Old Records Never Die (11 page)

He sniffed. “In the old days, when a kid came to college here, they'd scope all the record stores in the first week. And then CDs got popular, and the digital stuff, and people would come in and say, ‘Why are you carrying records, man? They're gone!' They'd laugh at us. We were kind of a joke. From 1999 to 2006, it was really rough. It wasn't until we moved here, to the new location, that things started picking up.”

I glanced around the store. It was totally empty. Nobody had even peeked in the windows since I arrived almost two hours ago. Aside from the Carla Thomas playing softly on the store record player, it was eerily quiet.

“A lot of the new thing with records becoming popular again, it's just a hipster thing,” he said. “And I'm fairly tired of hipsters. They have terrible taste in music. These kids come in and say, ‘You don't have anything that was released this year?' That makes me crazy. We don't need anything from this year!”

He pulled out a record by Thomas Mapfumo & the Blacks Unlimited. I had never heard of them, and know nothing of their music. Zimbabwe is mentioned in the album title, so I gather they're from . . . Africa? Gotta be Africa. I know as much about Africa as any American who got the majority of his African geographical cues
from pop music. I know that, according to Toto, Africa is a place where it rains a lot and where you can distinctly hear the drums echoing tonight. I know that the temperatures are pretty hot, making it impossible for them to remember when it's Christmas. I know that Sun City is a bad place, because of apartheid or something, and nobody wants to play there, even Joey Ramone and Hall & Oates. Which is kind of crazy, because that's two extremes of the musical spectrum. People who love Hall & Oates and hearing “Kiss on My List” instantly puts them in an amazing mood, they're not necessarily gonna be disappointed when the Ramones don't come to town. And the Ramones fan, who couldn't have stuck around for so long with his racist parents if it wasn't for “Teenage Lobotomy” and “I Wanna Be Sedated,” couldn't really care less that Hall & Oates won't be bringing their world tour to Sun City.

I knew something of racist parents. Not my own, but other people's. The first time I heard Bob Marley's name was from a friend's racist mom. Growing up in a suburb was like getting a tutorial in remedial racism. Many of our neighbors only moved to the burbs because it was “safer” (i.e., there weren't as many black people), but with safety came mediocrity, and that pissed them off. They had a chip on their collective shoulders because the black people had access to all the culture and the best drugs, and they were stuck with strip malls and whippets.

When I got my driver's license, I decided that my first big trip would be up to Chicago. But my best friend's mother announced that doing so would be tantamount to suicide. The city was teeming with dark-skinned criminals, she said, just waiting for their chance to lure some innocent white kid into an alley. She told elaborate stories about black gangs—though I think she was just repeating names she'd heard on
60 Minutes
—who would fillet their victims. Not just murder them, but fillet them. Like a fish. “It's true,” my
friend's mom lectured us. “It's all that African voodoo they're teaching at inner-city schools. They pump them full of Bob Marley reggae music and it makes them crazy. They hear that ‘Electric Avenue' song and they just want to kill white people.”

Even with my limited musical knowledge, I knew she didn't mean Eddy Grant. The video for “Electric Avenue” might've inspired a seizure, but definitely not racial violence. But I couldn't vouch for Bob Marley, whose videos weren't on heavy rotation on MTV and was therefore a mystery to me. If this Marley guy was making songs powerful enough to turn otherwise rational people into murderous zombies, it must be fucking awesome. I needed to hear reggae music immediately!

I bought a copy of
Legend
, just in time to bring it with me to college. And then, somewhere around my sophomore year, there was the crushing realization that owning
Legend
makes you a cliché, and you're just one of those frat douche bags who only knows “Stir It Up.” So I bought all of Marley's albums—
Exodus
,
Catch a Fire
,
Kaya
,
Natty Dread
—like a frat douche bag pretending to be a hipster.

But soon enough, because I was usually stoned while listening to Marley and didn't always have the motivation or physical strength to hit the skip button, I became exposed to his entire oeuvre. I developed a fondness for the deep cuts and soon favored them to the more recognizable songs that my stoner friends enjoyed. I had become a frat douche bag pretending to be a hipster with illusions of Rastafarian street cred. My favorite Marley song was “Time Will Tell.” I especially identified with the lyrics “Jah would never give the power to a baldhead / Run come crucify the dread.” I'd nod along like I knew exactly what Bob meant. Fucking baldheads, always fucking our shit up. Fuck them! Jah knows what I'm talkin' 'bout.

But then the Black Crowes, a group of white guys trying to play like black musicians, covered “Time Will Tell” and ruined it for me.
Their version is great, and I actually preferred it to Marley's. And that just made me feel like an asshole. I was a frat douche bag pretending to be a hipster with illusions of Rastafarian street cred who realized he was just another frat douche bag.

I left college the way I entered it, with a copy of
Legend
and a deep-rooted terror that everybody knew I was a fraud.

“In '99, all the record stores were going under,” Bob said. “It was just a terrible year.”

I nodded like I'd been listening the whole time. “I got divorced,” he continued. “Ted closed his store and disappeared. My 2008 recession started in '99. When the real recession came, I was like, that's no problem.”

I saw my opening. “If Ted just disappeared, what happened to all those records?”

“He just owed too much money,” Bob said. “The bank called in their loan. I never saw the books, but I found out he had doubled his salary for the last four years. We didn't get along. We never got along that well.”

“And the records?”

“We were always opposites. He was really good at business in the beginning. I was hopeless, I was just a vinyl addict. That's why we had two stores. He also worked in golf course management. He didn't have the same passion for music that I did. For him, it was just a business. And when they had a dry season . . .”

“Did he just take the records to the dump? Throw them in Lake Michigan? Set fire to the store and then dye his hair in a gas station restroom?”

That made Bob laugh, which came out like a seal bark. “He called me and said, ‘The sheriff is coming in, closing down Homewood. Get up here and take whatever vinyl you want.' He owed me some money, so I took a bunch of records.”

I leaned in toward him, like he was going to start listing off titles.

“I was able to sell a lot of the CDs,” he said. “I just put them in boxes, put them in a safe place, and brought them out slowly when I needed to.”

“And the records?” I said.

“Ted had a lot of sealed stuff. Because they sold more new releases than what we did. So I was able to put a lot of that stuff on Amazon and get a good price. And the old stuff that wasn't in good shape, I put some of it in our dollar section, just to get rid of it. College kids will come in, spend ten bucks on records they don't care about, that are in terrible shape but they have a kitsch value.”

In my head, I was crunching the numbers. This wasn't going to be hard at all, just time-consuming. All I had to do was ask for all his sales receipts from the past fifteen years, figure out which album titles matched up to the records I was looking for, and then get somebody in the school's alumni affairs to give me the current addresses of ten thousand or so former students, so I could drive to their homes and ask to rummage through their attics. Assuming most of these kids hadn't moved outside the system or at least stayed in the Midwest, I could have this whole thing wrapped up by spring.

“But I probably have most of them,” Bob said.

Wait, what?

“I took something like thirty thousand records from him, and I probably sold less than one percent of those,” he said. “When Ted unloaded them on me in '99, records were pretty much worthless. You definitely couldn't get any money for used records that were all scratched up and in shoddy shape.”

“Why didn't you throw them out?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don't know. Doesn't make sense to me either. But these were thousands and thousands of records. I couldn't just get rid of them. So I put 'em in boxes and just forgot about them.”

“In a storage locker or something?”

“No, in my basement. At my house. It's about a mile from here. It's pretty dry down there, so it's a good spot for them. I honestly haven't looked at them in at least a decade. Last time I cracked open any of those boxes, it was right before the millennium New Year.”

“You know, it's funny,” I said, trying to sound casual, even though I was practically trembling from excitement. “I sold most of my original record collection at Ted's store in 1999. I wonder if some of those records are down in your basement.”

Bob laughed again. “Yeah, wouldn't that be something, huh?”

I said nothing and he said nothing, and it felt like we stood there for a very, very long time, not saying anything. But it probably was just a few seconds. It felt long in my head, because I was staring at the vinyl copy of the Allman Brothers'
The 1971 Fillmore East Recordings
lying on the counter and wondering if it was heavy enough to knock Bob unconscious.

I didn't want to hurt Bob. I just wanted him to go to sleep for a little while, so I could reach into his pants, find his wallet and keys, and then drive to his house and go through all his records.

Almost immediately, I knew that wouldn't work. I needed a more sensible plan.

Maybe I'd follow him home, park a half block away, sleep in my car, and wait until he went to work the next day, then break into his house—I'd throw a brick through his window or something—and take an entire, nonviolent day inventorying his records. Unless he had a wife or girlfriend. Or kids. Then I'd have to tie them up, and that's just not my thing.

I considered the obvious, less-crazy plan: I could just come right out and ask Bob. “Hey, would you mind if I went to your house and looked at some of those records in your basement?” But that was way too risky. What if he said no? Why would he be okay with a total
stranger, somebody he had literally met a few hours earlier, entering his home, his private sanctuary, to rummage through his personal belongings? All because this guy thought maybe his old records were down there. Everything about that sounded insane. If he asked me the same thing, I wouldn't think twice about it. I'd tell him no, make up some story about selling all the records to Goodwill, and then stop returning his e-mails. Why should I trust me? I could be a violent criminal! A sociopath! A guy who seems friendly and harmless enough in conversation, but somewhere in his sick brain he's playing out fantasies of clocking you with an Allman Brothers reissue. You don't want a person like that in your home!

I couldn't take the chance that he'd succumb to common sense. I had one shot at this—one chance to make him believe that I was someone to be trusted, that letting me dig through all those boxes in his basement was not just a good thing but perhaps the most decent thing he'd ever do as a human being. I couldn't ask him until I knew the answer was yes, because no just wasn't an option.

In my daydreaming, I never noticed the other customers walking inside. There were three college kids in the back, loudly exclaiming their delight upon finding a Flaming Lips record. Bob was fingering through two crates of records, brought in by a woman in her midforties with frizzy black hair zigzagged with gray and threadbare jeans from some happier time. She looked heartsick and dazed, like someone who'd just agreed to have a sick pet put to sleep.

“I can't believe I'm doing this,” she said with a deep sigh.

I watched Bob for a minute, picking through the records, an almost clinical detachment in his eyes.

“I'm sorry, I've gotta do this,” he said, not looking up at me. “Are we good? You need anything else from me?”

I just smiled. There was really nothing I could say without freaking him out.

I
t was a brisk autumn afternoon in Chicago, and the sidewalk outside our apartment was filled with neighbors: drinking beer, firing up grills to cook endless brats for strangers, and soaking in the last of the summer sun. Traffic was blocked so their kids could run free across the empty street, shrieking with a combination of glee and fury.

It was the last block party of the year in our North-Side Chicago neighborhood, and every able body was outside for one last gasp of warm weather. But I hadn't come for fun. I was there on business.

I walked over to Mike, who was gently rocking his three-month-old baby, and practically shoved the record jacket under his nose.

“Does this smell like weed to you?” I asked.

To his credit, he didn't recoil in horror or demand to know why I was bringing contraband to a neighborhood party with minors present. He took a deep whiff and then crinkled his nose like he was evaluating the bouquet on a glass of wine.

“It reminds me of house cleaners,” he said.

I considered this. “Is that a yes?”

“I don't know. I haven't smoked any weed lately. Does weed smell like house cleaners?

“Sorry,” he said, handing me back the record before disappearing into the crowd to wrestle a hose away from his son.

I wondered briefly where my kid was. I looked out at the bodies on the street, splashing and stomping and hurling over one another, like a prepubescent mosh pit. I honestly couldn't recall if I'd told Kelly that I'd keep an eye on Charlie or if she had volunteered. I hoped it was her, or the rest of our weekend would be ruined by an Amber Alert.

I'd brought the Replacements album sleeve—a bona fide
Let It Be
—on a hunch. Our circle of friends—the other parents in the neighborhood with children Charlie's age, who liked to drink wine in the afternoon as much as we did—were all roughly our age, and with similarly bohemian pasts. We shared a nostalgia for things like smoking cigarettes, staying up past nine, and listening to music that celebrated bad behavior rather than the virtues of homework and picking up your room. All of our friends were old enough to remember when records were the norm, and at least half of them could, if necessary, create a makeshift pipe out of an apple or a soda can. Even if they weren't specifically Replacements fans, they were at least experienced enough to be a useful think tank.

I handed the album to Ryan, who had just passed off a juice box to his daughter. Ryan was tall and lanky, with a thick beard and an olive-green flattop army cap that never left his head. “Does it smell like what?” he asked, with a quizzical smile.

“Does it smell like maybe a teenager in the south suburbs of Chicago used to hide his weed inside the sleeve from the mideighties to about 1995-ish?” I asked.

“Wow,” he said, slowly taking the record, like he was slipping a gun out of my hands. “That's . . . really specific. Was this yours?”

“That's what I'm trying to figure out.”

I had my doubts, but I was still hopeful. It'd taken me months to find something that was even a remote possibility. When I started crunching the numbers, doing some hard research on my odds of ever finding my copy of
Let It Be
, it was weirdly encouraging. There were 150,000 CDs manufactured, and 51,000 cassettes. But the sole vinyl pressing of
Let It Be
was a paltry 26,000 units. That's a drop in the bucket compared to most iconic records. I don't know how many vinyl copies of Michael Jackson's
Thriller
were actually made, but I remember reading in Quincy Jones's biography that it'd sold 120 million copies.

The number of
Let It Be
records out there was roughly the population of Caucasian males living in Hoboken, New Jersey. But the copies of
Thriller
equaled the entire population of Mexico. Think of it like that, and my task really wasn't that improbable. I expanded my
Let It Be
search to the Internet, since that seemed to be the only place where old 'Mats records were being sold. The problem, of course, was that most copies were going for around two hundred dollars or vastly more, so I couldn't afford to take any wild chances. Whenever a
Let It Be
would appear on an auction site like eBay or eCRATER, I'd send the seller an e-mail, requesting more details. Specifically about whether it was reminiscent of a college dorm room with a lot of Bob Marley posters.

Most of them ignored me, but occasionally I'd get responses. “Just a normal record smell here,” one wrote. “Wow, best-question-ever award!”

“I don't make it a habit of smelling my records,” another responded, with what felt like snottiness. “And I don't intend to start now.”

“Nice try, narc,” yet another remarked before pulling his album off eBay completely.

I didn't even bother with the auctions bragging of albums in
mint or perfect condition. I looked instead for descriptions like “pretty beaten-up but mostly playable” and “looks like Bob Stinson used this as his personal ashtray.” I wanted the ugly children at the vinyl orphanage, the ones with ruddy skin and bad tempers, coughing wet phlegm into their fists.

I got excited when I found a listing that reminded me of imperfections I'd only half remembered. “Side one has a scratch from the end of ‘Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out' to the middle of ‘Androgynous.' Are also other scratches that appear to be surface.”

I had just such a scratch on my
Let It Be
. I could tell you exactly where it was—cutting off Westerberg as he's warbling “He might be a father, but he sure ain't a—” That's how I first heard “Androgynous,” and I sort of got used to it. It wasn't an annoyance; it was just a part of the melody.

I wrote to the seller immediately, asking the question I almost didn't want the answer to. I'd been heartbroken dozens of times by now; I almost preferred the idea of just letting it remain a mystery. But I asked anyway. Did it . . . smell of anything in particular?

“There is a musty smell but I do not think it is weed,” said the seller, who went by zdmsales. “But I am not positive. It smells like something.”

That was enough for me. I bought it immediately, paying fifty times what it cost me in 1986.

Since it arrived on my doorstep, I'd inhaled its musky fragrance at least a few times every hour. Sometimes it smelled like oregano, and sometimes it smelled like a wet attic. I needed a second opinion. And what better place to get that than at a block party filled with forty-something adults sipping on vodka lemonades in red plastic cups while barely monitoring their preschool children.

While simultaneously rocking his four-month-old baby in a BabyBjörn, Carl stuck his nose inside the album and breathed in
deep. “Hmm,” he said. “That could definitely be a weed smell. Or it could be something totally unrelated.”

“Like what?” I asked.

He took another long whiff and then peered inside the sleeve. “What's that dark stuff? Are those seeds in there?”

I took a look. “I thought that was dirt. It looks like something from the bottom of a pair of cleats.”

“I kinda want to rip this album cover apart, just to see what's hiding in there.”

“Please don't,” I gently suggested.

Other guys started wandering over—including a few who'd already weighed in—taking their turn with the record. They passed it around like a joint in a dorm room.

“Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it's gonna make my face break out in a rash,” Jeff offered.

“I think it smells like old paper,” Ryan said. “Like a library. I feel like I'm reading a very, very old book in the library.”

“It doesn't smell skunky enough,” Brad countered.

“Libraries smell skunky?”

“No, I mean for weed. It's not skunky enough to be weed.”

I didn't learn anything, other than that guys in their forties who'd had too many vodka lemonades on a Saturday afternoon can't agree on what old pot smells like.

In the end, I knew it wasn't the one. The skip on “Androgynous” was in the wrong place. I tried to convince myself that I'd just misremembered it, or a new scratch had been added by a subsequent owner, wiping out my scratch with a fresher, deeper cut. But the evidence didn't back up this theory. The vinyl's DNA was irrefutable. It wasn't my record.

Let It Be
wasn't my only disappointment. I'd done a lot of traveling over the last few months, covering thousands of miles, and I'd gotten my hopes up with some promising leads.

I'd driven up to my mother's house in Ann Arbor, a short drive from the University of Michigan. Like any respectable college town, it hosts a handful of record stores, but until very recently, I hadn't been inside any of them. Still, it seemed reasonable that a few of my records could be hidden in their crates.

Those records that I didn't sell ended up in my mother's basement, until she finally got around to unloading them. She couldn't recall exactly where she'd taken them, other than “you know, those places that buy old junk.” I didn't waste time scouring Goodwills or flea markets, as I couldn't imagine they'd hold on to inventory for fifteen years. But anything worth collecting would likely eventually find its own way to one of these musty old stores.

Encore Records, right in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor, was remarkably busy for a Thursday morning. There were almost thirty people in the store, packed together like calves in a veal farm. You couldn't shift your weight even slightly without having a domino effect on the entire herd. They were either college-aged kids or guys who looked old enough to be tenured college professors, who wore berets and called themselves “audiophiles.”

It was magical. The muggy, stale air from too many bodies crammed into too small a space. The way everybody moved together in perfect sync, like the muscles inside your arm, every small tendon having its purpose toward the greater good. How you didn't have to dig too deep into a crate to find a record with an
IF YOU PLAY IT, SAY IT
sticker, which meant it was originally a promo meant for a radio DJ and not intended for sale, which just made it more special—a vinyl forbidden fruit.

“Brown Eyed Girl” came on over the store's sound system, and
I hate “Brown Eyed Girl.” Everything about it is just terrible. And I love Van Morrison. I own almost everything he's recorded. My first dance with Kelly at our wedding was to “Sweet Thing.” But “Brown Eyed Girl” is a piece of shit. It was killed for me long ago after hearing it too many times on literally every bar jukebox in the free world. It's on every shitty movie soundtrack and every terrible mix tape curated by friends who only owned “best of” compilations. It's musical pizza—the one thing everybody can agree on when they're too tired or bored to have an opinion.

Hearing it again in this fresh context, blaring from an old record player, the hisses and pops were a reminder that this song existed before Julia Roberts movies, before chain restaurants put it on constant repeat. But nobody in the store was acknowledging it. Nobody was singing along, even during the “sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la” part. Nobody was announcing how much they loved this fucking song, or how it reminded them of their father, or saying “Oh, this is my favorite part” and then shout-singing one of the terrible lyrics. The song was just part of the background, part of the building's texture. Singing along would be like pointing at someone's pants and saying “Those are totally red!” That would be weird. It's just there. You don't have to acknowledge it.

It's been a long, long time since “Brown Eyed Girl” was just there. Just a thing that could be ignored and not meant as a big, loud social cue: “IS EVERYBODY HAVING FUUUUN?” I'd forgotten that this song could be quietly beautiful, when it wasn't being cheerleadered by people trying too hard to make you love it.

Feeling something for “Brown Eyed Girl” besides bored contempt made me want to revisit Morrison's catalog, see if there was anything else in there I could hear with fresh ears. They had at least one of everything, including a few bootlegs, and a record straight from my personal mythology:
Beautiful Vision
. As far as I know, I
was the only person on the planet, living or dead, to ever own a copy. I'd never heard any of its songs played anywhere, like at a friend's apartment or on satellite radio or Pandora. When stacks of vinyl lived on my shelf, and friends would flip through my collection, not once had one of them paused on the sleeve and said, “Oh yeah, I know that record.” Or “I've heard of this record. It's something I totally knew existed before right this second.”

I liked that. I liked having a secret. Or maybe it only seemed like a secret to me, and everybody was well aware of
Beautiful Vision
but they'd tried to forget about it, because it was so fucking awful. I'm fine with that too.

There was really only one song on
Beautiful Vision
that mattered. “Dweller on the Threshold.” That was the song that was playing when I lost my virginity.