Tomorrow is National Record Store Day. That is a noble thing, designed to celebrate independent places to find music on vinyl. It’s been sometime since I’ve had a working turntable as those things have been getting scarce. Hell, the store I bought my last one from went out of business sometime during the Clinton adminstration, the first one.
This has always been a bit of thing for me as I’ve always had a soundtrack, sometimes a little heavy on some repeats, but it has been fairly constant. The music industry has spent the past 15 years or so, maybe longer, shooting itself in the foot, and perhaps they haven’t noticed, but vinyl has been a growth industry. It will never be what it was, but you can’t help but think that was kind of nice.
In the proverbial day, it was a bit of an adventure to go foraging in Cavages, National Record Mart, New World, and the at the time expansive Record Theatre. As we’ve shifted to cd to downloads, something has gotten a little lost in the experience of finding music.
It takes a little more to discover new stuff. Fortunately, I travel in enough circles with friends who shared their love of new sounds, that might not be getting airplay or reviewed in Itunes. So, I can still find something to keep myself from falling into any musical ruts, at least not for too long.
But when vinyl evaporated, something disappeared. Now, I’ve never enough of an audiophile to always be able to tell what is the best format, at least until we got to the easily dissable Itunes downloads, but as the stores disappeared, so did the music hangout, the debates and discussions, the over the counter recommendations “if you liked that, you might be into…” kind of stuff.
Like being a car person at a track day, you miss the apples from Record Theatre and the like, and while I don’t have a turntable, I did stop in the current Record Theater on the last Record Store Day, picked up one of the special releases and might swing by tomorrow. While the days of my mom getting cool points for waiting for Springsteen tickets are gone, and checking out album covers has gone the way of mix tapes, the tunes do survive.
Might hear some good tunes along the way.
Mike's Pub 