Record Store Day 2015: The human aspect of vinyl records

So how many of you all grew up in the days before cds, before cassette tapes, back when vinyl records (and sometimes those gigantically bulky 8-track tapes) were the way that all music was played?  It was a while ago, wasn't it? I grew up in that era and I remember not even thinking twice about switching to cassettes when those came along. They were portable! We could record our records and listen on our Walkman! We could record songs off the radio! And, best of all... we could make mix-tapes!  And then cds came along and who thought twice about switching to those? Well, I'll admit I did, but pretty much only because I was poor at the time and didn't have a lot of money to buy a cd player, either for home or for carrying around, much less a whole lot of cds. But I had to do it, because cassettes became obsolete pretty much immediately.  Through these changes, all those records that took up so much space didn't necessarily become obsolete, they just... went away.

Now that I'm older and make a semi-decent living, I have more liberty to spend hard-earned dollars on my tunes. But five years ago, I still thought twice about shelling out a bunch of bucks to make a big format switch again, this time going backwards, from listening to cds back to playing records again. Anyone who reads my babblings with any regularity knows why, of course. It's pretty much impossible to become a devotee of Jack White without learning his philosophy of musical formats by rote. Notwithstanding his latest venture of becoming involved in the Tidal digital streaming service, vinyl records have been and apparently always will be the way he prefers for music to be listened to. As recently as last month in Billboard magazine's vinyl revival issue, he broadened his usual focus to speak of an appreciation for cds, and went on to say "...when you respect music, it doesn't matter how we're getting it. We still know what the real deal is." And that 'real deal' is still records-- "It's the movie theater compared to the iPhone....You're reverential to it. With vinyl, you're on your knees. You're at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spin and it's like you're sitting around a campfire. It's hypnotic."

So when I discovered Jack's music five years ago, taking that seemingly backward step of investing in a turntable and buying records again was the only way I could participate in one of the most exciting things he's created, the Third Man Records Vault subscription service.  As soon as I began hearing about the sort of exclusive music the subscription provided, there wasn't much choice to make beyond "How much can I spend on a turntable (and a receiver, and speakers)?"  Once I had the thing, it became a source of nostalgic delight well beyond what I got from Third Man-- The very first records that I went out to shop for on my own were all the old Bill Cosby comedy albums I loved so much as a kid. I wanted to laugh til my gut split while listening to that fucking Chicken Heart that ate Chicago again, dammit!  And I wanted to do it the way I had as a kid, with a record on a record player.  Of course, I've got some mixed feelings about those Cosby records these days, but up until recently they were an unadulterated joy, as are all of the other records I've accumulated over the past five years as I've explored the wide genre of blues music, picked up all of Jack's previous and continuing releases, and dived into the many artists I've been exposed to via Third Man Records and connections I've made radiating out from TMR.

As I began buying records more and more and cds less and less, I realized that there really is something that I prefer about vinyl. I'm no audiophile, so it's not necessarily the lows and highs or warmth and depth that serious vinyl purists go on about, though those elements are often very noticeable. And, unlike Jack White, I don't sit and watch my records spin around. I do enjoy admiring the sleeve art and taking the effort to drop the needle in just the right spot, there is a lot to be said for those rituals. But once the music begins, I either lie back to soak it in or bounce around the room dancing to it. So my reason for preferring records isn't based purely in the sound quality or in the ritual of listening, it's something more elemental, something I was only recently able to put into coherent thought, thanks to an episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast in which he toured the plant at United Record Pressing in Nashville (it's a bonus episode only available to subscribers but, seriously, go and subscribe and then search for "Marc's vinyl factory tour", it's worth the couple of bucks even if you only sign up for a month).

Marc's conversation with URP's PR rep Jay Millar begins with them discussing that return to vinyl that I talked about above, and why so many people are doing it these days. In their conversation, Jay used two words that turned on a lightbulb for me-- He spoke about the "human aspect" of vinyl. I realized that's it, that's what encompasses the sound quality, the ritual, the art that accompanies record albums, the tangibleness and moving parts that so mesmerize Jack White, it's that there is a very human aspect to creating, handling, and listening to vinyl records. Of course cds and even digital music files are also ultimately created by human beings, someone has to push the buttons and flip the switches on the machines that manufacture the cds or the computer that turns the music into the 1s and 0s of an mp3 (or flac, if you're an audiophile purist), but there's more machine than human in those creations. And while vinyl records are pressed by massive machines, there are humans involved around those machines at every step along the way, there's a symbiosis between man and machine that gives records an organic feel that digital music just does not have.



In comparison, to me at least, cds and mp3s have come to feel robotic and a bit sterile. I mean, hell, there's no way you could create a work like Dario Robleto's Melancholy Matters Because of You from digital music formats, in which the generations of a family are conveyed through the varying rpms of ground-up vinyl records.

Not my photo, snagged from the artist's website as linked above

And this past weekend's Record Store Day event at Third Man Records confirmed all of that, it confirmed Jack White's commitment to vinyl records, and it confirmed the human element that keeps drawing me in.  As described in the Billboard article linked above, Jack recently spent $300,000 to purchase the original acetate of Elvis Presley's very first record, My Happiness, which Elvis recorded at Sun Studios for $4. He then had it digitally transferred so that new copies could be pressed for a special Record Store Day 78rpm edition (and a less-limited 45rpm version to be released later this year).





Jack's motivation for spending all that money is surely based in the reverence he feels for music and its history.  And the tangibleness of records is tied up in that history. You can listen to a digital recording of an historic song, as I did at another Dario Robleto exhibit, Setlists for a Setting Sun, but there's so much more impact in seeing an historic item, seeing the age and the wear and realizing that that thing has been around and represents something that happened in time.  So seeing that original acetate of My Happiness that Jack bought displayed at Third Man like it was a shrine object gave me goosebumps.

Leaning around to glance at the back of the record,
I was able to see the still-loose Prisonaires label on the b-side

And then to see the Rek-O-Kut machine that that very single was cut on sitting right there next to it brought the magnitude of it all home. 

I've not been to Graceland yet, but I have visited the museum at Sun Records in Memphis and stood in the room where that Rek-O-Kut captured Elvis' first attempt to put on vinyl those urges that would before long change his life and musical history together.  And just that morning, I had watched TMR honcho Ben Blackwell carrying a bulky object covered by a white sheet across the street and into TMR and wondered if it was the Rek-O-Kut.  A representative from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (from whom TMR had the machine on loan for the day) confirmed that, sure enough, that'd been what Blackwell was hauling in.  If it'd been me, I'd have been scared to death of dropping it, would've wanted to put it on a cart or at least a dolly or something. The Hall of Fame rep also told me a fantastic story about how they just recently found out that theirs was the machine that cut My Happiness-- Scotty Moore, Elvis' guitar player in the early days, was walking through the museum and stopped in front of it and said "You know, that is the machine". The rep told me he replied something along the lines of yeah, we know it was used for a lot of records at Sun. Apparently Scotty said, "No, I worked with that machine a lot and I know it well. It's the machine that was used for Elvis' first record". When my jaw dropped and I took a step back, the rep said his reaction had been exactly the same. 

He then explained how they got the call from TMR early last week asking if it could be displayed for RSD. There were questions about things like insurance and such, but the biggest stumbling block was that the display case at the museum was built in, couldn't be moved with the machine. But then the very next day, the museum rep was out picking up a steel guitar that was to be added to the museum, and when he went to get it he found it was in a plexi case that was the perfect size for the Rek-O-Kut to be displayed in. He said it was as if it'd been meant to be for the machine to be displayed at TMR, because after that they worked everything out and all the pieces just fell into place within a day or so, just in time for Record Store Day.

Have to mention another little kick I got related to one of Elvis' predecessors-- A portion of an old, broken Robert Johnson Terraplane Blues 78 that was hanging on the wall in a frame with no glass and a little placard beneath it that read "Touch Me". Of course I did. 

So much history on those premises in one day. As if the vibe at Third Man doesn't buzz enough on its own, they had go and add these other thrills, these reminders of how the human aspect goes hand in hand with music and the records that contain it.  For the memories of that day that are attached to it, memories of time spent with friends, of stories told and history encountered, I'll always treasure my own My Happiness.

Few more photos from this trip (and previous ones) to Third Man, here.

The strange and mighty "Power of My Love" **

So, back on New Year's Day of this year, I began a new musical infatuation. I woke up that morning wanting to get into Elvis Presley. Of course, I've heard Elvis' music over the years. I even seem to recall one of my grandmothers having some of his albums and talking about him once or twice. But I never got into him, y'know?  But suddenly on January 1st I decided it was time.  I had a day-trip planned with a lot of driving, so before leaving the house I did a quick search of Amazon.com, found and downloaded The Essential Elvis Presley, and loaded it onto a flash drive for the car.  By the time I got home that night, I was deeply hooked and completely understood why the man became the star he was and still is. Since then, I've picked up the gorgeous six-lp 50th Anniversary box-set, gotten a couple of his movies from Netflix (I highly recommend King Creole, it's a blast) and read a few bios: One heart-breakingly sad, another heart-warming, and one just begun-- Peter Guralnick's two-part Last Train to Memphis/Careless Love. 

This new infatuation, though, has in no way eclipsed the already existing one, my addiction to Jack White and his music.  It's not inconceivable that Jack might've led me to Elvis, the same way he's led me into so much other music, from blues to rockabilly to garage rock.  After all, he's been Elvis--



And the connection doesn't end there.  Jack's worked with a few of Elvis' former girlfriends in recent years.  Both clearly grasp(ed) the effect of taking the stage in distinctive clothing (Elvis' early pink'n'black getups and those iconic white jumpsuits, Jack's red, white'n'black with the White Stripes and equally color-coordinated outfits in every other incarnation), and both dyed their hair black and play(ed) up their eyes with makeup. Both took existing musical styles and turned them into something just a bit different.  But that's all superficial stuff.  Something I read in Last Train to Memphis summed up what it really is. Guralnick quoted Tom Perryman, a young dj and promoter from Gladewater, TX, describing Elvis at nineteen, just a couple months after the release of That's Alright:

"You know, he was really a natural.  When Elvis was performing, everyone had the same basic reaction.  It was almost spontaneous.  It reminded me of the early days, of where I was raised in East Texas and going to these 'Holy Roller' Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people get religion.  I said 'Man, that's something.'  You'd see it in the later years with the big sound systems and the lights, but Elvis could do it if there wasn't but ten people (in the room).  He never realized what he had till later years.  He said, 'Man, this sure is a good crowd in this part of the country.  Are they always that way?'.  I said, 'No, man. They never seen anything like you.' Nobody had."

That's Jack. I missed the White Stripes, as I didn't get into his music until the band was already unofficially over. But I've spoken to many people who did experience the Stripes, read many a review of their shows, and have experienced for myself all of his post-Stripes incarnations.  I would bet money that every fellow fan I know would agree that seeing Jack perform live is like getting religion and that they'd never before seen anything like him.  And he puts the same passion into every show, whether it's in front of ten people or one of those places with a big sound system and lights and a few thousand people.

So just imagine the degree to which my silly l'il fan-girl brain was blown when my two infatuations recently came together.

Last Saturday was Record Store Day and, like last year, I headed to Nashville to celebrate the day at Third Man Records. The anticipation for this year's event, though, was light years beyond the previous one.  On April 3rd, just two days after announcing on April Fool's Day that Jack would be releasing his second solo album, Lazaretto, this summer, Third Man announced that on Record Store Day, he would take the stage of the Blue Room to record, direct-to-acetate, a live version of the first single, also titled Lazaretto.  Not only that, but the acetate would then be rushed down the road to United Record Pressing Plant (who presses all of Third Man's releases), an abundance of singles would be pressed, and then said singles would be rushed back to Third Man to sell to the fans waiting in anxious anticipation.  And not only that, but tickets to attend Jack's performance would be on sale within a couple of hours of this announcement. Did my stomach immediately begin doing flips?  Did I actually tell my boss that I needed to be off the clock for a short while that afternoon with my office door closed?  Did I then clock out, shut my door, and pounce on that ticket sale like a hawk after its prey, scoring one of those highly sought-after $100 tickets within a matter of seconds?  Affirmative to all of the above.

Yup, that'd be me. The thing in itself.

 On Friday two weeks later, I arrived in Nashville and checked into my hotel around 5:30pm. Taking a quick peek at Facebook, I found that two of my show buddies from the 2012 Blunderbuss tour were already at Third Man and had begun the line for Saturday morning's 10am performance. When I commented that they were awesome, the immediate reply was "Get your butt down here!".  So I did.  And I was glad and grateful for it in so many ways.

First was the fried chicken that I picked up for our dinner.  If you ever find yourself in Nashville, brave the lines at Hattie B's.  Lord above, I can pretty much guarantee you won't be sorry. And then I was glad for the night that followed with the terrific bunch of people who were there.  From pressing our ears to the metal door that leads to the Blue Room so that we could hear the sound-check (and being chastised for it by Jack's tour manager), to curling up in a camp-chair with a blanket to stake our place in line while my buddies crawled into their tent to sleep, to waking up from a light doze to see an almost-full moon glowing in the sky over the Wardenclyffe tower-replica perched atop Third Man, to taking everyone for a McDonald's run at 6am and coming back to find a bird flying in and out through the TMR logo in the metal door, testing the acoustics inside the hallway, and then perching inside the logo to serenade us before flitting off...  Thinking back on that night and morning, I kind of feel sorry for Jack that we've experienced something he'll probably never be able to-- The magic of spending a beautiful, chilly night outside the gleaming black walls of the place he created.  

This photo and all following courtesy of and property of Mike Dziama

 

But I was mostly grateful that I'd rushed over there when told to because I was third in line to enter the venue when the doors opened at 8:30am.  My buddies and I snagged prime real estate at the front of the stage and, oh, how different it was at this show, considering how tiny that stage is and how close we were to the action upon it.  Very kindly, Third Man put together a video re-cap of the entire day to save me from having to babble about it.  Suffice it to say, the grin that's visible on my face about 18 seconds in sums up the state I was in pretty much the entire 20+ hours I spent on the premises--



So where's the Elvis connection? You heard a snippet of it in that video, when Jack and the band covered Power of My Love, an Elvis tune I'd not yet heard of, as the b-side of the live Lazaretto World's Fastest Record.  As terrific a song as Lazaretto is, it's that cover tune that I and some of my friends have been talking about since.  



Where Elvis' version is all self-assured, sultry seduction, Jack's is a blatant, nakedly urgent declaration that this is how it is and now what are you gonna do about it?  Elvis croons the words, Jack spits and shrieks them (while still managing to slip in a bit of that Elvis quaver), but both versions have the same knee-weakening effect.  Probably not in the least surprising, but I've been giddy over this song all week.  

In an interview with Marc Maron (skip ahead to about 29 minutes in) in 2012, Jack described Elvis as an "alien" because of what he did with music. I don't know whether Jack doesn't realize it or would be too modest to say it out loud, but it's time for him to admit that he's one, too.


Been a tad giddy over these, too, so just for the hell of it...




** Yes, I do know that the lyric is "strength and mighty power of my love". But it sounds like "strange" when Jack sings it and that's somehow just so very appropriate.

Record Store Day Pilgrimage, and then some

Got up at 6am last Friday to get ready and go to work, just like any other day, except for the back of the car being full of a bag of clothes, a cooler full of Cock’n’Bull ginger beer, a sleeping bag, and a folding chair.  Left work a bit after 3:30 in the afternoon to hit the road.  Got caught up in the creepy-crawly traffic on the DC Metropolitan Area’s notorious parking lot, er, I mean route 66 (no relation to the celebrated Mother Road, more like an evil doppelganger of that highway) and the backup from DC to Gainesville, VA ended up adding an hour to my total drive time.  Just past Gainesville, the overcast sky began dropping buckets of rain so thick that fellow drivers were putting their hazard lights on. Pulled off route 81 just after the rain ended around 7pm for a plate of meatloaf and lima beans at a truckstop diner.  Back on the road, started yawning about 9:00 or so.  Around 10, I began to get that goggle-eyed feeling where you can't tell whether your eyes are open or not and you think you might be getting ready to start hallucinating.  By 11, no amount of slapping myself in the face was keeping my eyelids up, so I pulled off at a gas station a little ways before the Tennessee border to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.   Back in the car, blew a kiss at the huge guitar (photo from a previous occasion) across the highway from the TN Welcome Center as I crossed the state line, then set Freedom At 21 on repeat at full volume and before long was flyin’ fast and high.  (That 5 Hour Energy stuff kicks in damned quick, y’know?)



At midnight, route 40 past Knoxville, TN was just as ugly as I remembered it being in the daylight three years ago.  Around 1am, the road emptied out and other cars became few and far between, and my little Honda ate up a lotta lonely miles under a moonlit sky.  Finally, around 3am, I rolled into Nashville and pulled up at Mecca, er, I mean Tent City, er, I mean Third Man Records to join the dozens of fellow pilgrims already camped out along 7th Avenue South.



I was here for Record Store Day, in the year 2013, the year that Jack White was elected Record Store Day Ambassador, only a week shy of the third anniversary of my first visit to this place, when I drove from DC to Memphis for my very first experience of Jack on-stage and then swung through Nashville on the way home so that I could also experience TMR for the first time.  That was a damned good trip.  So much has changed since then...

The wait in the wee hours of the morning went well.  I don’t know how people were able to sleep, but Tent City was silent.  It was very cold, but not miserably so.  The couple of folks who arrived right after me were just as wired as I was, so we huddled in our sleeping bags and chatted quietly about Third Man and music while we waited for the sun to come up, and then for a handful more hours while the line continued to grow and we waited for the event to begin at 11am.

A cheer went up at the beginning of the line when The Door opened--



And then we waited some more. Sales of the limited edition Record Store Day release of the White Stripes album, Elephant, were in TMR's Blue Room performance space, taking place at the same time as performances by a couple of artists on the Third Man roster. Sales of other limited vinyl and some nifty new novelty merchandise were in the shop on the other side of the building. If you wanted to try to get everything, you had to make it through one looooooooooooooong, slooooooooooooooow line and then go join another, but if you wanted to see the live performances you'd end up farther back in the other looooooooooooooong, slooooooooooooooow line, and if you wanted to get something to eat or drink you had to ask someone to hold your space in line while you ran to get into that line (fortunately the food lines were short'n'quick).  And if you were one of the many, many folks who wanted to avail yourself of Third Man's latest addition (more on that coming up), then there was yet another line for you.  For me, at least, the lines were only part of the chaos.

Over the last three years, I’ve become involved in the Jack White fan community to a fairly high degree. It’s been almost impossible not to. I want to know what’s going on, so I spend a lot of time on two Jack-related message boards and other places on the 'net for both information and that phenomenon called "social networking".  I’ve been to so many shows and met so many people, some of whom I’m now very happy to think of as long-distance friends.  But, as always with me and other people, this has led to drama.  Much of it is my own fault, as I’ve a tendency to unconsciously try to take charge of things, to be the one in the know, to lead.   It’s a characteristic that has served me well at work, as I take assignments and run with them, learn whatever I can about the ins and outs of the project to keep it on track, and to get what I need from others to get things done.  In a social situation, like a music fan community or just a group of friends, it can lead to conflict.  Which it recently has, with my level of obnoxiousness being brought to my attention just a few days prior to this weekend’s pilgrimage.  So I was tense going into this whole thing, knowing I was going to be seeing people who were becoming fed up with me.  Fortunately, there were others there with whom I’ve not been so involved and I was able to hang out with them for most of the day and keep a low profile.  In addition to that was the speculation and expectation running through much of the crowd.  Everyone knew that Jack was there that day, though he'd so far remained within the inner sanctum of the building.  Pretty much everyone (hard-core vinyl collectors and flippers may have been less concerned) was brimming with anticipation for him to hit that stage in the Blue Room and give us a taste of what had brought us all there.  At the very least, as Record Store Day Ambassador, folks expected he’d make some sort of proclamation.  It created an edgy atmosphere, as some folks were hopeful but relaxed, while others became quite angry that he might just blow us off.  As for Jack, a couple of the times that he was visible during the afternoon gave me the impression that his biggest priority was the latest addition to the TMR Novelty Lounge-- A vintage record booth in which, for $15, anyone can "not only record your own vinyl record, but send it to anyone, anywhere in the world to share a song, poem, or private message with".



All of the social consternation and event confusion and will-he-or-won't-he expectation created a feeling of high school drama that swirled as an undercurrent to the whole day and brought me to the conclusion that I need to extricate myself a bit.  It begins to sour the pleasure and meaning I get from the music.  This has happened before and caused me to turn away from music that I loved, but I will not let it happen with Jack’s music.  He’s opened too many doors for me and what I get from his music and all of the music that he’s introduced me to is more important than knowing what’s going on behind the curtains and being a part of whatever “scene” any of us fans might be privileged to be a part of (or that we imagine we are a part of).  I’ll still keep track of what he’s up to because what he does is so important and inspiring and there's no way I'll give up any shows or events of this sort that I can afford to get to, but it’s time for me to take one or two steps back from the community, out of the drama and away from the temptation to take any sort of lead.  

Now, lest it seem that I had a miserable soap opera of a day, rest assured that there was much fun as well.  It’s impossible to be within sight of the black, red, yellow, and blue walls of Third Man Records and not become at least a little giddy with excitement.  At one point, a camera man working for PBS overheard me talking about my 11-plus hour drive from DC and asked whether he could interview me for an upcoming documentary about the history of vinyl records.  The 90 minute show will apparently go all the way back to sheet music and from there follow our desire to save music for posterity, with a focus on the vinyl format.  He wanted me to talk about why I’d been compelled to travel such a long distance to Third Man and what it is that makes vinyl records so special.  I feel like I completely babbled and, of course, can now sit here and think of so many things I should’ve said that didn’t come to mind impromptu, but it doesn’t matter because what I did say will probably end up on a cutting room floor anyway (Note: Need to watch for the show to come on ‘cause it sounds like it’s going to be very informative and interesting).  What matters is that what’s going on at Third Man is being noticed and I tried in that brief interview to sum up why it should be—It’s their passion, their contagious excitement for what they do, their love of history, their kid-in-a-candy-store joy for technology both old and sometimes new, their driving compulsion to always be making something, anything, unique and special that’s either never existed before or that used to exist but doesn’t any longer, all for the purpose of getting people to be involved with music.  And the fact that the music, that nebulous, intangible thing that affects us emotionally and neurologically in ways that I don’t think will ever be fully understood, is all wrapped up in tangible, interactive forms makes it a heady concoction that can be as intoxicating as any drug.  And a damned sight healthier for us.  It’s this that I want to experience, that I will travel hours and hours to feed off of and then carry the feeling of back home with me.  All the rest is either just icing or, in some cases, bits of burned crumbs on the bottom of the pan.  Give me that yellow, black, and white cake, with or without extra icing, and I’ve got all that I need.





 
And, finally, here is one of the other big reasons that I was so eager to make that long drive to Third Man-- To experience one of the most visible signs of their sense of whimsy, a bidet installed on the ceiling of the men's room as a functioning shower. I couldn't reach the controls, but was able to jump high enough to smack the upside-down towel.

Photo by Daniel Kitching