The Life Journey of a LP Collection

 I recently sold my old LP collection to a local shop. I got real money ($250) out of it and the buyer said he was happy I came by and happy to get the records. It made me think about the journey this collection has made…

The oldest records in my collection were from my Mom and Dad. They were 45’s that they probably picked up when they were in the Navy during the Korean war. I remember Elvis’ “Don’t be Cruel”. My first album was a monaural version of the Serendipity singers LP with “Don’t let the Rain come down” that my Mom got me when I was in kindergarten. We kids must have had a record player, but I don’t remember it. I can’t imagine my Dad let me use his system to play “Don’t let the Rain Come Down” for 10 hours a day out in the living room.

Over the next couple of years I added some more albums that had current soft classics. These may have been things my Mom liked that she thought I would enjoy. They were LP’s with one big hit: Petula Clark “Downtown”. The Seekers with “Hey There Georgie Girl”. The original Sound Track for “Mary Poppins” (Which explains why I know all of the words for ‘Let’s go Fly a Kite’). 

Right about now the collection made its first big move as it got packed up and shipped from Virginia Beach, VA to Monterey, California. I think this was a time of personal 45’s that I got from listening to American Top 40: ‘Crystal Blue Persuasion’, The Archies doing…. Something. Sargent Barry Sadler, “Green Beret” (God, where did that memory come from?), Elvis “in the Ghetto”. But no Beatles. They were too strange for me, my brother was playing them.

Then the collection moved to Japan. This was a big jump for it. All across the ocean. Not only that, but living in Japan had some big advantages. Back then Japan was the place to get cool (and inexpensive) electronics. The Yen was 360 to the Dollar and an American living in Japan could get some really good deals. My Dad got me a self contained stereo system. It was record play and radio (and Amp) that lived in a nice little cabinet. I could put 5 or 6 records on the player and let them go. It was great. If only I had 5 or 6 records….

Then my Dad went to Taiwan on his ship (The USS Catskill). While there he wandered around and found a shop selling cheap (counterfeit) LPs and he bought some and brought them home. OK, he brought several hundred. I mean, all these albums. Most of them were things that only my father would like but quite a few made it into my collection: Zager and Evans (“In the Year 2525”). Bobbie Goldsboro (“Honey”). Simon and Garfunkel (“The Graduate”). 

After only 9 months in Japan my collection got tired and up and moved to Guam. What a mistake. You can’t find any Albums on Guam and there is only one radio station to listen to and that is armed forces radio. My exposure to new American music pretty much ceased for a year. 

Then, in December of 1971, my collection moved back to the States. In fact, it moved all the way to the East Coast to settle for awhile in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly new music was assailing me. What was the big song on the Radio with Casey Kasem? “American Pie”. Talk about a hard first song to pick up and sing along with the kids. I remember not being able to predict when the chorus would start. Lots of songs going on in High School, but I did’t have a lot of money to spend on them and so my collection didn’t change much. I remember my brother getting records, though (he had a job). He was listening to The Beatles and (Horror of Horrors) Alice Cooper. (Funny, I love Million Dollar Babies now). 

Then I went off to College in Boston and left my records behind. I was sad and missed them. My new College friends all had their collections. So my Dad built a crate and loaded my cool cabinet record player and all of my records into it and put it on a train from Charleston to Boston. I don’t know if this is still a thing, but back then you could send pretty big things from station to station on the railroad. Trick was, I had to go to the train station in Boston (North End?) and pick it up. And I was living in the Dorm and didn’t have a car and certainly wasn’t going to pay for a taxi. So I borrowed one of those funny 4 caster/wheel flat hauling carts (with a tow rope) and pulled it across the Harvard Bridge and through the city over the train station, loaded it up, and then pulled the whole thing back to my Dorm at MIT. 

Now my collection entered into a new stage of life. I had a little money from the odd jobs I would get around school and there were HUGE selections of records available at the MIT and Harvard COOP and at various record stores around Boston. Oh, and there was also my friends and Dorm mates. It was very common to borrow and share records. At first this was just to listen to each other’s music, but it wasn’t long until everyone was getting cassette players and copying each others music.

One of my friends freshman year, probably John Thayer, turned me on to Gordon Lightfoot with the double album “Gord’s Gold”. I still listen to it all the time (though now it is a digital store on my home server). Other albums showing up Freshman year: “There goes Rhymon Simon”, “Boston”. 

Then all sorts of new music: Meatloaf “Bat of out Hell”, A bunch of Elvis Costello that was half price at the COOP (including “My Aim is True”). The other Paul Simon album, The Who with “Quadrophenia” (which I actually first heard at Scout Camp, but never mind that). Quadrophenia is a special album. It is a 2 disc set but it is arranged such that you can stack the albums and play them and the songs come out in the right order for the full story of the Album. So side 1 and 3 are one LP and side 2 and 4 are on the other disk. 

Then the Cars came out with a couple of albums real quick which was essential for my emotional break up with my Senior Year ‘love of my life’. Nothing like “Best Friend’s Girl” to gear up for angry and heartbroken studying for finals. 

And then. Just like that. The LP Collection had to leave the Dorm and go out into the big world. Which, in this case, was an apartment in Arlington where Jon was living whilst doing Graduate school. Hey, still had the same record stores, though now Charles Laquidara and The Big Mattress (WBCN) was getting me into more avante guarde areas: “Mr Roboto”,“Turning Japanese”, “I don’t like Mondays”, The Fools, “My Sharona”, The Rouches, Citadel. Tommy. So much to listen to. So much fun. I also got rid of the cabinet player and got a direct drive Technics turntable and new amplifier. I was still using the Crate my Dad had built to hold everything, though…

Men at Work ,“Who can it be now”?

Pink Floyd ,“The Wall”

Jethro Tull, “Thick as a Brick”

Now Time to get a Job for real. Pack up the now pretty big collection. 2 small moving boxes, and move to Dallas. Real Job. Real Money. Can afford real things. I got a nice piece of furniture specially made to hold the turn table, a bunch of albums, and drawers just the right size to store cassette tapes. At this time cassettes were the main source of music in ones car. Don’t leave them sit on the dashboard in the hot Texas sun, however, they will melt. 

Time for more thinking about growing up. Got a few albums from a new record label doing real music, Windham Hill records releasing things by George Winston and Ackerman. December. Passages. Guitar Samplers. More albums from The Who. Beethoven. Meatloaf looses his voice and so Jim has to do his own album with “Bad For Good”. Meat gets his voice back and does “Dead Ringer for Love”. Asia, Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Freeze Frame. 

Lost my job in Texas. Moved the collection to live on the beach in California. And a terrible thing happened. I got a CD player. 

So my collection effectively ceased to have importance. It went into its boxes and moved off into the attic. Poor thing. My record player went off with it. This was…. 1986. 

Music from 1957 to 1986. Lots of scratches. Lots of Genre. Lots of playing. They did come out a few years ago. I actually got the old turn table to work (though I had to find a new pre-amp) and hook it up to my computer and digitized the entire thing. Did you know that there are some classics you just can’t find on CD or digital download? Like the Serendipity Singers !!

So. One more big move. To Oregon. Sit around in a nice attic for 20 or 30 years and then. And then. And then there just comes a time when you have to let go. When you admit you are never going to try and get that turntable working again. When you admit that Radio Shack is out of business and you have no clue where to find a new pre-amp. When you wife is making you find a new place to store your boxes of albums because she wants her closet back for HER stuff. When you just have to take the 2 heavy boxes down the car and drive them across town and see if the nice guy at FastTrack records wants to buy them.

He does.

He looks them over for a day and offers $250. That is about $300 more than I thought I would get. That is around $5 a pound. So, more valuable than chicken legs. 

The check is in the mail. I will never see them again.

Bye Bye, Miss American Pie.

So Long Georgie Girl

With Tupence for Paper and String

You can have your own pair of wings

with your feet on the ground you’re a bird in flight….

With your first holding tight.

To the string of your Kite.

Major Logic vs Thanos

 So Thanos, can we talk for a moment.

You can not defeat me, Major Logic.

Of course not. Nor do I want to defeat you. I do, however, think you should be informed of the huge con you are falling for.

Con? No one Cons me. I am too smart. Listen to how well I speak English.

Yes. Well, that aside, you are almost certainly being conned.

You intrigue me with your courage. You may speak.

Great. So. Let’s start with the so called Infinity stones. There are 6 of them, I believe?

Yes. Everyone knows this.

And what is the source of this information?

What do you mean?

Well, the stones were created at the beginning of the universe. 6 have been found. How do we know that there are only 6 of them?

Everyone knows there are 6. Ask around. It is common knowledge.

Ok. Think of it this way. The big bang occurs and the stones get thrown out into the Universe.

Yes, for me to find.

Sure. Into the universe randomly, because at the time of the big bang, there was no intelligence in the universe to create non-random. 

Ah…. Well…. I am a little uneasy with the no-intelligence thing. My base leans in another direction…

Ok. But thrown out there with great force and violence, probably in different directions.

Which is why they ended up all over the Entire Galaxy !!

Exactly. The Galaxy. Let’s do a thought experiment. Lets say the universe is a sphere and we chop up that sphere into semi-circular slices.

Like one slices up an Apple?

Yes, very good. Like an apple. How many slices would you think we would have to make such that a slice was about the width that would contain our galaxy?

I don’t know that. Quite a few I would think. More than 10.

Oh yes. In fact, I don’t know either, but my experience tells me that no matter what number I choose, the answer is really a lot bigger. Because the universe is so big. So I am going to choose a billion. A billion slices and our Universe would fit in there. In fact, it would just be a grain of sand in this huge thin slice of the universe. Lots of other Galaxys would fit in there also. Millions of other Galaxies.

Can we move this along, please? I see Captain America over there waiting to get punched.

Don’t worry about the Captain, he is very happy to sit there and show off his new beard. My point, however, is that, everything being equal, there is like a one in a Million Billion chance that any stone would end up in our Galaxy. And that number to the 6^th power that all would end up in the same Galaxy. 

But here they are.

Yes. Which implies that either someone put them here on purpose, which probably means they are fake, or there are a lot more infinity stones than you think. The most likely thing is that they are fake and someone is selling you a bill of goods. 

Who?

I don’t know. Who benefits from your actions?

Well, everyone does. Well, half of everyone. 

Right. Let’s go there. Your plan is to save life in the Universe by killing half of it. Oh, by the way, this is a little vague, are you going to kill half of all life or just Intelligent life.

Oh, just half the people.

The People? So you have a good definition of what people are?

Sure.

And the stones just take your definition and read your mind and do what you want done?

Yes

That seems very simplistic. But that’s OK. Lets go with that. So you kill half of the People and then the Universe is saved.

Correct.

I don’t know about other worlds but here on earth, the people are humans. Do you know how fast the human race doubles? How fast it would take us to replace the half that you kill?

Ah….. What?

Historically, and I mean for thousands of years, the human race has doubled its population about once every 30 years. 30 years. So if you kill half of us, we will be back to the same huge problem that we have now in just 30 years. Other people on other planets might be a little faster or a little slower. Still, you do all of this nonsense and you buy the Universe around 30 years. Big deal. 

But…. But…. I can not fail. I must save the Universe.

Then you need something better than death. Hell, a pandemic and war can bring death. You need to snap your fingers and bring enlightened self interest. You need universal health care and birth control. You need massive health and reproduction education programs. You need people willing to live in a long term sustainable manner.

But…. Those are all common sense. One doesn’t need the infinity stones for those things.

Oh. Wanna bet?