THE VINYL COMMUNITY

Sarah has, quite possibly, never displayed the depth of her commitment to me as clearly as on a frigid February morning early in our marriage: that Saturday, she woke in the 6:00 A.M. darkness to accompany me to the Rhode Island Rock ‘n’ Roll Collector’s Convention. Squinting against low sun, we drove along the nearly deserted highway to North Providence, following directions I’d scrawled on a slip of paper the night before to a white cinderblock Knights of Columbus Lodge, its parking lot edged with frozen piles of gritty week-old snow and filled already with dozens of cars.

For the several years we lived in Ithaca, New York, I’d dragged Sarah at an even earlier hour to stand in line for that town’s famous Friends of the Library Book Sale—for which people routinely line up two days in advance, pitching tents along the sidewalk half a block from busy Route 13 and disregarding the vagaries of Upstate October weather in the hopes of being among the first two hundred let into the huge warehouse filled with a year’s worth of donated books. We always managed to arrive in time to make that cut: those who don’t must wait for someone to come out of the building, due to the fire code’s maximum occupancy, and in bibliophilic Ithaca—where among the discarded books are often rare first editions, or scholarly texts with some Cornell luminary’s marginalia—this is a long wait.

But on those morning trips to sift someone else’s junk, Sarah had a personal interest in the sifting, and often came away with armfuls of books. She’s indulged my obsession for record-hunting many times during our marriage, either by seeking solace in a nearby shoe store or boutique while I spend hours in some basement, or by following me inside the shop for some patient but aimless browsing, or even, sometimes, by waiting in the car or a café while I binge on rows of LPs—just one more row, I think, just one more row and I’ll go find her. (One of her colleagues, himself a record collector, upon finding out that I sometimes dragged her along to record shops, exclaimed, “That’s spousal abuse! You can get help for that, you know!”) This time, however, even I had reservations: I’d previously been to only one other record fair, where most of the records were overpriced and uninteresting, and had decided to try this one more as an excuse to get out of the house during a bitterly cold winter than with the hopes of filling any of the holes in my collection. For years, I considered the record fair an excuse for people too lazy to do real crate-digging to pay stiff finder’s fees for albums someone else has plucked from yard sales and Salvation Army stores. I withdrew only $50 from an ATM—let’s be honest: a pittance, given the circumstances—and even this enforced spending limit turned out to be optimistic.

As I steered the car into a parking space, I doubted that Sarah would find much to occupy her inside, and noted the same nagging guilt I feel when we’re in a record store and she says, “I’ll just go wait outside,” or when, at home, I pause to notice the shelves of records that require an entire wall; the LPs leaning, dozens deep, against the couch and the coffee table; the CDs stacked unevenly on the floor beside the vacuum record-cleaning machine and bottles of cleaning solution. My archive overflows our living room—which we recently rearranged, in part, to place my stereo’s speakers more optimally. Sarah’s passion for music differs from mine mostly in that she feels much less need to own it: when we met, her music collection consisted of about six dozen CDs and a shoebox of old cassettes, including those mixtapes with which I wooed her. At times she’ll ask me a question or two about something I’m listening to, and I’ll believe that I’ve roused some interest, but when I ask her what I should put on the stereo while we cook dinner, she usually replies, “I don’t know—whatever you want.” On a long car trip, Sarah once asked me about Beat Happening, whose first CD I was playing as we drove, and my extemporaneous dissertation about that band, K Records (the band’s homegrown label), and their shared importance to rock music—“Kurt Cobain had a K Records tattoo,” I probably pointed out—may have required several dozen miles of the New York State Thruway, as well as whatever was left of Sarah’s patience and curiosity.

More recently, I put the Clash’s first album (UK pressing, of course) on the turntable, and a moment later Sarah walked into the room, singing along with Joe Strummer on “Career Opportunities.”

“Did you like the Clash back in high school?” I asked, surprised that she knew the words.

She paused to consider. “Yeah,” she said, “but mostly I liked the boys who liked the Clash.”

At the Knights of Columbus Lodge’s smudged plate-glass door, a man clenching a cigarette in his teeth collected our $ 2 admittance fees and stamped our hands. Inside the hall—dark and smoky after the glare of early sun on snow—dealers stood behind folding tables on which they’d set cardboard boxes of LPs. More such boxes were shoved underneath the tables. A few dealers had hung framed posters or old concert bills behind them in a vague gesture toward giving the musty interior a rock-and-roll vibe, but the prevailing mood was suggested by the faux wood paneling, the dropped ceiling, the haze of smoke.

Like the displayed LPs themselves—out-of-date, worn, their jackets frayed, castoffs rescued from attics and basements and yard sales: not overpriced gems, as it turned out, but mostly commonplace junk—the gathering seemed both eccentric and behind the times. At thirty-two, I was one of the younger attendees. I heard little conversation; almost everyone in the room had bowed his head to flip through the albums. I’ve used the male pronoun here intentionally.

“Am I the only woman here?” Sarah whispered to me.

One man wore a colorful vintage Hawaiian shirt and jaunty tweed cap (“Are you a fan of Astrud Gilberto?” he inquired, when I paused over The Shadow of Your Smile at his booth); a few were outfitted in studded and safety-pinned leather jackets; some, in khakis and wool cardigans, evoked off-duty librarians or schoolteachers; some wore muddy workboots, faded Carhartt coats, and baseball caps pulled low; some wore—unironically—hockey haircuts and heavy metal concert T-shirts printed with tour dates from 1987; others appeared to be grandfathers, their watery eyes magnified behind thick glasses. Several carried tiny portable record players—I can’t use the word turntables—beige or avocado relics of the 1970s: these men squatted on the floor and, as if they were at a seventh-grade sleepover, played 45s from which they’d just shucked the dealer’s protective polyethylene sleeves. The expressions on their faces, as they held the plastic monaural speakers to their ears, suggested neither transport nor the excitement of discovery so much as a fierce, calculating focus. Some of the men might have been taking their first ventures outside in weeks. Like the members of twelve-step meetings one sometimes sees assembled for a cigarette break outside a church’s back door, the common denominator among these people—among us—was, except for context, invisible.

As reluctant as I was to admit it, I felt perfectly at home in this crowd, though I was made to feel immediately like an interloper: Sarah and I walked to one of the nearest tables, and even before I could begin to dig through this dealer’s boxes, he smiled at us. He wore a coonskin cap over unwashed, untrimmed hair, and his glasses reflected the overhead fluorescent light. “Is this your first show?” he asked. “I don’t remember seeing you before.” Were the people who came to these conventions so few, I wondered, so consistent in their habits?

Bringing your wife to a record fair is both a blessing and an indignity, like having your mom drop you off at school on a rainy morning just as a group of your drenched classmates walks past. In some ways, Sarah’s presence instantly marked me—and certainly her—as other, even to those dealers who do not keep attendance records. I attempted a casual posture by which I meant to indicate that yes, I was married, and Sarah and I had better things to do than pick through salvaged LPs all morning—that this was simply the first stop in our busy Saturday schedule, that we were not really part of this gathering—though my attendance here belied that attitude, and though this posture transformed into the familiar crate-digger’s hunched slouch as soon as I saw the records. Still, I refused to elbow my way in at the crowded tables, and strolled the aisles rather than methodically, obsessively flicking through every record in the hall.

Sarah discovered almost immediately a pristine mono copy of Donovan’s Sunshine Superman LP, priced at $3, which I bought (nothing special, but a nice addition to the library); she’d pulled it from one of the bins on the floor, through which she’d rooted with abandon. “What else should I look for?” she, flushed and smiling, wanted to know.

But a few tables later—after we’d split up for a bit—we were searching side-by-side boxes when she pulled out a copy of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual LP and held it toward me. “What about this?” she asked.

By this point, among the show’s attendees I could count perhaps two more women, one of whom stood on Sarah’s other side. I blushed. Cyndi Lauper? This from the woman to whom I’d pledged my life? Even as the example of cheesy 1980s nostalgia she intended, this LP was indefensible. I shook my head in what I hoped was a dismissive way—in case any of the record dealers might be looking—and continued finger-flipping the albums, trying not to sneeze with each puff of dust. But the woman next to Sarah suddenly spoke.

“Oh, I love Cyndi Lauper,” she offered. “I went to see her in concert with Cher.”

In half a lifetime of record shopping, I’ve come to see such unsolicited conversational gambits as an inevitability—one record store owner once proclaimed, when I bought John Phillips’s solo album, “John Phillips! John the Wolf King! Ah, to have had Michelle Phillips when she was young!” It often seems that simply stepping into the dim confines of a used record store invites the proprietor to regale you with his—again, with a few happy exceptions, I’m using the pronoun deliberately—theories on any topic from music to politics to sex, from shoplifters to social media to fashion. Sometimes record shopping feels like waiting at the bus stop, listening to the man standing beside you and hoping that the No. 6 arrives quickly.

Guessing where this conversation was headed, I patted Sarah on the hand and left for another dealer’s table. As I walked away, I heard the woman saying something about how good Cyndi Lauper still looks, “probably because of her positive attitude.”

A few minutes later, examining an overpriced Chi-Lites LP that I decided not to buy, I tried to tune out another conversation next to me. A man dressed in baggy corduroys, a sweater I imagined his mother had given him on some long-past Christmas, and ducttaped running shoes—he looked like the former editor of his high school newspaper, who ten years later was now publishing, from his parents’ attic, a Xeroxed fanzine—stood talking to a dealer and jotting notes in a steno pad, when I quite clearly heard the dealer say, “That’s not my area of expertise. You should talk to Big Al or Peck.” At this point, I flipped open my mental steno pad, trying to determine what sort of information the questioner wanted, who Big Al and Peck were, and what their area of expertise might be, while continuing to leaf through the LPs, if less attentively. The conversation appeared at first to concern local musicians who’d found national success, and I was tempted to name a few Rhode Island musicians whom these two hadn’t mentioned, but it quickly became clear that the part of the conversation I’d ignored was the key to understanding it, and I moved on.

Perhaps overlong association with me has led Sarah to believe that music is best purchased excessively and often, and in multiple formats as needed: when I next saw her, she had bought the LP Blue by Joni Mitchell, even though she already owned the CD. To my raised eyebrows Sarah replied, “You always say vinyl sounds better than digital.” (At a recent dinner party, I turned from my conversation to hear her arguing this same opinion at the other end of the table, though I’m unsure if the conviction was her own or if she was simply defending her crackpot husband.) She stood at my elbow for a moment before saying she wanted to go outside for some air. I twisted my wrist from my sleeve to look at my watch, calculating how much patience she had left.

At the next dealer’s table, another young man and I worked our way through the LPs: as if he were one of my old running partners on the high school track team, we assumed a silent and steady rhythm that neither of us seemed willing to break—concentrating on our every physical movement, yet always monitoring each other in our peripheral vision; secretly sizing each other up, the way my old training partners and I kept precise mental account of the hierarchy of our race times. And, just as on an eight-or tenmile training run, I began to note the smallest details. Crammed into Ernest & Julio Gallo wine boxes, the LPs moved stiffly; the remnants of brittle shrinkwrap still stuck to some of them rustled. My fingertips felt dry and dirty. I smelled mildew. My shoulders ached from stooping over the tables, trying to reach the back of a box. Somewhere in the near-silent hall, a gruff voice burst into laughter.

I’ve often considered crate-digging a competitive pursuit, with its own tacit code of conduct—a code outwardly governed by issues of propriety, nuance, and status, yet covertly cutthroat. If you believe, as I sometimes do, that should you pass on buying a certain LP now, you may never have the opportunity again, then every other shopper is a potential competitor. Call me paranoid, but every time I find some rare piece of vinyl I’ve been hunting for years, it seems the only extant copy: I feel “a version,” as Greil Marcus writes in Lipstick Traces, “of what Ulrike Meinhof called Konsumterror—the terrorism of consumption, the fear of not being able to get what is on the market, the agony of being last in line, or of lacking the money to join the line: to be a part of social life.” But such anxieties drive nearly every record collector I’ve met. In a crowded record store, I flip through the bins as quickly as possible, not only to increase my viewing rate, or to ensure that no one sees me studying the sleeve of some musical guilty pleasure, but also to signal my sagacity and experience with used LPs—i.e., I’ve already seen so many of these stupid records in other stores that now I recognize them with the merest glance, and am frustrated that here, again, they impede my progress toward uncovering something I want. I pull anything remotely of interest, even if I don’t think I’ll buy it, and carry it around with me as long as I stay in the store: someone else might snatch it up, otherwise. I do not subscribe to the school that dictates one should hide such interesting-but-not-immediately-purchased records in the back of innocuous sections such as “Folk Singers: Male” or “Soundtracks: W–Z” so that no one else will find them, including the store’s clerks, though I do understand this impulse.

The young man stayed ahead of me, but when I got to the last box at that table—nothing worth competing over here—he moved to my other side and began hunting through some of the LPs he’d already seen. Then he turned to the dealer: “Is there still a Tom Petty twelve-inch in here? Did somebody buy it?” I guessed he’d been at this table earlier, hadn’t bought the record then, and had returned for it now.

“Don’t know,” the dealer said. “I don’t remember selling any Tom Petty.”

“I think it’s in this box,” I said, pointing. The man had simply overlooked the record; I’d flicked past it moments ago. I’d spoken even before deciding to do so. Perhaps I should have added something along the lines of “Man, Tom Petty, how stoned is that dude?” or “All his albums since Hard Promises have sucked.” But irony failed me; I’m too well-acquainted with the momentary desperation this guy was feeling to have wanted to tease him.

I tucked the few LPs I’d bought under my arm, gave the room a parting glance, and, blinking, walked out into the morning. Two men passed me on their way inside. Sarah stood on the walkway to the parking lot.

“They just asked if I was a British girl,” she said.

“What?”

“Those two guys just asked me if I was a British girl. Maybe because of my eyeliner.”

“Your eyeliner?” Her eyes looked normal to me. “Were they trying to pick you up?”

“No, I think they thought I was a musician, maybe.”

We got into the car and headed down the road in search of a diner for breakfast. About a mile or two from the Knights of Columbus hall I spotted, in a small strip mall, a fluorescent piece of posterboard on which someone had scrawled “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! ALL VINYL & CD’S 20% OFF!!”

“Just for a minute?” I begged, turning into the strip mall’s parking lot before Sarah could answer.

A few weeks later, driving home from work, I noticed—it’s like a bird-watcher’s skill, I guess—a hand-painted sandwich-board sign standing in front of a Congregational church at a rural crossroads in Tiverton, Rhode Island. It read, simply,

Record Sale

33–45–78

Saturday 10–2

With another bribe of brunch to lure her, I brought Sarah to join me for this service. (The crossroads where the church stands is named Bliss Corners—a good omen, I hoped, for what I would find in the record crates.) We filed along a wooden wheelchair ramp and into the church basement among a crowd attired, apparently a day early, for the ceremony upstairs: they wore windbreakers over soft cardigan sweaters, polyester slacks, eyeglasses on thin chains, and hairdos from the 1950s. Not a one of them looked to be on the hunt for garage rock, post-punk, or soul 45s, or obscure psychedelic LPs. We were, by twenty to forty years, the youngest in this congregation.

Except for the setting, the formularies here were essentially the same as in our observance in North Providence: I paid a dollar for each of us to a pair of white-haired women guarding a petty cash lockbox and we entered a long, low-ceilinged room next to the church kitchen. Again, LPs slumped in mildewed boxes atop folding tables, and people milled about, though many of these folks appeared more interested in their styrofoam cups of coffee and the big-band oldies playing from a radio in the corner than the vinyl. I saw no dealers, no leather jackets, no one whose name might be Big Al or Peck, and assumed the records were parish donations that the pastor had decided, finally, to clear out of some closet to make room for the Christmas pageant costumes. I leaned over a table and began to work through a box. All of the LPs were shabby and worthless, the sort I’d expect to find at thrift stores: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Connie Francis, Percy Faith, Johnny Mathis, Barry Manilow, the Baja Marimba Band, Mantovani, Harry Belafonte, André Kostelanetz, the soundtracks to The Sound of Music and The King and I. On the sleeves of most of them, someone named Lloyd had inked his name in big block letters. His presence, mysterious and diffuse (since his taste in music did not help to differentiate him from anyone else buying LPs in the 1950s and ’60s), inhabited the room, and I wondered if he had recently died and now his estate occupied the boxes before me. The event took on some of the feel of a combined open-casket funeral and its subsequent reception.

As I flipped, I felt another nearby presence; this one occupied the space just behind my right shoulder, like someone on the subway spying on my smartphone screen—or, maybe, like my conscience. I turned to see a woman in a Western-style shirt with faux mother-of-pearl snaps. She wore a heavy perfume with the fragrance of some tropical flower. Old enough to be my grandmother, she winked at me. “It’s easy for me if I just watch while you flip,” she confessed.

I saw that her fingernails were long and painted. “Okay,” I said, turning back to the albums and moving from one to the next far more slowly than usual. “Anything you’re hoping to find?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m just looking.”

Together we studied, in a reverent silence, the sleeves of Lloyd’s LPs. There was absolutely nothing for me here, I realized immediately, but I felt some not unwelcome obligation to continue guiding my companion through the box at a sacramental pace. The LPs themselves possessed the enduring familiarity of ritual: André Previn. Dionne Warwick. The 101 Strings Orchestra. I may as well have been turning the well-worn onionskin pages of a hymnal. “Hmm,” the woman said at the sight of one LP, but, when I turned to see if she wanted me to pull it for her, she added, “You can keep going.” For a moment, crate-digging suggested—in its tedium and monotony, its apparent endlessness—a form of devotion or penance: perhaps murmuring the rosary to absolve some venial sin. We lingered over the last LP a moment, and then, since there was another browser on either side of me, I turned around. Except for a few weddings and this record sale, over three decades have passed since I have gone to any church, but now I felt something akin to the moment, in the occasional Catholic masses I attended as a child, when I would turn to my neighboring parishioners, extend my hand, and shyly whisper “Peace be with you” as they did the same to me.

“Well, thank you,” the old woman said. “Good luck.”

Sarah was amusing herself looking at the cheesecake photos on old records—the buxom 1950s models posed atop pianos or in leis and bikinis on sunset beaches—and that seemed as good a way as any to buy a few. I chose Hawaiian Percussion in Ping-Pong Stereo, mostly because of its op-art sleeve, and the All in the Family LP with Archie and Edith on the sleeve, paying another dollar apiece, and then ducked my head at the low lintel and followed Sarah out into the sunshine. Four dollars, I calculated, was about what each member of the laity might drop in the collection basket passed down the pew tomorrow.

As much as I enjoy the process of buying LPs—especially used LPs in a well-curated store, where the stock has the potential to surprise me—I’ve long thought that the real pleasure in hunting for vinyl comes in the moment when I carry my prizes home, unwrap them, and—in the seclusion of my living room, perhaps with the added layer of insulation my headphones afford—set them on my turntable and drop the stylus. For years, music has been my private pursuit, something not everyone else understands, something I don’t always want to—or need to—share. As with my toys when I was younger, I’ve often sought some controllable combination of the joy of seeing another person appreciate my records, and the joy of appreciating them alone myself; freed from any admonitions to “play nice,” I’ve allowed myself to be as selfish a listener as I’ve wished, to chase the sublime through the medium of a stamped vinyl platter.

But music, of course, is foremost an act of communication, and most of the music I treasure—no matter that it was first recorded in someone’s bedroom or basement—arises from small, self-defined, intersecting communities; to overlook this aspect of my taste seems the truest denial of the pleasures of record-collecting and of listening. If I try to act as sole architect of my experience, I am reminded of the towns I used to construct on the kitchen floor, and the famous family photos of my younger twin sisters, like Godzilla and Mothra, crawling through my careful arrangements of wooden blocks or Legos and laying waste to my creations. In these photos, the countenance on my four-year-old face is, as I reach to repair my tumbled bridges and towers, some immeasurable combination of frustration and delight.

Though we who collect records are commodity fetishists and idolaters (forgoing music’s dialogic communion between artist and audience, at times, in our selfish zeal to commune instead with an original pressing, a limited-edition fanclub release, or a recalled sleeve), at least the record fair allows us some sense of community—as do, for their own members, the fraternal society hall and church in which these two record fairs were held. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions for “community” include “members of a civil community, who have certain circumstances of nativity, religion, or pursuit, common to them,” and “social intercourse; fellowship, communion,” as well as “joint or common ownership.” Of course, all record freaks want to practice private rather than joint ownership, but collectively we possess an abiding respect less for the popular than for the shunned and the undervalued; a passion for redemption (I treat my recent rescues with a two-step process of Record Research Lab’s “Super Deep Cleaner” and “Super Vinyl Wash”); and a hand, however small, in the writing, rewriting, and declaiming of various musicological gospels. In these custodies, despite our often mutually exclusive tastes, we can find fellowship as we pursue our purchases—a fact that, until recently, I did not fathom.

The dealer in North Providence who asked if I was attending my first show probably wanted only to get a handle on what I was hunting so that he could help me find it—and, along the way, brag about his own collection and inquire about mine. The old woman in Tiverton wanted to protect her manicure, yes—but also, I like to think, wanted someone to notice these songs and artists that formed the soundtrack to the dances and car rides of her younger years, rather than to watch me negate both music and memory with impatient flicks of my fingers as I mindlessly chased my own narrow nostalgia.

But there are practical considerations in such fellowship as well. Among today’s e-mail messages has come a note from Sarah’s record-collecting colleague—who, a month or two back, introduced me to a semi-secret used LP shop, and has since hinted about others that are larger, better, and also little-known. “Record run on Wed.?” he asks.