| KUOI KUOIRNER: Vinyl: the new, old black |
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| Written by Marcus Kellis - Argonaut | ||||||
| Monday, 20 April 2009 | ||||||
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Saturday was Moscow’s Hempfest, day two of the University of Idaho’s Mom’s Weekend and Iran’s Army Day, but it was
also Record Store Day — an international celebration of independent
record stores.
It will shock no one to declare in this column record sales are down, or bands that were once niche now reach Billboard’s Top 15 (as The Decemberists did earlier this month with their new album, “The Hazards of Love,” on Capitol Records). But these trends do not take place in a vacuum. Exactly counter to the decline in CD sales and music sales overall is an increase in sales of gramophone records, or vinyl, or wax or whatever you want to call those impractical 12” discs. KUOI has literally thousands of these in its collection, dating back to the ‘60s and earlier, and if you haven’t seen it before, it’s worth seeing. In talking with alumni of college radio nationally (many of whom stay in college radio for a while after graduation working with labels or promoters), collecting vinyl is a hobby plenty of twenty-somethings adopt. I am among them. The lowest row of my bookshelf contains many $1 treasures, from “National Anthems of the World” performed by The Vienna State Opera Orchestra to “Music for a German Dinner at Home” by Franz Hertzman and his Orchestra to “Romantic Zither” by Ruth Welcome, apparently a noted zitherist. But I have more than novelties and oddities — I also have the latest albums from Architecture in Helsinki, Built to Spill and Destroyer. Years ago, a band giving away CDs would find takers. Now we suffer from an overabundance of music and a shortage of time. When I do buy a CD, I put it on my computer and put the CD wherever it happens to lie. Some find their way to storage, others float around my apartment for months. LPs are not wonderful. They’re heavy, they degrade and they’re inconvenient to store and to play – but with an LP I feel like I own my music in a way that escapes me with digital media, whether physical (with CDs) or not (with MP3s, et al.). Record Store Day was founded a few years ago to promote independent record stores, which have been something of an endangered species since record label consolidation and record store consolidation hit full throttle in the ‘90s. My favorite haunts are Boise’s Record Exchange, that has a killer gift shop and café besides a good amount of used and new LPs and CDs; Amoeba Records in Berkley, San Francisco and Hollywood — each the size of a floor or two of UI’s library; and Bop Street Records in Seattle, that devotes its ample space almost exclusively to vinyl and is a favorite haunt of both DJ Shadow and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, two of my favorite musicians. More locally, Pullman’s Atom Heart Music stocks new and old music and has a Spokane distributor that accommodates requests (scoring me three Tom Waits LPs a year ago). Goodwill and the Salvation Army tend to be heavy on Lawrence Welk and Christmas music, but will occasionally have, you know, Captain and Tennille or something else marginally worthwhile. Most independent labels have begun, continued or restarted vinyl production – you can get Bright Eyes and M. Ward on wax, naturally. But even majors are getting into the game: Radiohead’s albums with Capitol have been reissued on vinyl, and most of Neil Young’s latest albums on Reprise are making their way to the format too. I don’t anticipate reel-to-reel, 8-tracks or cassettes coming back, but for however long it lasts, vinyl is a fact of the music industry at present. It’s also a fact of the past – being the predominant format for 50 years, there’s vinyl that will never officially make it to CD or MP3. I’m a little bummed I missed the days of the CD revolution, when people threw out their LP collections for no good reason. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen Herb Alpert in a thrift-store bin, I’d be a rich man. But the Beatles, who were somewhat more popular and sold many albums, can hardly be found for a dollar. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.  Add as favorites (72) | Views: 889
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