About seven years ago, JP, our then 17 y/o, chanced upon a beautiful wood-stained Crosley record player that someone was throwing away in the neighborhood! Also, the LP player had a CD and cassette player with it—no 8 Track Player; now that was truly a fad! I had fun telling JP what the "33 1/3" and "45" rpm meant.
When I got home, JP told me the neighbors told him that the needle didn't work, but that it was practically new. Since his generation is mainly familiar with iPods and digital oriented music, it was neat to see his interest in something that I had grown up with: big albums!
And then I recalled how most old-fashioned record players had those switch-around needle heads on them, so if a needle got bad or needed replacement, all you had to do was flip it around. So voila, we were in business!
JP certainly didn't have any LPs around to give this beauty a try,
although he indicated that some of his friends were getting into album music
like it was almost avant-garde again! But I was able to unearth an old LP I
still had: The Greatest Hits of Peter, Paul and Mary!
I had to wonder to myself, "Why
did I ever give away all of my Beatles and Monkee's LPs around 15 years ago?"
They are surely prized collector's items!
At that moment, I had a flashback
to my own 17 y/o days in New Orleans when I used to go The Mushroom on
Broadway near Tulane University to get all my LPs. My buddies John, Scott,
David, Neal, Marshall, and Peter also helped me find this cool LP store that
was in the Big Easy area—I think The Gold Mine in Harahan, where one could get
"bootleg LPs" sometimes, like the Masked Marauders!
My buddy Marshall, whom I visited about 8 years ago in Victoria, Canada, has all of his LPs safely in those neat clear and large zip-lock containers to protect LPs from water and humidity.
So back to JP's wonderful find in the neighborhood, when I put the Peter, Paul and Mary LP on it, I felt like I was a teenager again—while I love the crispiness of a CD or digital types of sound, there is nothing like an LP sound, as many a music aficionado have noted! JP and Cookie, my wife, got tired of me singing "Puff, The Magic Dragon" over and over again that day!
To borrow from Sonny and Cher, "The Beat Goes On," and dem LPs also go on and on to "My (Younger) Generation," JP and his friends, as The Who once noted; I got to hear the latter once in a concert at the PMAC; I also had gotten to see Genesis at the old Centroplex—now Raising Cane's River Center!
When I go to Walmart and other stores, I can't believe now how
much shelf space is allocated to albums, which truly brings back some wonderful
music memories and cool LP names like Rubber Soul by the Fab Four!
