In an earlier edition this year of the Red Hook Star-Revue, Mike Cobb wrote about the welcome revival of record shops in Red Hook (see “The Return of the Record Store,” February 2019). In his treatise, Mike told of the special relationship that music lovers have with vinyl records. To paraphrase his sentiments, he said something like “You can’t put your arms around an MP3.” He wasn’t pinching a Johnny Thunders line here (the dead New York Doll’s guitarist was talking about a memory, not an MP3). I would add that you cannot roll a joint on the cover of an MP3 either, nor can you spill beer all over one and still listen to it. But you can make associations with records, ones that will never go away.
I was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. My father, whose name was Merlin but who went by the moniker of Mogs, spent a chunk of his life as a beat journalist down there. He worked for the morning daily Natal Mercury, later the afternoon Daily News, and the weekend Sunday Tribune, all Durban papers. He even moonlighted for The Leader, Durban’s independent Indian community newspaper. In these jobs, he wore many hats. At different times, Mogs was the crime correspondent, the shipping reporter, Uncle Bill in the kids’ comic section, the horse racing maven, the man on the spot at City Hall, the test driver of new autos (the Vauxhall Viva), and especially the record reviewer. It was this last brief that had a profound effect on his own kids, my two elder sisters and myself.
In his capacity as a music critic, Mogs brought home a truly bizarre collection of long-playing records. Our house was the recipient of such gems and unique thumpers as Around the World with The Chipmunks (Alvin, Simon and Theodore), One Million Dollars’ Worth of Twang by Duane Eddy, Donald Where’s Your Troosers by the Scottish crooner Andy Stewart, My Fair Lady by the Percy Faith Orchestra, Jim Reeves Sings Afrikaans Country Music Hits, The Theme from the Bridge on the River Kwai by the Mitch Miller Whistlers, Expresso Bongo by Cliff Richard and The Shadows, Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites, Ivor Novello’s We’ll Gather Lilacs, Jump Up Calypso by Harry Belafonte, Charles Penrose’s The Laughing Policeman, and Flaming Star/Rock a Hula Baby by Elvis Presley, to name a few.
“We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school” – Bruce Springsteen, “No Surrender”
There was only one problem. We didn’t own a record player. So Mogs relied on the liner notes to guide his critical voice. A typical review would lead off with a hook like “Move over Frank Sinatra, there’s a new act in town,” or “She has the hips to swivel, and boy can she prove it.” He had no idea what he was writing about, but it came across as convincing. This might have been a different and earlier form of fake news: fake opinions, at least.
Finally, my parents purchased a Pilot radiogram, and we had the opportunity to actually play these albums. The Pilot didn’t work too well. The speed on the turntable was wonky, so the Chipmunks sounded like the Kingston Trio, and Matt Monro could have been Alvin of the Chipmunks singing the Japanese Banana song instead of the theme from Born Free or From Russia With Love. It didn’t matter. We listened to everything
Christmas came, and we children all got a seven-single each as presents. Jenny, the eldest, received Sherry Baby by the Four Seasons, with the Frankie Valli wailing falsetto. Bronwen was given You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two, the Fagin song from the musical Oliver (as an aside, Steve Marriott, the front man for the Small Faces and Humble Pie, was the Artful Dodger in the West End stage production). I wound up with Edward and Gordon from the original Thomas the Tank Engine, series by the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, an Anglican cleric and railway enthusiast. The floodgates were open. By the age of eleven years, I had saved enough for my first record. It was Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. There was no going back.
Late 1977, I left South Africa for London in a bit of a hurry and had to abandon my record collection back home. It was fairly formidable, ranging from Frank Zappa to the Zulu Malombo Jazzmen, and a whole lot of in-between. The stranded albums were all in the hands of Durban’s ex-premier record reviewer Mogs, who no doubt immediately dumped the entire shebang on the front doorstep of the local Sally Army thrift store…so much for that.
I was broke in London, but always put aside a few quid for a trip to Virgin, the HMV record store or the street market vendors down Notting Hill Road or Camden Town way, and so I had accrued another smaller but far more exotic record collection. These ones included artists such as Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Graham Parker and the Rumour, the Welsh wizard Dave Edmonds, the punk poet John Cooper Clarke, and various dub men and women like Tapper Zukie and Althea & Donna.
In September 1978, my South African movement work brought me to Brooklyn, New York, USA. The plan was to be in America for a couple of months at the most. That was forty-one years ago. I am still here. So that particular London record collection journeyed straight up the Khyber too, on the path of no return to the khazi (English slang for the outhouse).
Here in Brooklyn, I went for a good seven years before I scored a regular monthly wage. Not oddly enough, political activism was a poor breadwinning vocation. We were barely earning enough to pay the rent, drink bathtub gin at home, and occasionally socialize in cheap bars that would literally petrify today’s hipsters. When I finally landed a more reliable gig, I made a promise to myself: I would rebuild the record collection from the git-go. This would involve refilling all that I had abandoned before if I could ever find it again, and keeping up to snuff with what was new that appealed to me. I spent all of my extra cash on this pursuit and going to the boozer.
And man, was I in the right place to do it. Saloons stayed open until four in the morning, and stores like Tower Records, J&R Records and Sounds were attractions to me akin to a dung beetle’s jones with giraffe shit. I will no doubt die poor, but I have a wall of records and the liver to prove it. I have no regrets.
[pullquote]This is why Mike Cobb’s article meant something. It spoke to the record collector inside of me. And now LPs are back in style.[/pullquote] This has to be a music industry initiative, so the motivation behind this latest popularity could well be dubious. It is certainly pecuniary, if the asking prices for new albums are anything to go by. I couldn’t give two hoots about the salvation or growth of the music business, and why the sale of vinyl now makes sense to those executives in suits. Their needs have always fucked people like us anyway, not to mention countless worthwhile musicians.
We hang onto certain things because they are meaningful to us. They are ours, not theirs, and this has nothing to do with fixations about private property or ownership. It’s the stories behind the collecting and the listening that matter. Sometimes these memories might be all that we are left with. And we can certainly put our arms around them. Check out your local record stores and start from scratch, if that’s what it takes.
