rtestplace: vinyl

i have collected, over the years, a bunch of vinyl. as i was just a bit more stable than the parade of transient hippies who lived in my various houses, i "inherited" quite a few. i'm talking lps. albums. records. analog music. and some spoken word stuff too. they have been packed away for many years. i also have a box of cassette tapes gathering dust. and now the cds robin and i have, have also been superseded by technology. we are connected. we get our tunes on the intertubes and put them on an ipod. i just recalled that somewhere here with us in our new home is also a stack of 78 rpm records. those might not be vinyl. oh yeah, i may have one of the earliest records i bought. a wannabe beatnik kid stuck in the 'burbs, at 16 i bought a 45 rpm mini album, maybe called an ep(extended play): music from the movie "the man with the golden arm," which i had not, and still have not, ever seen.

last week i pulled out the ancient garrard turntable i got from somewhere. the needle had lost its point, so i laid out 20 bucks for a new pickup and needle. those old lps sound great! ok. here's some technical stuff. we record this stuff on a mac using a free program called audacity, by plugging one end of a patch line into the headphone outlet of our stereo amp and the other end into "line in" on the computer. we also record on our older pc using a program called sound forge, which we bought some years ago. either of these systems works for taking music from cassettes too. these programs record in wav format, and convert that into mp3. itunes will also convert a wav into an mp3.

here is a small sample of my albums, with commentary. it was tough to pick out just a few. there are lots from the sixties, seventies and eighties. rolling stones, the dead, quicksilver, jesse colin young, fever tree (??!). loads of us have those (maybe not fever tree, or cat mother and the all night newsboys) so i didn't pick any of them for pictures.

i was raised on jazz. well, not really. my parents liked music, but had no records. and thelonius monk wasn't even on their radar.

oh just look at this! you see the word "rapping?" does it sound modern? was this guy ahead of his time or what. recorded live in oakland, california, 1960.

i was there! as the crowd thinned out late at night the ushers opened the gates and let my high school buddies and me in. we were ten feet from the stage. 1959.