A Personal History
The first recording I fondled was a 78 rpm album of music by Frédéric Chopin, the great Polish-French composer of the early 19th century. The disc, which belonged to my grandparents, was part of an “album,” like a photography album, which was then a collection of similar 78s by the composer in a heavy-cardboard case the size of weight of what we’d now call a coffee table book.
I asked: “Who’s ‘Choppin’?”
My nana and papa explained his name was pronounced “Show-pahn,” which made no sense to me. They told me he was born in Poland but had lived and worked in France, so it was a French pronunciation. I argued with them about the spelling and sound of his name. I insisted he be called “Choppin’.” The French were wrong. I was a difficult child.
The Chopin recordings weren’t vinyl: these discs were heavy and brittle, made from shellac; easily breakable, I was amazed I was allowed to touch it. Other plastics were also used in manufacturing 78s, such as styrenes. OK to listen, not, like licorice pizza, good to eat.
I didn’t expect them to have any rock and roll records. I was already alert to the possibility that there might be a beat record by some famous rock person, such as Elvis Presley, or R&B performer like Louis Jordan, might have snuck into their Astoria apartment, but no luck.
When I got just a few years older, I was able to go for a walk by myself on Steinway Street, the main drag then and now of Astoria, Queens. I always headed for Steinway Sports and Records, an amazing hybrid for a 10-year old to visit. It stocked sports equipment on one side, music (singles and albums) on the other. I always took a perfunctory look at the baseball gloves and the footballs and hoops equipment, but then got down to the serious business of going through the records.
We owned a few 45s at home, mostly novelty hits my younger brother and I would enjoy: “Alvin’s Harmonica” by the Chipmunks, “Witch Doctor” by David Seville, who was the creator of the Chipmunks. One 1959 oddity was called “Ambrose (Part 5)” by Linda Laurie. (There were no parts one through four.) A frightened young girl is walking in a subway tunnel, talking to the thuggish Ambrose, whose only comment is “Just keep walkin.’” Creepy and seedy, and most likely a regional product, as Linda Laurie, over a tinkling piano, recites her lines in a heavy native Brooklyn accent.
I already had The Everly Brothers Best, which I loved, and The Fabulous Style of the Everly Brothers, as birthday gifts. It took me a while to warm up to the many covers on the latter, even Little Richard’s “Rip It Up.” From an early age, I always preferred the original versions of songs, until I was about 11 in 1961, when I found out that “Blue Moon,” by the Marcels, a 45 I bought, (I suspected the album would be similar novelties that would wear thin), was originally performed in 1934, and written by Rodgers and Hart. Possibly, it was first sung by someone related to Choppin’; I had no idea except that it definitely wasn’t doo-wop.
I bought my first album, Presenting Dion & the Belmonts, at Steinway Sports and Records. It was an unusually well-put together album for its time, remembered as the era when the music industry prospered on the small change of 45 rpm singles, and released albums to capitalize on hits, with many tracks of filler. The Dion and the Belmonts album had no filler, even though its range was wide: The uptempo hit “I Wonder Why”; the mid-tempo romantic hit “A Teenager in Love” (written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman); respectfully updated standards (Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When”; “That’s My Desire”); a feint to “I Got the Blues”; teenage defensiveness (”Don’t Pity Me”); and even a country song, “You Better Not Do That.” That made me suspicious, a vocal group from Belmont Avenue in the heart of the Italian Bronx doing a country song. Dion told me many years later that his fondness for country music was sincere, since it would be heard in the Bronx from a radio station in New Jersey, and it was the real deal, Hank Williams and all that.
Whether it was the same day or another I’m not sure, but I remember being wracked with indecision (not an unsual frame of mind for me, as I often had to reconcile the rigid instructions from my mother with the flexibility required of the real world). I held in my hand an album called Chuck Berry Twist. Intuitively I knew Chess Records was releasing such an album to capitalize on the Twist craze among us young ones, and I already had many of the familiar Chuck Berry tracks as singles or on other albums. But I felt the spooky foreshadowing of future vinyl collectors as I thought: “One day this album might be worth a lot of money.” But I left it behind, and at least once a month since I wish I had bought it. I think I left the store with Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger, because I didn’t own any Diddley.
Growing up in Franklin Square, Long Island, we were a short drive from one of the earliest outdoor shopping malls, the Green Acres Shopping Center in adjacent Valley Stream. Green Acres was anchored, in my mind, by an outlet of the famed Sam Goody’s record chain. Though my family liked to shop often at Green Acres, I once asked my mother to make an emergency visit. Already a fan of Huey Smith and the Clowns, Ernie K. Doe, and other New Orleans regional acts crossing over to the national rock market (Jimmy Clanton’s “Just a Dream” and Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise” were others), I heard Huey Smith’s “Don’t You Just Know It” on the radio. I thought to myself, this one has too much regional hoodoo to be on the radio in New York; I need to get it now, before it disappears. We ran down to Sam Goody and I copped a copy, and I never did hear it on the radio again. The 45 had a groove skip, which for years I thought was part of the record.
Most of the albums I bought in the pre-Beatles era were hits collections. L.A. disc jockey Art Laboe created the Oldies But Goodies series. Volume one was almost perfect, 12 songs split between a “dreamy” side for ballads: “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, “Tonite Tonite” by the Mello Kings; “Stranded in the Jungle,” by the Cadets, “Let the Good Tinmes Roll” by Shirley and Lee, “Nite Owl” by Tony Allen. They weren’t all doo-wop, some were pre-rock samples of Central Avenue L.A. R&B like Faye Adams’ “Shake a Hand” and “I Got Loaded” by Peppermint Harris.
Later vinyl and CD reissues have changed drastically. At first, the reissues of these albums have changed to reflect Laboe’s appeal in the Mexican-American community. An album I bought on my first trip into Marin County, California was East Side Revue, Vol. 2, “20 Songs from East Los Angeles’ Most Popular Groups,” from 1965 – 1968, a scene known for bands spelling “the” as “thee”: Thee Epics, Thee Runabouts, Thee Midniters. I bought it for $3.98, regular price, at Village Music in Mill Valley, an oldies haven with a specialty in American regional music of all kinds, from Arhoolie, Yazoo and other similar labels for blues and zydeco, and a place where if I had any intention of staying in California, I would have asked for a job.
Here was the thing: oldies were a big deal everywhere, because Elvis Presley was in the Army from 1958 – 1960; Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper (fast-talking Texas disc jockey with the comic novelty “Chantilly Lace”) had died in the famed 1959 plane crash; Gene Vincent was crippled in the 1960 U.K. taxi crash that killed Eddie Cochran; Little Richard had sworn off rock for the rock of ages; and so top 40 radio had plenty of time for new dance songs, Phil Spector, and Motown and the like, but every city had a DJ with hours to play oldies, and there were a few in New York, including Murray “the K” Kaufman; Jack Spector, subject of a tribute by the Del-Lords circa 1984, “Saint Jack.”; and Bruce “Cousin Brucie” Morrow.
At this point, say 1960, rock and roll was only officially about six years old, so listening to these oldies could give the eager student a quality education in the history of rock. Both Murray the K and Cousin Brucie not only played oldies on their shows, they branded compilation albums similar to the Oldies but Goodies series. Bruce Morrow, prematurely bald, had “12 + 3 = 15 Hits”; Murray the K had his Golden Gassers; ABC-Paramount had a collection, A Million or More, with Paul Anka, Lloyd Price, and others that offered good bang for the buck.
When the Beatles came, in England in 1963, here more stealthily until the end of the 1963/beginning of 1964, I didn’t find it necessary to buy the first singles or albums; they were on the air all the time. In fall 1963, we moved away from Franklin Square, Green Acres, and Sam Goody. And that first year, I had a very hard time making friends. But I bought Rolling Stones albums almost from the beginning. We did live a half-mile walk and two bus rides to the Roosevelt Field Shopping Center, a covered mall. It’s great attraction was a large Record World store, with frequent sales. On a bitterly cold Saturday with no one to hang out with and nothing to do, I braved the buses to buy the Rolling Stones’ December’s Children. This would have been December 1965, so I was already in my junior year at Herricks, and my friendships were still patchy.
I bought the album, then waited at the bus terminal to begin my journey home. There was a cute girl also about 14 or 15, and we shared a cigarette, and I overcame my shyness to proselytize for the Stones. When her bus came (she lived in Carle Place, closer to Roosevelt Field), I thought about asking for her phone number, but what would the point have been? Too far to date without a car. My parents were going out that night, and my brother and I, both depressed, listened to December’s Children, with a selection of pithy, sad originals: “When Blue Turns to Gray”: those were my feelings precisely; “It’s the Singer, Not the Song,” another excellent early Jagger-Richards song. But there was also the fast opening rocker “She Said Yeah,” which I did not notice until today was co-written by Sonny Bono. I don’t remember if we had a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine stashed away. If we did, my brother got quite buzzed; I got a little buzzed, but wanted more. It rarely occurred to us to hit the liquor cabinet and mix Fleishmann's vodka with some juice, or rum with Coke. The sweet liqueur in fashion, Cherry Heering, tasted like cough medicine.
I remember buying Rubber Soul and Revolver and “Sgt. Pepper” at Record World. Beatles in mono, $1.77; stereo, $2.39. I bought mono because I thought it would make no difference on our very basic music system, and I was right. Also, with a $5 bill and some change, you could leave Record World with three mono albums rather than two stereo albums.
This is a reissue, but the cover’s the same. The sound is better on the original mono.
Sometimes my hoodlum friends would decide to pull an album heist at a small department store with a decent record department in New Hyde Park. I didn’t approve, but since I accepted the role of lookout, standing outside the store and not quite participating, I got a share of the booty, which for me meant The Blues Project Live at the Cafe Au Go in 1965. There were also a handful of record stores in Greenwich Village on West 8th Street east of Sixth Avenue whose stock insisted entirely of overstock or “cutouts” from jazz labels such as Verve, Impulse, and Riverside, and Atlantic Records’ jazz catalog as well. They were cheap, maybe $1 or so, and among the records I added to my collection were The Blue Yusef Lateef and Ornette Coleman’s The Art of the Improvisers. It was a low-risk, high yield way of broadening jazz knowledge.
If thrift shops are a major destination for vinyl crate-diggers, imagine what they were like back in the late 1960s? When I was a sophomore at Bard in 1968 – 1969, my roommate and I dug up a car one weekend and drove across the bridge to Kingston, which was nothing like the capital of Neo-Brucklyn it is today. There was a thrift shop that had singles for five cents each. We each spent a buck and brought home a bounty of James Brown singles on King Records, and the entire repertory of Ike and Tina Turner on Sue Records.
I was on the staff most of the time at the Bard Observer, the school paper (sometimes listed on the masthead as “M.I.A.” when the editor wanted my attention). I covered the student government meetings, which were generally quite collegial with a student body of what was then around 650. The Observer occasionally published my bad poems and Donald Fagen’s pseudonymous snarky record reviews. One day a box of albums appeared from Capitol. It had the Steve Miller Band album, Brave New World, with “Space Cowboy” on it. I always thought it was his best record. But I wondered how it got to the Observer office. “Oh,” the editor told me. “Record companies send albums free to music reviewers.” I immediately saw my future, and started getting promo record service a few weeks after I hit college again, in 1970, in Boulder, Colorado; I found myself music editor of the Boulder Express shortly after I walked into the office. I received free albums through the entire vinyl era, and then free CDs until those started disappearing. But I remain a fan of scouring for vinyl for the records that were lonely and left behind, wherever I travel, anywhere in the world.
“Vinyl, A Love Story” might be continued at any time, since Substack Notes has become a vinyl collector’s clubhouse. I’m considering making some of the rarities available in Dutch auctions for paying subscribers. Let me know what you think.
Header Image: Presenting, album cover by Dion and the Belmonts. Please message Wayne if you know where he misfiled his copy.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
0 comments