I wasn’t always this cool. I wasn’t always the guy people stared at when I walked into a record store. The collector that makes shop owners sweat and rack their brains for the most obscure and rare item in their shop. Will it be enough to satiate me? What if I already have it? Or worse, what if I laugh at their suggestion entirely?
At one point I was as clueless and uncool as you. Thinking my Costco leather jacket and Chuck Taylor’s made me better than everyone else. Turning my nose up at your Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin, for I listened to music you normal people hadn’t even heard of. Bands whose genius you couldn’t even begin to comprehend: Joy Divison, the Velvet Underground, King Crimson, and so on.
Getting into record collecting when I did was…..well it probably wasn’t the best thing for my social life. Everyone who knew I collected records thought that it made me inherently cool (which was false and an unhealthy boost to my ego) or thought it made me inherently uncool (Which was also false and a terrible blow to my ego) I think plenty of other people born after the golden age of vinyl that started collecting records in highschool had a similar experience. It was slightly alienating to collect records when Spotify was just beginning to take over the music world. Here I was saving my lunch money to spend $25 on a record that I already had downloaded onto my phone for free. Mind you, I was listening on a Crosley record player that I had received as a gift from a high school girlfriend who had purchased it at the local Urban Outfitters. Needless to say, my records didn’t exactly sound better than their Spotify counterparts.
But I had a record player. From then on it was a matter of creating a collection of records that was so perfect and so complete that it demanded respect from my peers. A record collection that would make me cool beyond a shadow of a doubt. This desire to impress people who would never ask let alone see my record collection drove much of my early buying habits. It was the 2010s and modern artists were only just starting to press their music on vinyl again. Most of the records available were used records still kicking around from the 80s and repressings of the most popular records from decades past. My musical tastes were heavily influenced by that of my dad and older sister. Initially, this helped to further alienate me from kids my age. I was the one walking around with a Smiths shirt, thinking it made me better than everyone to say and think things like “They don’t make good music anymore.” But it did make shopping for records a little easier.
Any chance I got I would go to the only record store that I knew existed. Boo Boo Records. A small little record store in San Luis Obispo that was owned by a local who had previously owned a sports memorabilia shop in town. As far as I was concerned it had always been there. The shop was small and when I was going in high school it was a pretty even split between CDs and Records. The snug backroom was filled with neatly organized bins of mostly rock records. Posters and stickers covered every inch of the wall giving the whole store a very punk DIY aesthetic that I yearned to be a part of. I’d put on my coolest outfit (a flannel over a Joy Divison t-shirt, jeans, and Converse) and flip through bin after bin looking at records by bands I had never heard of, imagining people were secretly watching me in awe.
I wanted to fill my collection with the essentials first was what I decided. What this meant to a 16-year-old was music made between 1960 and 2000 that I didn’t consider “old people’s music.” The lines I drew were fairly arbitrary. The Doors were cool. Bruce Springsteen was lame. Talking Heads were a yay, Aerosmith was a nay, and so on.
Dark Side of the Moon was the first record I bought myself. Something about the cover and the reputation of the album just made it seem like I simply needed it in my collection and that I wasn’t a record collector or music fan if I didn’t have it. It was a right of passage. It wasn’t just part of the aesthetic of owning a record player in 2015, it WAS the aesthetic.
After that, my record purchases were influenced by various music magazine articles with titles like “The 50 Best Alternative Albums of All Time.” I distinctly remember reading through list after list and adding dozens upon dozens of albums to my Spotify library so that I knew which albums to look for at Boo Boo. My dad and my sister made their initial impressions on me with their music tastes in my adolescence, but these listicles would be the next major development in my music-listening journey. Many of the albums on that list I still listen to today and influenced my first wave of record buying when I was a wee teenager. Velvet Underground and Nico, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Stone Roses were some of the earliest I remember buying. Records that met two important criteria: I actually liked them, and I thought the guys at the record store would respect my taste.
The potential shame of buying a record that an employee thought was lame was another early motivator. Some of my favorite records wouldn’t make their way into my collection until years later when I realized how ridiculous it was to not buy something for fear of judgment. This is a sentiment I think many young collectors get into still. When I first started dating the girl I would later marry I asked what her favorite album was so that I could give her the record and a record player together as a birthday gift. She told me Leftoverture by Kansas. Years later she confessed it wasn’t her favorite album, it was just what she told me so that I would think she was cool. It’s still in our collection today, it has been played one time, the day she unwrapped the record player I bought at Walmart.
Sometimes I wonder how many spins it would have gotten if I had bought her A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out instead.
After 2 years of growing my collection to a whopping 25 or so records, I moved away to college. I wasn’t sure if my roommate would find my collection cool or lame so I opted to play it safe and leave it behind first semester. After my freshman year, my girlfriend and I moved in together and combined our meager collections into one that is still growing to this day 10 years on. The last I checked it was a modest 250. A number that feels massive and tiny at the same time. My turntable is much better now and I no longer call it a record player. I now know what a pre-amp is and I know that any record store that judges what you buy isn’t someone you should give your money to and that anyone who judges your music taste is someone whose opinion doesn’t matter anyway.