Long Play - 33 1/3

Does anyone else miss LP’s? I have exactly zero these days. I sold all of mine around the time I went to college. I boxed all of them up (even Boston with the cool guitar/flying saucer art) and took them to Eides where I think I got about fifty dollars for them, less than a buck a piece since some they didn’t want; I donated them anyway.


I really don’t miss the music, I have recouped most of it via CD’s or downloads (all paid for by the way…regardless of what argument you want to make about the scoundrel record business, I never had it in me to rip off an artist.) What I miss is the whole package, the cover, the liner notes, the LP itself. There was no fast forward, no shuffle or repeat play, and to hear the whole thing you had to turn it over. Imagine! For God’s sake, I miss alphabetizing them. I also miss the hardware. I think at the end of my LP days I had a modest component set with hand me down speakers from my older brother. It had the long pin on the turntable that you could stack several LPs on, when one side was done, the arm would pull back, and the next record would drop down and begin playing. I miss wanting to hear a certain song and gently taking the arm and manually trying to move it to the darker groove in between songs, and rarely getting that right. I’d end up catching the last few, fading chords of the previous song. You got to know your records too…where they skipped, the rare gem on the B-Side (think Thunderbird…last song on Quiet Riot’s Metal Health.) I miss the crunchy static in between songs. It’s not lost on me that my kids will probably never buy an album in a store…and that’s a shame.

There is a great, online debate raging between me and my buddy Mark about the state of music over the past twenty years…and as of this writing I am waiting for a reply. But I am convinced of this, if we had more LPs and less downloads, we may still have Garth Brooks but we would have less Jack Johnson…and that’s a world I could live in.