Aaliyah came home last week in a great state of excitement because she had acquired some technology she’d been wanting.
A record player.
Yes, a portable record player, the same type that every teenaged girl wanted in the 1950s.
She had gotten a Taylor Swift album, and Kindra bought her an album of Disney movie hits. She was the picture of a happy teenager, spinning platters on her new record player.
I thought this was interesting because I myself spent many an hour listening to records as a kid, half a century ago. Mine were bluegrass music, mostly, with some Hank Williams thrown in and some Bob Wills.
In the late ‘60s, the world shifted to 8-track tapes and I shifted right along with it, buying 8-tracks to play in my car and records to play in the house. In the early ‘70s, the trend shifted to 4-track cassettes, but I kept buying records for a while, still mostly bluegrass and country.
I can’t swear to it, but I think the last record I bought was in 1976. It was a compilation of Hank Williams songs recorded live at the Grand Ol’ Opry.
By that time, I had maybe 100 records, but I have no clue what happened to them. Became part of the flotsam and jetsam of life and wound up in a dumpster somewhere, would be my guess.
A few days after Aaliyah brought her record player home, we were at Kindra’s parents’ house for Mother’s Day and guess what we found.
Why, it was her grandfather’s old turntable, receiver and speakers, that’s what it was.
And a stack of 33.3 rpm albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Glancing from half a room away, I immediately recognized the covers of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison and San Quentin albums. I had both of those on 8-track and wore them out driving my ‘61 Chevy.
Kindra was immediately enamored of this relic from her past and so the electronics and the albums came home with us that evening.
There was a mix of country and pop albums. Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Simon and Garfunkel.
The electronics were state of the art for the 1970s, but something evil befell the needle and we had to order a new one.
A couple of nights later, Kindra and were sitting in the living room watching the records drop onto the turntable, like it was 1970 revisited.
Eventually, it was time for Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, and I couldn’t tell if Kindra was impressed or disturbed that I still remembered all the words to Dirty Old Egg-Sucking Dog and Flushed From The Bathroom of Your Heart.
I think records and record players are still cool, but hey. I’m a guy who continues to use 70-yearold cameras with film in them.
What surprised me was how much everyone else in the house likes them.
Kindra even bought a two-record set of Creedence hits and went on Ebay to buy a copy of the Greatest Hits of Flatt & Scruggs.
That was the first album I ever bought. Saved my lawn-mowing money when I was 13 or 14 and ran the needle through it. You could almost see through the grooves before I was done with it.
Anyway, we have been reliving the phonograph years and I was thinking: life has finally come full circle and caught back up to me.
Nothing can top this, I thought. It was then that Melo started taking pictures with her new technology - a Polariod camera.
Looks like I was wrong.