Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past

Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past

Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past

Old Records Never Die: One Man's Quest for His Vinyl and His Past

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Overview

A Hudson Booksellers Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year, with foreword by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy

High Fidelity meets Killing Yourself to Live when one man searches for his lost record collection.

As he finds himself within spitting distance of middle-age, journalist Eric Spitznagel feels acutely the loss of… something. Freedom? Maybe. Coolness? Could be. The records he sold in a financial pinch? Definitely. To find out for sure, he sets out on a quest to find the original vinyl artifacts from his past. Not just copies. The exact same records: The Bon Jovi record with his first girlfriend's phone number scrawled on the front sleeve. The KISS Alive II he once shared with his little brother. The Replacements Let It Be he’s pretty sure, 20 years later, would still smell like weed.

As he embarks on his hero's journey, he reminisces about the actual records, the music, and the people he listened to it with—old girlfriends, his high school pals, and, most poignantly, his father and his young son. He explores the magic of music and memory as he interweaves his adventures in record-culture with questions about our connection to our past, the possibility of ever recapturing it, and whether we would want to if we could.

"Memories are far more indelible when married to the physical world, and Spitznagel proves the point in this vivid book. We love vinyl records because they combine the tactile, the visual, the seeable effects of age and care and carelessness. When he searches for the records he lost and sold, Spitznagel is trying to return to a tangible past, and he details that process with great sensitivity and impact."—Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of The Circle

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780698168046
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/12/2016
Sold by: Penguin Group
Format: eBook
Pages: 304
File size: 898 KB

About the Author

Eric Spitznagel writes for magazines like Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Men’s Health, Billboard, The Believer, and the New York Times Magazine, among many others. He’s the author of six books, one of which was translated into German and features a cat on the cover for no apparent reason. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son, the latter of whom wants to be a “mad scientist” when he grows up. (That’s now in print, so the author intends to hold him to it.)

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Eric Spitznagel

Think about the first song that meant something to you.

I don’t mean a song that just had a hummable melody and you knew all the lyrics because it was on the radio incessantly, and you were like “I love this song,” but you meant it like people mean “I love ice cream,” which is just something people feel about ice cream when they’re in the midst of eating it. But ice cream isn’t something you stay up late thinking about. You don’t argue about ice cream’s deeper meanings with your friends. You don’t obsess over ice cream because you feel like ice cream understands you in ways you didn’t think it was possible to be understood. Nobody says, “This is the ice cream I want eaten at my funeral.”

I’m talking about the kind of music that sinks into your pores, that enters your bloodstream and becomes part of your DNA. It’s the song that stuck by you when you felt abandoned or misunderstood, and you’re pretty convinced it was written specifically for you. When you hear people say “I love that song too,” you just smirk. What do they know of love? Their relationship with the song is a one-night stand—a summer fling at best—but you and this song, you’re soul mates.

When people challenge you with that hypothetical poser “If you could bring only one album to a desert island, what would it be?,” you always mention a certain record, because it’s got that song you’re pretty sure you could spend the rest of your earthly time listening to it on a constant loop, as you collected firewood and hunted for animals with crudely made spears and went slowly insane. That song, that particular arrangement of notes and words, would be all the comfort you needed as you died alone on a beach. But you don’t say that. You pretend it’s a difficult question, and it’s the first time you’re considering it, and you’re like, “Hmm, let me think about that.” You try to be all cool and casual about it, pretending that your feelings about the song aren’t a little bit inappropriate, and hearing it doesn’t automatically make you feel less alone in the universe, and if it didn’t exist, something about you would be different somehow.

Think about that song right now. Close your eyes and let those familiar chords drift through your head.

Is it there? Can you hear it?

What does it smell like?

Now, for some of you, what I just asked will make no sense. You think I’m talking gibberish. And that’s okay. You’re from a genera- tion that knows about music only as a digital thing. It isn’t something that can be touched or held. It’s not a physical thing. It’s in the ether. It’s on a screen and needs to be bitstream compliant. It’s all about megabytes and gigabytes and compression algorithms. It has to be downloaded or streamed or kept in a cloud.

Not so long ago, there were two audio formats: “That sounds good” and “Nope, sounds like an Alvin and the Chipmunks record.” That was all you needed to know. Now, when you get new music, you have to ask, “Am I going to need a LAME MP3 encoder to hear this?” Or “Does it have enough kilobits? Just 128? I accept nothing less than 640!”

MP3s, or M4As or WMAs or AIFFs or OGGs, whatever your digital format of choice, doesn’t smell like anything. The device that plays your music—your iPod or laptop or whatever—that may smell like something. But it’ll smell like that same thing whether you’re listening to Foo Fighters or Jay Z. It’s not unique to a particular song or album.

Records are something different. They’re physical objects. Big, bulky, inconvenient, easily damaged objects. Vinyl is like skin that changes, in good and bad ways, over a lifetime. Skin gets damaged, intentionally or by accident—maybe it gets burned, or tattooed, or scarred—but it always retains some of its original character. It’s the same skin—it’s just weathered some life.

Some of these records—the good ones, anyway—have a distinct smell. They might smell like the beach. Or your dad’s cologne. Or when you bought Elton John’s Greatest Hits for two dollars in 1977 at a Lions Club’s garage sale in a recently renovated building that used to be a cherry processing plant, and even a decade after the fact, the record smells like cherries.

Here’s another one. Billy Joel’s The Stranger. I can’t even look at the album cover without smelling Calvin Klein’s Obsession.

During the mideighties, my grandmother was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. My parents flew out to New York for the surgery, and my brother and I were sent to stay with family friends. The family that took me in had a daughter, Debbie, who was about two years older than me, and almost unfairly attractive. A woman who looked like her in a Whitesnake video was one thing, but existing in the world, walking past you in the school hallway, a reminder of how your fantasies can be right in front of you but also a million miles away, was just not cool.

I remember being dropped off at her house and her parents taking me to her room, saying, “This is where you’ll be sleeping.” And I sat there, in her room, totally mesmerized. Because Jesus Christ, I was in her bedroom. The place where she slept, maybe in her under- wear.

I went immediately to her records, because I just had to know— what does a beautiful women listen to while sitting around her room in sexy underwear? The first record I pulled out was Billy Joel’s The Stranger. I’d never heard of it before, but the cover was amazing. Joel is sitting on a bed, wearing a full suit and no shoes, gazing down at a white theater mask next to him, with a pair of boxing gloves on the wall. Cringingly pretentious, but for a thirteen-year-old boy who still owned all of his original Star Wars action figures, Billy Joel seemed super complex and deep.

I made a mental note to wear more suits and buy some boxing gloves.

The record had its own unmistakable scent. I wasn’t able to put a name to it until decades later, when I was on a blind date and the girl was wearing Obsession. While we were making out, I took a deep breath of her neck and said, “You smell like Billy Joel’s The Stranger.” (It didn’t end well.)

I’m not sure how long I was sitting there, smelling Debbie’s The
Stranger, when the door burst open and Debbie came charging in.

“Hey,” she said, beaming. “You’re here.”

“Yep,” I said, staring at her like she was a black bear that’d just wandered into my campsite.

She nodded, inching closer to me. “This is going to be so cool,”
she said.

I had no idea what she meant by that. I remember thinking, “Cool how? What’s so cool about it? And why’s she standing so close to me? Is she waiting for me to do something? Maybe kiss her? Oh Jesus, should I kiss her? Of course I should kiss her! There couldn’t be a more obvious signal. I’m totally going to kiss her.”

I didn’t kiss her. And I never really talked to her again during the entire week I was at her house. It’s possible I missed my opportunity. It’s even more possible that she’d confused me with another boy and was too polite to say anything when she got close enough to realize it.

I eventually bought my own copy of The Stranger. But it wasn’t the same. The songs sounded generally similar, but something fundamental was missing. It didn’t have that hot-girl smell.

There’s another record whose unmistakable odor has become a sort of personal mythology for me. The Replacements’ Let It Be, first released in 1984, first purchased by me in 1986, and my copy eventu- ally sold in 1999. For the vast majority of its existence, the record sleeve was used for more than just a protective envelope for the vinyl. It also served as a sort of safe-deposit box for my stash of marijuana.

It’s amazing I ever thought I was getting away with anything. I think my thought process was, if somebody—my parents, DEA agents doing random searches of teenage bedrooms—got the crazy idea that kids were hiding marijuana in record sleeves, they’d look at titles a little more obvious. They’d probably check my Cypress Hill. Or my Grateful Dead. Or my Bob Marley Legend, which I kept in my closet in clear sight specifically as a weed red herring. It’d never cross their minds to looks elsewhere. They’d be, “Oh, don’t bother looking for his stash in any of those ’Mats records. They were into heavy drinking, not weed.” Because obviously, both the DEA and my mother would have done extensive research on the intoxicants of choice of my favorite artists.

I was never busted, and not because Let It Be was such a clever disguise. Obviously nobody cared that I was smoking marijuana.
I haven’t stopped listening to those songs. I’ve owned the album on several formats. I’ve had three CDs of Let It Be, and numerous MP3s of the songs, which I’ve synced to too many iPods, iPads, nanos, minis, and shuffles. The notes are the same, the voice sounds familiar, but it doesn’t feel like my music anymore. For one thing, the smell is gone. And the scratches, well, there aren’t any scratches. Which isn’t something you’d think you’d miss. But I miss those scratches more than anything.
The scratches matter. They’re not just an imperfection. Some- thing meaningful happens when those scratches are made. Some- thing is etched into the grooves. Something important has become a part of your permanent record. And the song is your witness. It’s borne witness to your milestones; it held your proverbial hand when life got shitty, or gave you a danceable beat when there was something to celebrate. The song, yes, but more significantly, the physical object that was with you, that you touched and held on to and watched spin around and around as you listened to it make the music that felt like it might be the only thing keeping you alive. It wasn’t just the messenger. It was your companion. It was an accomplice.

If you saw it again—that record, that specific record—would you recognize it?

Would you know it was yours?

If it was one of my records, I’d like to think I’d recognize it. Even if it’s been sitting in a damp basement, or stored under a leaky air conditioner. I know where all the scratches are; I put them there myself. I know every pop and hiss. I’d recognize my records like I’d recognize my own flesh and blood.

During the first few months after my dad died in 1999, I had this recurring fantasy that he’d faked a heart attack. Maybe he did it so he could skip town to evade back taxes, or run away with his mistress. Whatever it was, the story was comforting. It was my life raft during his funeral: the thing that kept my head above water so I didn’t suffocate on grief. I imagined him somewhere in New Orleans, with a bad dye job and a mustache, living a gypsy lifestyle as he moves from motel to motel with his Brazilian lover.

Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I have this vision of myself wandering through a Mardi Gras parade, and I see him in the distance, with a handlebar mustache and a safari hat, sucking back the last of his hurricane before kissing the neck of . . . what’s her name? Rosario? Yolanda? And then our eyes meet, and I know that he knows that I know it’s him, and he smiles at me in that weak way that says, “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you over these past fifteen years, and I’m sorry that I missed so much of your life. I love you more than you can begin to imagine, and I wish I didn’t have to leave, but la vida es corta! You’ll understand someday.”

And then poof, he’s gone, disappeared into the crowd. I chase after him, pushing people out of the way, stumbling over revelers in masks and slipping through guys on stilts and knocking drinks out of the hands of tourists and running and running and running, the sound of joyous laughter and music and celebration all around me. I know I’m never going to find him, but somehow it’s okay, just knowing he’s still out there, and he’s still breathing the same humid air that I am, and at least now he realizes that he never fooled me, with his silly “he had a heart attack at sixty” ruse.

Just like I’d recognize my father’s eyes in a Mardi Gras parade, I’d recognize my copy of the Replacements’ Let It Be. The one that was with me through puberty and too many girlfriends and years of stomach-clenching loneliness and an ego that sometimes felt like it was held together with Scotch tape and sloppy punk riffs. If I saw it again, I’d know it was mine. And not just because it smells like weed.

Of course I’d recognize it. Assuming I was ever in the same room with it again, it’d be impossible for me not to recognize it. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part would be finding it, since I sold the record when I was still in my twenties. A lot has happened in my life since I let it go. I got married, and had my first meaningful employment, and buried my father, and almost got divorced, and became a parent. It would be laughably impossible, but maybe. If you looked long enough, and hard enough, and refused to give up, maybe you do find it again. Maybe you find your dead dad in the Mardi Gras parade. The thing you thought was lost forever, that part of yourself that just disappeared, that vanished when you weren’t paying attention, maybe you chased it down and kept running until you cornered it in a back alley and you managed to get it back.

But then what?

What People are Saying About This

Patton Oswalt

The perfect combination of a vinyl completist's dream and nightmare. --Patton Oswalt, author of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

Neal Pollack

Memories are far more indelible when married to the physical world, and Spitznagel proves the point in this vivid book. We love vinyl records because they combine the tactile, the visual, the seeable effects of age and care and carelessless. When he searches for the records he lost and sold, Spitznagel is trying to return to a tangible past, and he details that process with great sensitivity and impact.—Dave Eggers, author of The Circle A funny and heartfelt memoir about music collecting that gives birth to a new branch of social science: Gen-X archaeology. —Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad

Jancee Dunn

Spitznagel's quest for the actual records of his youth could have been a gimmick. Instead it's a touching exploration of loss: of opportunities, of loved ones, of the ability to even remotely discern what's hip. Hilarious and heartfelt, this is a book for anyone who has ever spent entire years of their lives haunting record stores, dissecting the merits of Doolittle, and studying liner notes with the intense focus of a Talmudic scholar. --Jancee Dunn, author of But Enough About Me

Marc Spitz

I can't remember when a book had me get out my black pen and underline so many wonderful things. Maybe never. Loss and laughter and all those denizens of sonic ghost town record stores willing but often unable to make us all whole again. Something on every page to stoke the geek heart with sad recognition and hope. --Marc Spitz, author of Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the 90s

Martha Plimpton

Eric Spitznagel is the only music nerd in the world who's not entirely insufferable. Old Records Never Die will make you wish you were his roommate. --Martha Plimpton, actress

Al Jacobs

I'm working on a list of things that make me laugh harder than Eric Spitznagel's writing. So far, it includes old Albert Brooks movies, videos of animals riding bicycles and…well, that's about it. What I'm trying to say is: Eric Spitznagel is hilarious. And this book is perfectly Spitzagelian: Funny, smart, even a bit wistful at times. The way he feels about the Pixies — that's similar to the way I feel about Spitznagel's writing. --AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

A. J. Jacobs

I'm working on a list of things that make me laugh harder than Eric Spitznagel's writing. So far, it includes old Albert Brooks movies, videos of animals riding bicycles and…well, that's about it. What I'm trying to say is: Eric Spitznagel is hilarious. And this book is perfectly Spitzagelian: Funny, smart, even a bit wistful at times. The way he feels about the Pixies — that's similar to the way I feel about Spitznagel's writing. --AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

Davy Rothbart

To say Old Records Never Die is a book about music is to say On the Road is a book about cars. Really, Eric Spitznagel's energetic and endlessly engaging memoir is a book about the ways we seek to discover and recover our essential selves. Music lovers will love this book; unrepentant nostalgiacs, like myself, can expect to be absolutely riveted. --Davy Rothbart, creator of Found Magazine and author of My Heart is an Idiot

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