We had a parking lot sale last week as a fundraiser for our Lions Club. As we sorted through all the donations, figuring out the best way to showcase the unique collection of donated treasures, I got distracted by four storage boxes filled with vinyl records and started flipping through them. Barry Manilow, The Carpenters, Tom Jones, Glen Campbell, The New Seekers – many of the names jumped out at me even if I didn’t recognize the cover art. I flipped over each album and scanned the tracks to see how many songs I knew. Turns out I’m a lot older than I think because these albums were filled with songs I remembered listening to on the radio as a kid.
There’s something magical about holding an album that you don’t from looking at a Spotify playlist. Maybe it’s the elaborately staged artwork on the front and back cover, like The Osmonds record I discovered, where the five brothers are standing in a line, waist-deep in a farm field, arms crossed, wearing coordinating dress shirts. The back of the cover shows them “growing” to knee-high and on the inside sleeve artwork, they’re fully grown and standing on top of the dirt. That kind of silly creativity didn’t translate well to 8-tracks or cassettes.
I remember being infatuated with my mom’s Neil Diamond “Double Gold” album, where Neil is on the cover staring moodily into the distance looking like what I imagined Beethoven might look like had he been a young man in the early 1970s. Since it was a double album (twice the music!) it had a big photo on the inside cover of him sitting casually on a stone staircase surrounded by a whole bunch of neighborhood kids who looked to be around my age. I would listen to “Kentucky Woman” and “I’m A Believer” and just stare at his handsome face.
The first record I ever bought was a “K-Tel Presents” collection, filled with popular songs of the moment, advertised on TV and sold by mail if you knew how to send a money order or pay C.O.D, neither of which I knew how to do. Luckily, I found a copy at the drugstore and carefully carried it home. We had a wooden stereo console in the living room, a piece of furniture so large our goldfish aquarium sat on top of it. I put the record on the player, pulled the power lever, and practiced my disco steps on the living room carpet, being careful not to jump around too much and make the needle skip and scratch it.
All these years later, we’ve gone through multiple format changes: 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, MP3s and now streaming. Each format claims to be an improvement over the previous version –more portable, better sound, and now with streaming, pretty much every song you could ever want whenever you want to hear it. But lately, I’ve noticed vinyl records popping up on store shelves. It’s funny how things come around again.
As I helped carry the heavy boxes of records out to the sale, I wondered if anyone would want these slightly musty, old albums. Turns out they were a big hit. While we didn’t sell them all, a number found new homes, either as future wall art or as a trip down memory lane. I missed one friend’s text to save The Monkees album I’d posted on Facebook. It was sold by the time I read her message. I set aside a few nostalgic albums for myself. It’s fun to hold memories of your childhood in your hands again, even if you don’t have a record player anymore.
Prescott-area resident Kelly Paradis is the Prescott Evening Lions Club president and community liaison for Good Samaritan Home Health, Hospice and Marley House. She loves listening to and writing stories about life.