Records
Last weekend we visited our friends Debbie, Paul, and their 14 month old baby Kaitlyn in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania (Debbie and I went to high school together). On Saturday we went to Waterloo Village, which is a fun place to visit but has sadly lost funding since I last visited when I was 10 (*Gasp!* That was 15 years ago!).
On Sunday, we went to the Quakertown Farmers Market and Flea Market in Pennsylvania. We got incense, whisks, bandaids, and RECORDS! Yes, records, glorious records!
Matt and I recently acquired an old record player…I need to post pictures of it; the thing is awesome. It’s in a wooden cabinet with storage underneath for records. The problem is, we didn’t have any records. Until our little trip to Quakertown, that is!
We bought FIFTEEN classic albums for eleven dollars! Our collection now includes:
Steely Dan’s Aja (It was $0.33! Wow!)
Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick
The Allman Brothers Band: Beginnings (A two record set for ONE BUCK!)
Gregg Allman’s Laid Back…we’re going to see him at the Orpheum next month so we’ve gotta get in the mood! :-)
We got some more…I can’t remember what else. I think Matt got some Doobie Brothers. He’s a HUGE Michael McDonald fan.
Ooh, we also got a Boston album…Matt’s always been a big fan of them and I never listened to them much before, but since we got into Beatlejuice it’s really cool to hear Brad Delp singing.
It’s fun to have some of these classic rock albums on record. There’s something about the sound of a record that CDs and MP3s don’t compare to. My first record ever was Culture Club when I was a kid. I listened to it on my Fisher Price Record Player! :-)
Getting these records made me sad about the direction of album cover art. It’s been going downhill since the advent of CDs 20 years ago. The worst was on tapes. Album covers never translated well to cassette covers. But now with MP3s, album covers really mean very little. Even when I do buy CDs (which is rare), I rip the MP3s onto my computer and often lose the actual CD case. :-( I guess at this point it’s more important for a band to have an impressive website than an impressive album cover. The art of album cover work is nearing nihility. Sad, sad, sad.
But for now, Matt and I will be enjoying listening to old records in the attic. And we’ll be continuing to build up our record collection. I think next we’re going to try to find some jazz.
Filed under Greater Boston (General), Music, My Life, New Jersey |13 Responses to “Records”
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I had a Fisher Price record player as well. Its low-tech stylus scratched up a lot of my records, LOL.
I agree with you mostly about album cover art. I used to be obsessed with having the complete artistic package when a new album would come out, but now iTunes is good enough. Unless you’re Three Dog Night, a picture of the band on the front just doesn’t do it.
I don’t know if CDs were the beginning of the problem, but I do miss (even though they were an ecological nightmare!) cd longboxes. One of my favorite pieces of album art ever (Danzig’s Black Aria) was designed specifically for the longbox.
I was shocked at how much album covers are worth as art! But I love my albums and having it all plugged up to my surround sound system, even though it’s just stereo when you play them.
I completely screwed up recently when I should have purchased album covers and not been so picky about the actual album. DOH!!
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[...] After carefully transporting the unit from Southie to Newton, Krissy and I hauled the thing up 2 flights of stairs into the attic, where it now resides. All we needed was some media to play on it. We found these companions on a trip to Pennsylvania this weekend. [...]
We should compare collections- I have all my parent’s records upstairs, from when Mom died. Fiddler on the Roof? yup. Man of La Mancha? how else do you think I learned at a tender age what a “whore” was?!
Dinner sometime? We’re pretty unscheduled right now…
Dinner would be great. We have nothing big planned for a while now…I’ll check with Matt and we’ll make plans.
Ha, of course you got the Sound of Music. And have I told you about my close personal friendship with one of the former members of Boston? He was my insurance agent! He had gold records in the office and everything…
That’s so funny…which one was it?
Having Thick As A Brick on vinyl is essential - the mock St. Cleve Chronicle articles & classifieds are hilarious! And it includes a rather self-effacing review of the “aestetically palatable” record itself.
Matt was super excited to find “Thick As A Brick”…it’s worth it just for the album cover alone!
i had this one:
http://www.thisoldtoy.com/new-images/images-ok/800-899/FP816-EB69158868-C.JPG
[...] I joined Yelp a while ago for the sole purpose of writing a bad review of The Courtside Karaoke, and then I forgot about it. It’s really a fun site. I like to dine out, so I had lots of restaurants to review. I just went through a phase where I reviewed a bunch of record stores. We collect records. [...]