Vinyl is my ex - Installment #1

Vinyl is my ex-girlfriend - hold On Sha-REESE, get your mind out of the gutter if it was there - I'm talking about recorded music folks. Vinyl. Records. LP's. Licorice Pizza (Perhaps the coolest name for a record store ever - thank you L.A.). Of all the formats to buy recorded music in, Vinyl is like an old girlfriend that I broke up with, one that I should have stayed with all along. One that I should get back together with - which may or may not happen. It should, but she lives far away. It wasn't so long ago that we were together, and I have nothing but wonderful memories of the good times we shared. Still, somehow it seems like a lifetime ago. And out of all the formats I've bought recorded music in, Vinyl is the best.

Vinyl wasn't shallow. She had depth, and even though I appreciated that when she was around, it feels like I appreciate it more with her being gone. Vinyl seemed a bit high maintenance when compact disc started showing up at friend's parties. Compact discs seemed perfect at first glance - and she understood my love for music and seemed very low maintenance - I didn't have to pull out a DiscWasher brush and run it over the surface to get the dust off and make sure the disc wouldn't skip. How was I to know that when Compact discs skipped, it would be so much more annoying than any pop, click or skip that Vinyl ever tossed at me? And let's not forget what may be my all-time favorite compliment: You have excellent taste in music. While I've received that compliment a number of times in my adult life, Vinyl is what I think of when that compliment comes to mind. Compact discs? A little. 8-Track Tapes? Never. Cassettes? Nope. MP3's? Not a chance in hell - though I do have quite a few of them mind you.

Wow - you have excellent taste in MP3's! Said no one - EVER.

How could I have been so blind that I didn't see,  even at half the price of Compact Discs, Vinyl offered so much more? Cover art, liner notes - both of these are serious eye candy for music enthusiasts. Substance people - the stuff solid, long-term relationships are made of.  Compact Discs? The same artwork shrunk down to a much smaller format. Nowhere near as visible from across the room. Liner notes in the smaller format are a bit like having to read something, as opposed to choosing, getting and wanting to read something. Taking the quantum leap, as my buddy Jeff called it when I bought my first compact disc player, came with a lot of negative things that Vinyl never had. Compact discs aren't as indestructible as the general public first thought, which didn't matter to a guy who saw a large music collection as a prized possession that I both had to take care of, and wanted to.

 Vinyl had a cool record care kit, at least in my humble opinion it was cool - the Discwasher system. A sleek and delicate brush with a beautifully crafted dark wood handle, a specialized solution that you put three or four drops of on the surface of the brush and gently ran the brush over the surface of your record to remove dirt and dust - oddly enough, even this, had some visual appeal - albeit in a geeky kind of way. To me, it was a small visual of proof that my music collection meant enough to me that I would buy such a device to take care of it. I looked at records before I played them, I cleaned them. I guess you could say this ritual was wining & dining - and it never got old. Compact discs didn't seem to matter as much, and now...well, with the benefit of hindsight that is always 20/20, all Compact discs offered was unparalleled clarity and perhaps more longevity for my investment. Both were false promises - in the early days of compact discs, some of the things I bought in the new format were nowhere near as sonically pleasing as Vinyl. Then there was a CD that simply stopped playing for no reason at all - no visible scratches or smears on the surface, no explanation offered. If Vinyl ever pulled such a stunt, and mind you she did, the reasons were obvious - I only had to man up and face them: a dirty playing surface, warping, scratches that were either the result of my own carelessness, or in making a bad call and loaning them to the wrong friend - and mind you, I replaced a few LPs due to that mistake.

I miss everything about Vinyl now that she's gone. I know that if I were to run into her, it would be just like the old days - even better for having learned the hard way that we had a good thing going all along. I can't say that we'll get back together for sure - or that we wont. Never say never. I'll have a bit more to say about the cheaper, easier ladies that are recorded music, in future posts - but today, my heart yearns for Vinyl. I hear she's doing well these days, and that makes me happy for her.