1.
Reckless Records, Wicker Park, Chicago. I’m sitting on the floor, wrist-deep in crates of 45s. Folks walk past, chatting; I overhear one couple rehashing an odd dinner party from the other night, three kids exclaiming over finding a record that their dad likes. They move past me, knees at my eye-line, sometimes pausing and standing inches away from me, rifling through a bin of LPs, in a tableau that’s very difficult to imagine now.
As I write, vast swaths of the country are under stay-at-home orders. Social distancing has become the surreal norm. Streets and grocery stores in my small town are quiet, semi-filled. My local record store, Green Tangerine, closed a few weeks ago. The last time I’d visited, a couple of days before the Coronavirus fears and a new way of living settled upon us, the employee at the register offered the use of a hand sanitizer and disposable plastic gloves moments after I’d entered. “My boss says we have to,” she explained from the opposite end of the store.
Weeks earlier, I’d been engaged in a favorite pastime at a few record stores in Chicagoland and up in Rockford, regular joints that I hit every couple of months as new crops of used 45s and LPs arrive. What the last couple of weeks have illustrated to me in stark clarity is the thinginess of crate diving, and how badly I miss the pursuit, the presence of hands that have held these records before me—from the original owner to the scores of others who may have owned them, played them, loved them, lost them, to the record store proprietors themselves. (Somehow, it had never occurred to me how rough of a time a germaphobe must have in a used record store or thrift shop.) I’m prohibited now from leisurely flipping through a box of 45s or a bin of LPs at my favorite stores or somewhere out on the road, looking for that long-sought b-side or rare mono pressing, alert to the surprises that any motley assortment of vinyl might deliver me on a lucky day. I might come upon a record I hadn’t seen in decades, say, or a picture sleeve unique to a U.K. release, maybe a dare purchase of a beat-up, scratched single, or a record issued on that subsidiary label that I think was based in Memphis (I think) or which design or mod colors on the label I just really dig. I deeply miss this poor-man’s treasure hunting, where fifty cents might land me a seven-inch that I’ll cherish forever. I find myself pausing in the middle of the afternoon, sniffing the air for the musty scent of thrift shops, eyeing my boxes of records unhappily, wishing I could toss in a few more records to keep the party going.
I must say here that in the relative ease of my isolation—which is less taxing compared to others’ suffering and loss—I feel silly acknowledging that this is what I miss so deeply. Yet the kinds of physical nearness that we’re urged to avoid now are manifest in used record stores and shows, in book stores and thrift shops, places where people gather, sometimes closely, to hold what others once held, in a kind of continuum of acquiring and of letting go, objects passed along, home to home. I miss the communal aspect of record shopping, the overheard, often illuminating conversations between a customer and the owner, the joking banter, the friendly side-eye appraisals of a neighbor’s purchases, stray comments about a song being played in the store that might lead to a murmured conversation among customers about the first time they saw that band. (“Oh, I was at that show, too.”) Fingerprints, scuffs, pen marks, dust, smudges. The proof of people living, or having lived: these are what I love about vinyl, the virtual conversations taking place among scratchy, sleeveless 45s in a cardboard box on a floor, the ghosts of chatty, previous owners through which I sift, a gathering of folk.
Recently for a couple of bucks I found “Big Bird,” a brilliant Eddie Floyd single from 1968 and an all-time favorite, in a cramped box in a cramped store in Rockford. It looked worn as hell but, an old house or used paperback or dirt road, that's what drew me to it. Nothing a Spin Clean couldn’t help, anyway, which did in fact brighten the highs and deepen the lows of this beauty, written by Floyd with Booker T. Jones, who produced it for Stax Records. Those pops and clicks in the opening: the sound the ground makes under your feet on the approach to your grandma's or your new girlfriend’s; that creak in the front door of the beach house you stayed in that summer when you were.... That hand-written number “4” on the pale blue label? I have no idea, but I could come up with five imagined storylines to explain it. A previous owner had inked the initials “MB” on the label of a recently-scored copy of Love’s galloping “7 And 7 Is” 45, from 1966; the song’s so intense that I guess “MB” was spooked, and let it go. Or maybe “MB”’s mom did the honors, without asking.
Shuffling through a box of old 45s is like letting fistfuls of soil leak through your fingers. Organic matter, minerals, microbes all seem present on vinyl and worn labels, the grooves veritable garden rows. Heft, ballast, stuff in my hands. For what it’s worth, I’ve never found such tactile sense memories among my CDs (which have been boxed away in the dark of our basement for some time), even the first ones I bought in the late 1980s. For several decades I’d dropped loads of money on CDs, had bought into the overwhelming argument that 1’s and 0’s paved the virtual road to the future, there’s no looking back. Sure, the shelf of old mix tapes I made swapping with friends and wooing my girlfriend tells lots of stories, as does a stack of chipped compact disc cases or the obscure handwriting on a CD-r discovered randomly in Salvation Army, but plastic only bends so far before it snaps. Fingerprints on a CD case, the robot-like error when a damaged disc plays: these lack the depth and the sponginess of vinyl and of album covers and 45 sleeves, softened with the years and the touch of hands, strangers’ and my own.
This is in no small way generational, of course. I still listen to, and discover, a lot of music via Spotify and YouTube. Streaming is too pleasurable, fun, easy, the lure of millions of songs at one’s fingers too hard to resist. (And why should I?) And yet as has been well documented, sales of vinyl have been improving for years. A Rolling Stone article from last fall reported that vinyl records “earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales.” Vinyl revenue grew by nearly 13% in the second half of 2018 and the first six months of 2019, while revenues from CDs remained stagnant. If these trends remain robust, “records will soon be generating more money than compact discs.” My anecdotal evidence for this is certainly persuasive. Many of my students are buying vinyl beyond gestures in hipster irony—the numbers of twenty-somethings now equal those of their older, graying counterparts at the stores I shop in—and the DJ culture never turned its back on the 45 and the 12-inch. Yet the golden age of vinyl, it seems, is finished. Some personal history from another century: Christmas mornings with LP-shaped gifts under the tree; the epic, many-colored sweep of the Columbia Record Club inventory. I can still conjure the smell of the insides of my favorite record stores when I was growing up, from Kemp Mill Records and Backstreet Records in Wheaton, Maryland, to Yesterday and Today in Rockville to Record and Tape Exchange in College Park....
During these weeks of restrictions, I’ve been required to teach remotely, as have, at once, hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world. I’ve long resisted online teaching, yet I’ve learned that, as substitutes go, a Zoom essay-writing workshop is decent enough. Though it’s novel to see students lounging on their beds at home or hanging in their basements during class, occasionally startled by a wandering, yipping dog or a very young sibling who asks to be held, the pixel experience can’t replicate the intimacies and physical presence of a classroom, where back-and-forth conversing, surprises, arguments, and side-glances, not to mention the politics of bookbag buttons and patches, create dimensional, warm, dynamic learning experiences.
Last week, I was alerting my students to some revamped deadlines during class when I noticed that R. in the top left window of rowed students suddenly appeared frozen in place, her head tilted to her left and angled upward. I asked if her screen had locked up. Yeah, she replied unhappily in a disembodied voice. Bad connection. As I’d spoken, she’d turned to gaze at the calendar on her wall, and her laptop froze, fixing her in a pose at once local and universal: looking longingly (or was it despairingly) at time.
The last hand I shook before the lockdown turned out to have been my student K’s, at the start of a class in early March when I congratulated him on his internship to Japan, which was, of course, subsequently cancelled.
I’ve got things on my mind.
During the summer of 1987, I worked for Telesec, a temporary agency that staffed Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. libraries with part-timers. The work was often tedious. My initial job site was the first of many austere and wholly-foreign tax libraries I was to wander into over the next couple of summers: I’d be the anonymous young temp toiling in a sterile cubicle alphabetizing Library of Congress book order-forms, or organizing a more efficient system of routing periodicals to the partners and junior partners, or setting to the task of refiling the multiplying government dockets received each Monday morning from Capitol Hill. Mandy, my Placement Director, was consistently good to me during those summers. The money was fine, and for a summer gig, working in air-conditioned offices, where I was allowed some measure of anonymity and independence, and could work with my Walkman on, the job was ideal. For a couple of months, I “headed” a team of motley temps at the Museum of Natural History’s staff library hired expressly to merge that mammoth institution’s entire Library of Congress and Dewey catalogs. The work was about as exciting as it sounds—what I mostly recall are endless hours in musty stacks, dozens of over-weighted book carts, and lonely lunches sitting along the Mall in whatever shade I could find.
One rather remarkable incident occurred on that job. I held with my ungloved hands the first copy of National Geographic Magazine, although I probably wasn’t supposed to; memory blurs, and looking back I wonder if I’d daringly followed one or two of my more courageous (reckless) colleagues into the rarefied stacks where the issue was located. My fingers trembled as I held the magazine—which was published on September 22, 1888—and history, somehow the history of history, became a tangible presence, the deliverance of a past century to me. As I look back, I recognize that I held that issue nearly one hundred years after it had been published; to me, that afternoon, it had felt a thousand years old. The pages were thick and heavy, mysterious, as if the past had deepened into the fabric of the pages much as personality can deepen into character, and character into wisdom. A relic from a different age, and more real to my touch than the doorknobs, lunch sandwiches, and desks around me. Every generation bemoans, or takes note of, the speed of its present versus the languor of its past, yet things are radically faster now than at any point in human history. Of course the older one gets, the further into the past the past vanishes; though hardly news, that still rankles. I was in my early twenties when I held that National Geographic Magazine: my childhood had ended the month before, it seemed; adolescence just a week later; I didn't have a whole lot of perspective yet. But I sensed the gravity of distance before I could adequately essay it. History was a physical thing, humming in my hands.
2.
One modest year of playing snare drum in the school band and several years of piano lessons notwithstanding, I’m not a musician. My tactile pleasures from music issue not in the feel of picks, strings, or drumsticks, but from records only, and from sonic waves roaring from backlines and bodies pressed up against me at shows.
“When I sing, I feel like when you’re first in love. It’s more than sex. It’s that point two people can get to they call love, when you really touch someone for the first time, but it’s gigantic, multiplied by the whole audience. I feel chills.” That’s Janis Joplin. When I was younger, and single (or cheating), I’d flirt with women at shows, nearness, eye-glances, arm-strokes, sweat. Now, a crowded show to me is no less thrillingly physical, shoulder-to-shoulder, toe-crunching, beer-flying animation under lights and perspiration. Such fleshly proximity—the cramming of bodies into a small room—is hard to imagine as I write this, social distancing and bans on large gatherings of crowds having rendered shows impossible. In addition to the staggering losses of the revenue that musicians and venue owners rely on—and in this age of streaming music, only pennies of which make it into the coffers of labels and the threadbare pockets of musicians, touring has become a reliable if grueling money-making reality—there’s a concomitant loss of physical intimacies, of strangers pressed together in low-lit clubs in the bliss of amplified music, colliding and, grinning, shaking it off. I’m grateful for the musicians and bands that are getting it together and hosting virtual shows from their living rooms or otherwise empty venues, but, like teaching online, the energy that’s transmitted back and forth is of a lesser wattage, dimmed, if still cherished.
The most recent show I attended, the last for the foreseeable future, was in March when I caught Reigning Sound at Sleeping Village, on the west side of Chicago, a club with a small-ish stage and crowd area. The band's original lineup (Greg Cartwright, Greg Roberson, Alex Greene, Jeremy Scott) made a brief swing through the Midwest, showing little signs of rustiness. “We haven't done this together in seventeen years!” the bass player proclaimed, looking fondly at his bandmates; such was the warm looseness of the gig, pulsating yet loose, urgent and restrained. The guys have decades worth of long nights among them, yet they played with ferocity and precision, save one or two fuckups and good-natured responses, the desperate ballads and stomping four-on-the-floor rave-ups charting the wide interval that these wonderful players roam in their music. Grins, laughter, shut-eyed bliss—Reigning Sound ran the gamut of responses to the songs that they played, vibing on the packed club. After the show, they warmly received well-wishers, a few of whom were bearing drinks, congregating on the floor in the front of the stage in the kind of relaxed, back-slapping, album-signing post-show familiarity between band and fans that’s now gone, leaving us longing and surprised. Already, that show feels as if it occurred a year ago. The warm, chatty camaraderie at a merch table gives the impression of a long-lost communal rite, now, of a prohibited religious gathering.
Here’s legendary bluesman Buddy Guy, from his autobiography When I Left Home (co-written with David Ritz), on the lure of plugging in: “I cottoned to the electricity because it was something I could turn up. Volume did a lot for me. If I couldn’t play better than the guitarists around me, at least I could play louder. I could also play wilder.” He adds: “When I heard the buzzin’ and the fuzz tones distorting the amps, that didn’t bother me none. I figured fuzz tones and distortion added to the excitement of the sound. Didn’t mind jammin’ notes together in a way that wasn’t proper. Notes crashing into each other was another way to get attention. I learned how to ride high on electricity.” He says succinctly: “The blues electricity got into the people.”
Guy arrived in Chicago in 1957, via Louisiana, and was stunned by the din and excitement in blues joints like the 708 Club, on East 47th Street. “Lord, have mercy—those barrooms in Chicago are loud,” he writes.
The folk are happy and excited to be off work, and they wanna talk and tell stories at the top of their lungs. They got energy to release. So if you a musician and wanna be heard, you gotta pump up and project. Baby, you got to shout. That shouting is a thrilling thing to behold. If you went into a Chicago barroom, say, in 1958, you’d be thrilled out of your mind. The electrical music would throw you back on your heels.
Recognizing that he might have to outplay and outperform other local guitarists, the fiery breath of competition on his neck, Guy made the calculated decision—motivated by native joy and urgency—to show off, and to dismantle the divide between stage and audience, a time-honored, usually nervy, always thrilling rock and roll gesture very dear to my heart.
Guy recalls one snowy night—there were three-foot drifts along the sidewalk and street—when he hooked up his 150-foot guitar cord and started playing from inside a car parked outside the bar. “The crowd was screaming long before they ever saw me,” he writes. Unlike other local guitarists, Guy never sat down when he played. “I never started playing inside the club. No matter how cold or hot the evening, I’d come marching in, my guitar screaming. I might march into the men’s room and play from there. Hell, I might march in the ladies’ room and play from there. I’d jump off the bandstand and sit at some pretty woman’s table if she was alone. I’d leap up on the bar and play flat on my back. I’d pick the thing with my teeth. I’d put it between my legs and stroke it all sexy. I’d wave it around the room like it was a flag. I’d do any goddamn thing to get them to like me.” I would’ve loved to have been in a club (or the men's room) and seen Buddy Guy Enter Playing Guitar. Boundaries erased. Let’s grab another beer.
The owners of music venues and of shuttered record stores risk losing their businesses, and I fervently hope that the coronavirus lockdown ends before For Sale signs hang in windows. The patrons and customers are losing, too: I gaze at dozens of cancelled listings at my favorite clubs, at images of empty floors and stages, and my heart aches. As this pandemic rises and crests, I assure myself on my best days that the global lockdown is temporary, yet I’m doubtful of the wisdom of exploring my feelings about an event as it’s occurring and as it’s shifting daily. I admire artists who can turn out work for official occasions, but I’ve always been skeptical of that gesture. Thoughts, observations, and attitudes marinate over time, in time, deepen and change molecules and their relative values like ingredients in a complex soup, or a painting that’s given dimension across its many drafts. Perspective and widened contexts give writing its depth and value.
And yet. I’m reacting today. To dark rock and roll clubs. To empty basements or backyards where lo-fi folk-punk shows sprout like weeds. To shuttered record stores, where I sat on my butt with a flimsy cardboard box of scratchy 45s on my lap, decades of songs and stories, the apparitions of hundreds of previous owners, their presences virtually visible on the vinyl surfaces and ink-tagged labels, while around me others walked, clueless to the sweet nearness we’d soon give up.
Joe Bonomo's most recent books are No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing and Field Recordings from the Inside: Essays. Find him at No Such Thing As Was and @BonomoJoe.
Photo by Sean Davis on Foter.com / CC BY-ND