" Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago."
~ Tom Waits
What do you do while you’re listening to records? Are they background music to your everyday activities? Or do you have one of those purpose-built listening rooms with the audiophile system and the comfortable seating in the sweet spot for total immersion?
I ask as a way to point out that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. The proper way is what works for you.
Regardless, there’s something to be said for living life in 20-minute intervals. LP’s provide somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes worth of music on each side, which seems just about right.
That’s a good amount of time to focus on one thing or another, and about the right timing to get up and stretch your legs to flip the record.
My turntables are set up adjacent to our kitchen and living space, so I’m in the habit of having something spinning while we’re cooking.
Mornings are usually Jazz, typically instrumentals. I find that Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann, Lonnie Smith, or perhaps Charlie Byrd set the stage for caffeine and breakfast quite well.
The dinner hour calls for something more funky — maybe Ramsey Lewis or Gene Ammons, or deeper into the Blues with the likes of Muddy Waters or Albert King.
Lately it’s been all about our favorite 1€ flea market find, La Compagnie Creole, an Afro-Caribbean group with a huge following here in France. We just scored tickets to their 50th anniversary concert coming up in Vendôme!
Today I’ve got ZZ Top blasting in the background while I write this. We bid a fond farewell to long-time drummer Frank Beard who passed away last month. May he rest in peace, sunglasses on, sticks in hand.
Which brings me to my anecdote for the day. My start as an amateur stagehand would’ve been in about 1978, before anyone in Colorado had heard of punk rock, and hip-hop was still far over the horizon.
ZZ Top were just starting to make it big and they were booked as the headliner at the county fair in Grand Junction. I had signed on as a minimum wage helper setting up barricades.
I’d been rocking the LP Fandango for a year or so by that point, but alas, I didn’t get to meet my heroes. The closest I got to them was filching a couple of beers backstage.
I still have the LP. Dropping the needle takes me right back to that hot dusty afternoon. I’d like to think the same thing can happen one day for a young fan of a touring band who owns the record now.
Vinyl has some weird way of holding a connection across time and space. It’s something to hold on to.
And with that — onward through the fog!
If you haven’t checked out a copy of Vinyl Vitality yet, I’m running a $2.99 special for the DRM-free e-book for the next week or so, and they’ve got the first three or four chapters live on the sales page as a preview.
(This is all to encourage you to check it out, and hopefully order a print copy or put it under someone’s tree for Christmas.)
Thanks for reading, and happy New Moon! Rock-on, or rave-on, whatever the case may be. I’ll see you back here in two weeks on the Full Moon!
M+
Mark Metz
Analog Press
Lunar Note #3
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Print edition is officially published!
Soon to be in bookstores, now out on Amazon.
Check out the preview, order a copy, and for the love of vinyl
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Damn right, Mr Waits…
He heads up Chapter 42 — “A Lifeline to the Before Times”. You might say that time waits for no one, but a good record will wait for you.
What Tom‘s talking about tracks with the idea that analog media is somehow a carrier wave of consciousness.
It blows my mind when I pull out a record that was pressed in the 1950s and the sound comes to life exactly as it went down in the studio some 70 years ago.
The fact is, we have no idea how long a properly-cared-for vinyl record will last. Decades obviously, centuries possibly, millennia maybe? Only our great-great grandkids will know.
In the book, I talk about a phenomenon where vinyl collectors will often hit a phase where they start listening to the music that was in the air around the time that their parents conceived them.
Discovering long-passed recording artists in the dollar bin that transmit the zeitgeist of the time you were born across time and space is an analog experience no digital file can provide.
Keep ’em spinning, and big ups till next time!
M+