Last year Counterpoint Press published a collection of essays on music by Geoffrey O'Brien called Sonata For Jukebox; Pop Music, Memory And The Imagined Life. My favorite piece in this brilliant book is an essay about the Beach Boys titled The Lonely Sea," wherein O'Brien reflects on what the Beach Boys meant to him and his friends when they were teenagers and shared an obsession with Brian Wilson. Enchanted by the intoxicating fantasy the Beach Boys evoked of life in Southern California during the '60s, they developed a cult-like devotion to Brian Wilson, and O'Brien is astonishingly adept at analyzing how such an obsession takes root and grows. Pliant young minds are particularly vulnerable to being colonized by pop stars for the simple reason that the young take music intensely personally. Teenagers tend to display their tastes and preferences as if they were hard won badges of achievement, and have a propensity for claiming pop songs as crucial accessories in the mental picture they have of themselves. I've been thinking about all this and about O'Brien's book, because I recently moved for the first time in twelve years. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the most challenging aspect of moving -- a life change that's invariably fraught with myriad difficulties -- was figuring out what to do with my record collection.
Allow me to backtrack for a minute. In the early '90s there was a two-year period when I moved four times. With each successive move I shed more of my possessions until I reached the point of having whittled my worldly goods down to almost nothing. The one thing I dragged faithfully from one home to the next was my record collection. Mind you, CDs were by then firmly entrenched as the music delivery system of choice, and I hadn't had a working turntable for years. Nonetheless, the thought of parting with a single scratched slab of vinyl brought a lump to my throat. Like Ratso Rizzo and his quest to get to Florida, I clung to the belief that one day I'd get a new turntable, some great speakers, miles of shelves, and I'd alphabetize those records and play them again.
In the midst of my most recent move I asked several friends -- who, like me, are of a certain age -- "What did you do with your record collection?" My friend Jack replied, "It's in boxes in the basement, like everybody else's." I discovered he was right -- there are lots of people out there like me, with fiercely protected collections of records they never play. So what do we need them for? This is something I've thought about a lot lately, and I think I'm beginning to understand what they represent. When I look at my boxes of records I see myself as a lonely young girl with emotions perpetually in a state of upheaval, struggling to learn how to make my way through the chaos that is life. Isn't that what being young is all about? It certainly was for me, and my records served as a crucial life raft on that stormy sea. I found solace, wisdom, and courage in them, and they made me feel part of a tribe of people with common beliefs and experiences who were out there listening to the same records I was.
I have a friend who claims he's never bought a record, and when he first told me this I was stunned. The idea that he'd never heard a piece of music that he simply had to hear again was incomprehensible to me, and it gets to the root of why I'll never part with my records. I love them because they're concrete symbols of a response to beauty so passionate and intense that it forced me to go out into the world and seek out that beautiful song again. That seems like something worth hanging onto.
Subscribe to Feed
