost connection to the heart and soul of discovering music, I began to visit second-hand record shops in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. But those establishments were too off-putting to the casual buyer. If you were not looking for limited editions or rarities, the staff acted as if you were wasting their time.
I didn’t go to these shops to discover music, but to recover lost memories.
I should have started searching in the most obvious place nearest to home – the neighbourhood mall in one of Petaling Jaya’s satellite suburbs.
Every weekend the mall holds a flea market outside the food court on the ground floor. There, traders and customers get to compete with festive sales and the ardour of the lunch-time crowd.
The bustle of the flea market faded away as we flipped through the albums stacked in cardboard boxes, hoping to have our patience rewarded. Old records are often dismissed as junk, but we treasured the routine every week.
We were not lonely, obsessive record collectors. Like archaeologists at an excavation site, we gathered with other enthusiasts, heads bent over the tables as we sorted through the vinyl records resting in their sleeves.
The stalls – little more than a row of folding tables crammed beneath the escalators – had no names, except for one called Record Rescue, which sold second-hand vinyl records.
Every weekend the signs stuck onto the boxes at Record Rescue read, “Everything Must Go”. The goods-sold-cannot-beexchanged policy ensured nothing was returned. But some LPS stayed put under the constant presence of Maxwell, the stall owner.
I never got to know Maxwell’s full name. He liked to talk to his customers if he saw them often enough.
Ever since the day I commented that he shared the same name as a brand of cassettes, Maxwell would greet me with a vigorous handshake. He appeared to be in his mid-fifties, Chinese, with the chewed cap of a ballpoint pen perpetually wedged between his lips as he took notes and orders.
He had a prosthetic foot; the metal shaft was visible whenever the hem of his grey jeans rode up as he sat on a battered red plastic stool. An accident at the workplace, I overheard him say to a regular customer.
I saw a “Help Wanted” sign taped to the side of a box, but no assistant ever appeared. The sign remained taped for several weeks before I asked him if he needed one. “I don’t need help.” “What about your family?” “My two sons went to the (United) States. But they never come home.” “Not once?” Maxwell went back to checking his inventory. “I send them money but they don’t send any back.” I never asked him about his children again. Maxwell dealt with completists by directing them to online sources. Most of his customers were in their thirties or forties and they were also searching for a lost memory. But most were unaware of that until confronted by the covers or track-listings which reminded them of connections they had forgotten.
I smiled and cringed at the mullets, platform shoes and shoulder pads on album artworks of the 1970s and 1980s. One-hit wonders and defunct bands emerged from the boxes.
A woman burst into tears when she found a lost .45 single by The Bay City Rollers, All of Me Loves All Of You. She told Maxwell that the song was playing on the radio when her late husband proposed to her.
One Saturday, Maxwell changed the label stuck on a crate from “Rarities” to “Music You May Have Thrown Away”. People shoved each other for a chance to look inside the box, until he hastily removed it and spread its contents out on a spare table.
Six months after I started going to Record Rescue, Maxwell failed to turn up at the flea market. Out of habit, his regular customers would wait at the vacant spot under the escalators, but he never came back. According to the other stall owners, he had suffered a stroke.
Maxwell was not the only casualty. I was sorry to see that the search for second-hand music had slowly stopped.
I like to think we were salvaging those albums by saving them from the threat of obscurity. The album covers are now outdated, but before we had the Internet, those images were our sole link to the artistes. Analogue records had not yet been obliterated by digital formats, just as stairs had not been replaced by elevators.
Maxwell used converters to compress each track of the vinyl records to the digital format of his customer’s choice. But just as you have to climb the staircase step by step, the tracks on a vinyl album require the listener to experience them in the correct sequence, with a sense of ritual.
In a world that is noisier by the day, my weekly visits to Record Rescue provided me with a rare refuge.
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