AJ the Helper
I first began collecting albums (you remember them, don’t you: vinyl records that held approximately 40 minutes worth of music?) back in the late 1960s. My mom belonged to the Columbia Record Club and let me order a couple of records off her membership. If you’re over fifty, you probably belonged to Columbia or RCA or one of the other record clubs at one time or another in your youth, am I right? You know, the ones that had ads in every magazine printed back in the day, including Boys Life? The concept sounded simple enough and, well, too good to be true. For a buck you could select five or six stereo LPs (that’s a “long playing” record to you whippersnappers) to be delivered to your doorstep via the U.S. Postal service. You were then required to buy a set number of albums over a limited period, say three years, at greatly inflated prices. If you failed to buy the other records, Columbia or RCA would have a bill collector hunt you down and corner you and beat you with a big stick. Or something close to that in terms of verbal and telephonic harassment. Despite the downside, my mom was a member and, as I said, let me pick out a couple of albums when I was in junior high.
Being a patriotic seventh grader and not yet opposed to the war in Vietnam, the first record I ordered was Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets (for more on Sadler, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sadler). I know, I know. I had poor taste in music. But Sadler’s corny single, “The Ballad of the Green Beret” rose to No. 1 in the charts in 1966. I bought my copy (which has since been lost in various life changes and moves) in 1967, when I was still a wide-eyed young Boy Scout. But you know what? I can still sing the words and as bad as a vocalist as Sgt. Sadler was, he had the right to say what he believed in song just like those protesting the war, including the author of my favorite set of anti-war lyrics of all time, Steve Goodman (“The Ballad of Penny Evans”; see http://www.ivorytowerz.com/2006/12/ballad-of-penny-evans.htm) had the right to have their say as well. We can debate Vietnam some other time. Suffice it to say, when Sadler’s album arrived, I learned every damn word to his anthem of service and patriotism. Every damn word.
The second album I bought with my mom’s subscription was more mainstream: Dave Clark Five’s American Tour (1964). I wasn’t a Beatles fan but I did like Clark’s “Glad All Over” which, in retrospect, is really a knock-off of the Beatles sound and style. I bought the album, helping my mother meet her quota and avoid the debt collectors knocking on our door.
My Godmother, Pauline, who now lives with my old man (long story, buy me a beer and I’ll tell it!) had two vivacious daughters, Susie and Patty, both much older than me, who bought me my first “real” rock and roll record: Crown of Creation by the Jefferson Airplane. I especially liked the first song on the disc, “Lather”, the story of a thirty-year old who realizes, in sudden fashion, he has to grow up. You can listen to this great tune at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGzJJUQbjdM. I was never a huge JA fan but I still have the record, carted with me from my family’s first house on Chambersburg, to the place my old man still owns along the banks of Miller Creek, to the college apartment I shared with Rich, a pot smoking chemist I met while working at General Cleaning, to my basement apartment with my high school buddy Wayne in Bloomington, to apartments I shared with my new bride in the Cities, to our first house on St. Marie Street in Duluth, to the two homes we’ve owned in the country. That album is still in my collection, buried in a cupboard of the great room of our home along the banks of the Cloquet River. I haven’t listened to it in years. But I know it’s still near perfect, unscratched, waiting to be played.
Which brings me to the photo at the top of this blog. Four years ago, my three oldest sons (or maybe it was just Matt; I forget) bought me an Ion digital turntable. You’ve seen these slick gizmos, right? Record players (shows how old I am!) that can convert the analog sound of a stereo LP into a digital sound wave computers recognize. Essentially, the technology lets you take old albums and make them into new MP3 files so you can haul your favorite old tunes along with you on your iPhone or iPad or iMac wherever you go. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast. When a person doesn’t use the device for four years (I think my son Chris tried it once, three years ago), guess what? By the time I got around to trying the gizmo, proudly setting up my laptop and CD recorder/player in the extra room of our house where the turntable resides, the device’s software was out-of-date. Expired. Undaunted, I went on the web and downloaded the updated version of EZ Vinyl Converter and then spent five fruitless hours pounding my head against the wall. Oh, I was able to pull a track off the album I was using as a test run, Alchemy: Dire Straits Live and get it to play. But as soon as I wanted to pull another track off, the whole damn thing got messed up. I gave up.
Jersey Devil LP
The album to the left is a rare 1972 recording of Bruce Springsteen and some of his mates, including the Big Man (Clarence Clemons) but not the complete E Street Band. You can hear drunks in the background (the LP was recorded on a shitty tape recorder in a bar) and there’s lots of popping and hissing and unintended distortion. But hey, it’s the Boss, right? Anyway, I thought it was an album worthy of spending another day with the Ion turntable trying to figure things out. So yesterday after church, I plugged everything in again and put the disc on the turntable. After about two hours of making mistake after mistake (all four of my sons would have solved the riddle of the device’s software in five seconds) I finally figured it out: All I had to do was uncheck the “automatically separate tracks” box and simply do that task manually for recording to go smoothly. Man, what an idiot!
Why Springsteen you ask? Well, good question. I first heard the E Street Band back in 1978. I was at a law school party. Someone kept playing Springsteen’s 1975 triumph, Born to Run, over and over and over. I wasn’t smitten. I wasn’t impressed. Back then, I was a CSN&Y and Eagles fan. The Big Man’s sax threw me. I’d never liked the Stones because of their reliance on brass and that prejudice leaked into my dislike of the E Street Band. But over time and with the purchase of The River (1980: shortly before I graduated from William Mitchell) I became a fan. And then, when I got around to buying Nebraska (1982), I was hooked. That’s why yesterday, in addition to converting the old Springsteen bootleg album, I converted my vinyl copy of Nebraska into digital format. And then I tackled the double live album by Dire Straits. I was still hard at it, five hours after I’d started, when my grandson AJ stopped over for dinner. That’s him, at the top of this blog, helping grandpa move into the 21st century.
Thanks, AJ, for the help, and Bruce, for the music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS28SrKEL68
Peace.
Mark
