I didn’t have a large record collection growing up. I don’t remember our family having a ton of extra money. We had a place to live and food to eat, but not a lot of extras. I’m still trying to figure out how mom afforded that 10-speed bicycle for my 12th birthday.
A trip to the record store was a rare treat — made more rare if one of us was headed there to purchase a full-length LP.
We’d played those flimsy 45s included as National Geographic or had been given Sesame Street records by friends, teachers or relatives as gifts, and made our way to yard sales or thrift stores for the old stuff.
However, we simply didn’t accumulate many of our own newer, FM radio-publicized albums. It wasn’t like when our favorite artists released a new one, we were down at the local record store on the release date to check it out. For one, I was born on the tail end of the record era, so cassettes were starting to become prevalent, but even with cassettes, I didn’t get new albums regularly until at least 1988 or so — when compact discs started to flourish.
The LP has been the most grand and majestic way music has been presented so far. Of the five formats from my lifetime — records, eighth-tracks, cassettes, CDs and digital music — the record LP is the largest and most cumbersome to store or transport.
Records required the second-most care, with CDs being the most high-maintenance, can be identified at a great distance and is meant to be heard from beginning to end. It’s a grand production.
I was thinking of records leading up to and during the Lynch Mob concert I attended at this year’s Iowa State Fair. One of the first LPs of new, popular music I owned outright was Dokken’s “Tooth and Nail.” Having somehow not seen the band play live while George Lynch was its guitarist in the 1980s and having never seen Lynch Mob until 2016, it was a dream come true to finally hear a “guitar hero” whose licks I had first heard with the crackle of vinyl in the background.
Talking about a record collection makes someone sound old. Hopefully, always makes a person sound educated on how to care for music and art. If someone wanted to record an album in 1975, that person needed to either be rich or be talented enough and play ball enough with record companies to get one of them to bankroll a recording session and tour.
This provided a higher benchmark of talent to reach. Now, anyone with a fair amount of home software and hardware can record, meaning there’s no longer a need to hone the craft and develop an original sound before putting songs out for the public.
Lynch’s music is what I’d call five-medium worthy: It’s worth purchasing again in new formats. Maybe someday soon, when technology allows for music to be embedded in DNA, I’ll load some Lynch Mob or classic Dokken songs there, too — though I think the music is already in my blood.
Records didn’t last long. I have a handful of originals from my youth and some others I repurchased along the way, but really, most folks who played records as children or in their teen or young adult years destroyed them. While the form wasn’t’ the most durable, the memories buried deep in the grooves of those LPS and 45s will last forever.
Contact Jason W. Brooks
at jbrooks@newtondailynews.com