Last weekend, a friend brought over a bunch of sealed box sets of music from Warner Records as a donation to an event our theatre company was having. He also presented me with a gift that his wife had gotten for me a while ago but hadn’t had a chance to give me yet:  a sealed box set of all eight of Roxy Music’s studio albums, on LP. This was a reissue from a few years back; when the set originally came out, circa 1985, on Deutsche Grammophone, I had ordered one (from Europe, I believe) for a then-unconscionable amount of money.

I took the new set inside and showed it to my 18-year-old daughter. She wanted to see inside, so I opened it up and slid out the albums. I immediately noticed that the vinyl was far thicker than it was the last time I’d bought vinyl; that would’ve been about 1979, when records were so thin you could’ve used them to wrap leftovers in. My daughter found it even more remarkable, though, because it turned out she’d never seen a record before.

“You’ve never seen a record before?” I asked. I felt like I’d uncovered a new dinosaur in an archaeological dig. She just shook her head no.

I took one of the albums, Manifesto, over to our turntable. To some of us, Manifesto is notorious for having two versions:  the one with the good (original) version of “Angel Eyes,” and the one with the bad discofied version that annoys us mightily. Decades ago, I’d had a cassette tape version of the album that had the “real” version of “Angel Eyes”; when I’d bought the album on CD some time later, I was horrified to find that this splendid, dirty, nasty-sounding song had now been rereleased with a galloping disco beat and cloying harp sounds behind it. Poor Phil Manzanera was still slashing away at his guitar, but now he was trapped in a Bee Gees nightmare. I wanted to see which version of the song might be on this album from the new boxed set.

First, I had to clear stuff off our turntable. It isn’t really a turntable, or not much of one; it’s one of those cheap all-in-one units designed to look retro, but with every component vacuum molded from recycled foam cups or something. Here, it’s one of these:

I call this the Crosley Crummy Sound F, because that’s what you get out of it. Yes, theoretically it will play a CD, or a cassette tape, or an album, or the radio, and sound of a sort will come out of it. It’s an all-in-one that my beloved wife, who musically speaking has a cowbell for an ear, proudly brought home one day from a department store. The music it generates sounds like it should come with a monkey on a chain. Most exasperatingly, all of those little press buttons arrayed across the middle don’t light up and have tiny raised lettering that blends perfectly with the background, meaning that those labels cannot be read even with our overhead lamp on, and so every button pushed is a mystery. Whenever I’m instructed to do something with this sound box, I have to get a flashlight to see what those buttons say.

The stuff now cleared off the machine’s top, I lifted the lid. Emma watched in fascination. She hadn’t seen a turntable either.

“Never?” I said.

“Audrey had one in her house,” she said, invoking a childhood friend, “but nobody ever turned it on.”

That was understandable. When’s the last time I played an 8-Track tape?

I put the record on and it started spinning and playing and she oohed over it for a moment, and then I went on to do whatever it was I was going to do. I came back about 20 minutes later and heard nothing happening. I went over and looked and the record had finished playing but was still on side one.

“You know you have to flip it over, right?”

“Oh.” She hadn’t known.

So I showed her how to flip it over. Then I showed her the lever to lift and drop the needle. I started side two. Some time later, she asked if she could switch the record — “Sure!” I called back — and heard the album Siren start mid-song.

I took a look. “Um, you see those grooves?” I asked. “Those are the spaces between the songs. You missed the beginning.”

“Oh!” she said.

So I showed her more carefully how to place the needle, while an image came to my mind of the guys from “American Pickers” showing somebody in a barn in the woods exactly how a Harley from a hundred years ago would have to be hand-cranked.

I couldn’t think of anything else to explain about the record or the record player — I’d explained that records needed to be flipped in order to hear both sides; that the needle needed to be raised and lowered via that lever; that the spaces in the tracks denoted the separation between songs; and I’d cautioned her not to jump up and down or she’d put a scratch in the record. I strained to think what could possibly be left to explain, but couldn’t come up with anything. But as I moved away, I saw her looking closely at the inscrutable indicators on the front of the unit.

Finally, she asked, “How do you know when the song is done?”

“Huh?”

“How do you know when the song is done?”

I couldn’t figure out what that meant — until finally I realized that she was thinking there’d be an LED readout, like for a CD:  “Track 1.” “Track 2.” And so forth.

“You don’t hear it any more,” I said. And went to get the newspaper.

Two last things:

1. I was delighted to learn that, yes, thank you Lord, the LP has the original version of “Angel Eyes”; and
2. It’s been a week now and nobody has played any more records

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2017 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Music, Roxy Music, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.