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A similar, yet longer term memory -- years ago, in the same life that is also the other life that was mine and that is the "you be you" of any past for any wo/man -- my buddy Brian had a turntable, and with it, he was able to expunge himself in all the used record shops of Boston, he was able to take that city and make it come across the country with him to California because that city was the shops where the circular shapes of tender, imprinted grooves held their secret lives in dazzling silence. I carried on a secret war with him, I carried myself across time and space by refusing to join him, I pulled a "u-ee" and went in the other direction, towards CDs (which, at that time, were the new best next thing on earth, since they would LAST FOREVER). What's sad (and another kind of memory, that of the past sadness of something that is passed over in time) is that those records he bought were records that CDs would never become, because records are to be forgotten, while CD's, which LAST FOREVER, become a reason for Bryan Adams, for example, to give us 75 minutes of unbroken stardom to gaze into and become dulled from. But Brian would show me a record he found in his wanderings across town -- always something that he was proud to show me, and always something I would have wanted to own but had decided I never could -- and I would REMEMBER IT. Always. Even now. Even later, when I'm too old to remember the name of that girl I copied out Black Sabbath lyrics for as a token of my gnarled heart.
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But, today is today, which means turntables don't fall from the sky and into our preamps, even though the sky is more wounded than ever and less things stay there than ever. I can't easily walk down the street and trip over an inexpensive record player without finding myself in a part of town where the record player would matter much less than my making my way home, NOW. So, I amazon'ed this Audio Technica for $79 and sat on the edge of the couch and waited and stared out the window into the street where the UPS van would come and lift me back up into the falling sky. Because I don't care about anything else than the record when I have the player. Because the player is the record, and the record is the thing I'll play and the turntable will fade into the sky, too, like a bird whose flight is more than the bird itself, is only the arc of the air on which it has flown.
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For the record -- pun intended -- CD's don't LAST FOREVER. At least one I have owned needed a complete clutch overhaul. I had a 1980 Honda Civic with a broken carburetor that lasted longer. Actually, if I remember correctly, the thing about CD's was not that they LASTED FOREVER so much as that THEY WOULDN'T WEAR OUT. What's funny to think of in response to that marketing fact is that wearing out a record was like proving your deep love of it, like Velveteen Rabbit-ing it into its own alternate reality, such that the crackle and hiss of the sunken, collapsed grooves meant that the music on that record had melded with your mind and become that very thing that walked around with you and thought two steps behind you. You wanted to wear out a record, but you wanted to do so simply by living with it, by playing it whenever there was time and space to have the sound of the world be the sound of that record. I don't actually think anyone anywhere ever bought a record and thought that it was a too-difficult-fact of the world that they may have had to one day replace this record because it might wear out if they loved it too much. In fact, no one has ever known how much they might really come to love a record until they bought it, brought it home, removed the tenuous plastic coating, and gently placed it on the rotating wheel, so how could anyone have ever worried that they might love it too much and kill it? A record isn't a person, so what could you ever worry about? Spilling bongwater? A CD is no improvement there, el capitan....
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The thing that Brian had, which is what Joe has, which I now have, with a turntable, is ACCESS. This access is to two basic and totally essential things in musical life -- one, to the fullest sound there has been of what has become recorded. While I declare that I think records "sound better" than CD's, I'm not very interested in that argument. I am happy to inform the world that what they sound, doubtless, scientific, is FULL. Like the sky with clouds, the sea with water, an ancient tiger with stripes, a contemporary novel with tropes. There is a totality to music on record that no other recorded medium provides. This is not the fascist view of the natural world, where you must do something specific in order to be anything at all; it is a totality of the sound that you then are finally in a position to interpret, let come to you, succumb to in the name of your ears and your eyes and your mouth and your hands, fill the ceiling with something you can't see but will try to see. The second bit of access is to the actual recordings themselves. There are the ones that you can find also on CD, the recordings that you can find in their native state, that nativity that is the reality of technological form informing the thing that has been mutated to ever meet that form's requirements. When records were "being made" -- and each era of recorded music, as well as the genre and styles that existed within each era in relation to each other and in relation to the eras themselves -- the recordings themselves were made with the record as the God of the form the music was to take, in terms of the TIME of of the music (how long is this going to go on for, anyway?) and the BREAKS in the music (when does one thing end and another begin? When's the intermission? When can I go outside and have a smoke and come back and have missed nothing?) All of this is built in to the music, just like turning the page is built in to the writing when you read a book, which means the writing of the book means the page must always be turned until there are no more pages for you to turn, which means there is no more writing, which means there is no more book, because a book is the writing that writes it, right? The access to the recordings also means access to the records that are now only scattered amongst the endless debris of the world, the debriefings of those documents in time when these things were made, reproduced, and abandoned, and which will never come in from the cold unless we gather them up in our solidarity to the remembrance of records past. It is access to the endangered species that are the beaten, battered, weathered cardboard squares with images and photos and illustrations and titles and informatives, all older than everyone who doesn't know them, all handled by multiple parties, all fingered and which put the finger of ownership right on you, right now, when you realize that if you don't take them, they will disappear and be melted into uncut ozone.
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As a perfect example, and essential epilogue to my turned table, where what was once on it is on the floor, and what was once under it is now the only thing I can attend to when I sit at it, I give you Alphonso Johnson's Spellbound. I'm sure you could find it on CD, but this is one of those recordings that is an ALBUM, from the cover of Alphonso with a Chapman Stick, to the wicked double tremoloed guitar kraut of Pat Thrall, to the vocals that seem both strained and restrained, stranded and standing tall. The whole thing could only have been made as an album where there are such things as rock and jazz and fusion and cars and sensitivity and industry and ambition and thoughtlessness and thoughtfulness piled into pure plastic form.
There is funk everywhere, but politely, with old timey moog synths that make you think of the old west, like a gunslinger with a gun just a little weirder than everyone else's. Now, the record, here, in MP3-post-CD-newspace, sounds super thin, fusion goof earnest world road trip innocent sunscreen. But on record, this whole thing is ALL BOTTOM, the only thing that goes out are your geeky lights because you realize that what's dark about this stuff is that there is actually muddy soul at the bottom of it, which the record lets hang in the air, lets distort and then fly off into dream drama realspace.
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I could always upload all my records, through my turntable, onto my laptop using its USB. When the martians come for me, I will make sure that I keep Alphonso Johnson in my space disaster kit and take everything with me to the moon. I'll find myself an old couch and have all my records eternally ready to be played into the purest crackle.
