So many ways to hear music

Some kids collected stamps. Or marbles. Or coins. I collected records.

Those 78s I acquired at a local furniture store seemed like gems to me. I grooved on Patti Page, Guy Mitchell, the Four Aces and Frankie Laine. In retrospect, I don’t think they were as good as I thought.

Once, in 1954, a kid came up to me, lifted a record out of the bin and whispered, “You’ve got to try this.” He said it illicitly, like he was pushing drugs or something.

So I bought it. It was “Shake Rattle and Roll,” by Bill Haley and the Comets. I had no idea he was onto something there.

I did not become a rock ‘n’ roll fan, but I did buy Elvis Presley’s early records. I was able to play only the second half of “Heartbreak Hotel” after accidentally taking a chunk out of the fragile 78.

I transitioned to 45s for awhile, but the big change came with 33 1/3 LP (long playing)  records, which allowed much longer songs than the other formats.

I got records from the Columbia Record Club. When my first record arrived broken, my dad secretly called the company and got them to send me a new one.

My collection grew. I packed at least a hundred  of them in the back seat of my car when I drove from San Francisco to a new job in Delaware.  Not surprisingly my shock absorbers and rear tires gave out before I reached Denver.

Like everyhone else, I switched later to cassette tapes and CDs, which were easier to handle. Of course, as soon as I gave all of my LPs to Goodwill, vinyl became popular again because of its superior sound.

Well, superior if you had a top-of-the-line record player. When their price came down to $100, I bought one, but I never played it. So what was the point?

Years before I parted with LPs, Pickett asked me to do something about her uncle’s collection of 78s from the 1930s and 1940s, still stored in Cluster Springs. I took them to a record dealer in Richmond, who gave me $200 for the complete set without even looking them over.

“The real market today is in jazz LPs from the 1950s and 1960s,” he told me. Really? I still had maybe 50 of them! Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck among them.

So I brought a bunch to the dealer, but he found that most of them were too scratched up to be re-sold. When I bought them, I was a teenager playing them in a rec room.

But he was fascinated with one that was pink. It was Cal Tjader’s Latin Concert album.

“Uh, what’s this?” He asked me, pointing to a hole in the record. “Oh, that’s a dart hole,” I said. “I wasn’t a very good player.”

We looked at each other without saying a word, and I left with my records, feeling stupid.

Today I don’t have any records. I switched to itunes for awhile because you could pick and choose individual songs rather than full albums. Now I listen to just about all of my music on YouTube. I do have a costly subscription to avoid ads, but I can find just about anything there.

But what do I want to hear right now? I haven’t a clue. What’s that box in the corner? Oh, a radio? I’ll just listen to that!

 

 

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Oh, I also collected baseball cards. I probably got so many cavities from the gum, they may have paid for a dentist’s retirement.

I had two shoeboxes full of cards in the mid-1950s. My mom gave them all way when I got older. Among them were several Hank Aaron rookie cards. They would be selling now for up to $300,000. Mom!!!