Records? Why Talk About Records?

Long before the advent of the MP3's. before cd's, before cassettes, before 8-tracks, we had albums. Vinyl albums.  Crackle and pop from a dirty record or needle.  Not dirty that way you perv's, but dirty that wasn't cleaned properly.  In the last few years vinyl records have made somewhat of a comback.  I remember being in a book store and seeing new vinyl records appear on the shelves.  Now the cheapskate in me was in no way going to pay twenty five to thirty bucks for a new album, especially in these days when a click of a mouse or a swipe on a phone can get you pretty much any song you want.  Nonetheless I was somewhat intrigued by this.  I had albums when I was a kid, so this form of media was not a new found thing for me.  Like when I was a kid, I approached the bin and thumbed through the records.  Now this was a few years ago, before the latest vinyl craze has hit.  I had been seeing albums in antique stores that my family frequents, but most of the time they were from folks I hadn't even heard of.  I started finding a few here and there, like Frank Sinatra,  and other crooners like Tony Bennett, Dean Martin and such.  In the last couple of years some booths have appeared in the antique stores that have music much more to my liking and needless to say my record collection is growing, slowly, but still growing.

You have to realize that even though I was buying these records even though I didn't actually on a functioning record player, I owned one, but it was in need of repair.  This changed when my kids bought me a "suitcase" record player.  That's been a couple of months ago, and I really don't remember what the first record I played, but dropping the needle to take me back, and guess what, I didn't hit a button to skip a song, I listened to the whole side, then turned the record over and listened to the other side.  I believe that is lost on this generation and probably a couple before it.  We have become an overly impatient species that believes fast isn't fast enough.

There are probably more people than not that will not understand the whole vinyl album resurgance.  I get that.  For me it's not the sound of the album,  I'm not that big of a fan of the "crackle and pop", I like hearing clarity.  I think people are losing the experience of an album.  The time you spend looking through the albums, looking at the artwork of the cover, reading the liner notes, things that in this day and age is not even considered (or at least I think so).  Yes cassette tapes and cd's had this, but on a much "smaller" level, and in my age a big old album with bigger print is easier for me to read.  All in all, the vinyl resurgance will come and go, just like every other thing that comes back and then goes away.  For me it's much more a rememberance of how things used to be, not that anyone can ever go back in the past, but it's sure fun remembering it.