It is hard not to be amazed by the variety of 20th century technological innovations forsaken now in the second decade of the 21st: telephone land lines, dial-up modems, dot-matrix printers, vinyl phonograph records….
Oh, wait. I don’t think we’re done with records yet.
As a matter of fact, the technology that supplanted records, the compact disc, seems in more danger of extinction. According to the people who track such arcana, CD sales accounted for 90 percent of album sales in 2007. In 2014, only 51 percent of album buyers got their fix on disc, with digital streaming and download roaring to the fore.
However, there was an uptick in anachronism. Nielsen Entertainment executive David Bakula said, “Although overall music sales are showing declines, vinyl album sales were up 52 percent in 2014, shattering last year’s record-setting total by more than 3 million LPs.” That’s more than 6 percent of all “physical” album sales, about the same market share vinyl enjoyed in 2006, when tech commentators were writing obituaries for the venerable format.
The statistics are impressive, but it’s more so to visit one of Birmingham’s record stores and see the diverse clientele browsing therein. Even better, you should come up to Gardendale’s Main Street this weekend for the Birmingham Record Collectors’ 31st annual record show, which is billed as “the South’s largest.” In the Gardendale Civic Center, vendors from all over the region will be displaying their wares, which means you can find music in every genre and every decade, and said vendors will be delighted to sell it to you at some price or another.
I hasten to point out that I am not a Birmingham Record Collector. I’ve never felt exactly worthy of such an appellation. I’m more of a Birmingham Record Possessor. Throughout the years, I have had the good fortune to acquire a modest stack of vinyl LPs, but I have not spent a fortune, relying instead on the enlightened self-interest of record label promotion personnel to give me the free kind.
The dangerous precedent began in the winter of 1968, when I was bumbling through a stint on the air at WABP, a University of Alabama radio station with wattage so low that the signal was actually carried on power lines around the campus. The late Jon Petrovich, the Godfather of CNN, was the program director of the station at that time, though I do not think that entry ever showed up prominently on his resume.
A cardboard box somewhere in the vicinity of the teletype machine offered free albums to whomever wanted them. Now, I don’t know how it is where you work, but in a radio station, by the time free stuff makes its way to a common space, the staff and management’s hierarchy of needs has already manifested itself pretty dramatically on the largesse. There wasn’t much in the box by the time I got to it, just some new promo albums by people nobody had heard of at the time: folk singer Eric Andersen, the British band Family, some Canadian guy named Neil Young.
It turned out to be plenty.
I had a secondhand portable stereo at the Tuscaloosa apartment for playing records—a G E Wildcat, if you please—but I’d used it mostly for the AM radio tuner and to play the few 45 rpm platters I owned. I listened to my new LPs endlessly and found the music on each to be engaging, even though they weren’t to be heard on any radio station in this part of the world. Therein lay the charm, by which music lovers throughout the ages have been enthralled; the discovery of lyrics and melodies one thinks nobody else knows about.
Staying in the radio business for many years afterward gave me first dibs on a torrent of great music as well as significant insights into music itself. I learned that even an indifferent album has some sort of element to recommend it, that almost every double album could have been released as a single LP without sacrificing much, and that there is no perfect album.
I was always partial to vinyl, but when compact discs first came out in the early 1980s, I was impressed by the clarity they brought to music I already knew. Until I heard Chuck Berry on CD, for example, I had no idea how much a part Johnnie Johnson’s piano played in the structure of those recordings; it just didn’t come across on my old Chess vinyl pressings. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when a classic painting has been restored, CD remastering took away some of the patina of many vintage recordings, making them seem less warm and familiar to the ear.
Sonic quality aside, the vinyl album is more sensuous than its CD or downloaded counterpart. There is some there there. As British science writer Lee Barron noted, “An LP is an object and one that comes with a certain ‘ritual’ behavior, from the opening of the sleeve and the gentle handling of the disc, to the aesthetic qualities of the cover and the inner sleeve designs with its artwork.”
It’s a plus, not needing an electron microscope to read the lyrics on a vinyl album cover.
Additional attractions at the record show this weekend include an induction ceremony for the newest members of the BRC Hall of Fame (Sandy Posey, Sonny James and the late Buddy Buie), plus a Saturday night concert featuring Muscle Shoals music legends (Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, Donnie Fritts and Travis Wammack). There will be CDs for sale, maybe even some eight-tracks and cassettes, but the thing you will want to see are the thousands and thousands of albums. Take it from Jack White, rock star and vinyl record label impresario: “Vinyl is the real deal…and it’s not just me or a little pet thing or some kind of retro romantic thing from the past. It is still alive.”