One Vinyl Archive

My last post was about nostalgia. I remember writing that... Man, that was a good time. I dunno about you, but it seems to me like the world was a little gentler then, people took the time to stop and say hello, offer you some red hots.

But now is now and my sleep this night consisting of the miniscule peninsulae twixt bays echoing with the snoring rollers breaking next to me, coves of stinging salt brine intruding deep into nasal provinves. You know, a cold. So now, to write.

But first, the photo: Marley on Sony on walnut on camel-hair rug on tablesaw on garage floor. This is shortly after christmas, when I received an analog pre-amp to boost the circa 1979 turntable's signal to the 1980-something Panasonic boombox core.

Last time I heard music rumbling up from vinyl coulees was 1990. For more than a decade after, records and player perfected static techniques to amass a latently lithified mantle of dust in my parents' attick. Yeah, I spelled it attick, because fake as it may be, it looks older.

I wiped off dust a few times during the next decade, but the Virginia years were marred by death and dysfunction, poverty and plain ole bad luck. Breaking into a collection consisting primarily of early hardcore--live-fast die-young, dark and hopeless as a death-head's sinus--wouldn't have made sense anyway.

The tech to connect turntable to computer has been around for a while, but I don't want that. I want analog. Not because I am some high-end tube-warmed audiophile, but because I'm a preservationist, cheapskate, occasional luddite, garagelodite.

Likewise with the music. I have one milk crate of albums (plus a few of dad's classical discs), about a dozen 45s, and a couple of those in-between size ones. 10 years worth of Plan 9 purchases, yard sale finds, ironic parental property, and a few precious black platters liberated from unworthy owners. Like I said, a lot of punk, some rock and reggae, a few classical recordings, the standout of which is Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil in Beethoven's 9th. You know, the Clockwork Orange music.

I'd say I regretted nearly half of the records that I ever spent money on. Several can be blamed on my falling for some critic's stupid opinion, others on getting the only thing remotely interesting in a shop full of crap (and finding that the interest remains remote). A bunch of these remain in the collection simply because the milk crate has enough room. I always felt like I'd wanna listen back when I was older, so why get rid of them, why not keep an archive of the 1980s? I guess there are a million reasons not to, but that milk crate stashes so easily, gets out of the way so well, that the collection remains.

So now I get to fulfil that prophecy, and reminisce over the vibrations of diamond on vinyl.

Kids don't always understand the earnest social commentary and subtle ironies of band names like "Millions of Dead Cops" or songs like "Fucked up Ronnie" (Reagan, of course. One memory that struck from vinyl days was repeatedly opening the dorm door and blasting from my huge homemade speakers the opening line "Ronald Reagan, You're Fucked Up!" Ahhh...good times. I bet everyone else on the floor remembers that fondly as well.)

So I started with Bob Marley. Catch a Fire stayed one of my favorites since the time I first heard it. Besides, it's from 1973, I think, a year that echoed through my collection. That's the year of Ziggy Stardust, Dark Side of the Moon, something by Led Zep (like my sister and I were saying the other day, once you get past your adolescently self-conscious loathing of mainstream stuff, you find out that some of it is great), and several other titles that I randomly spew (maybe correctly) when veering into my rant about how that was maybe the best year for records.

Then I played Surrealistic Pillow to see if the Airplane proved rocking enough for my younger daughter. It came up short at the end of the side, and I may have overshot on the next choice, Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. She tore around on her scooter for a while, but by "Death Trip" her eyes seemed a little glazed.

Not sure what's next. I'll amble through the crate, make some discoveries, maybe cull a thing or three, and eventually delve into the hardcore. The girls will all be gone, the garage empty and reverberating. I'll see whether my improvisation lives up to what dad taught me about the physics of record players: concrete floor under a heavy metal table under a rug (to dampen whatever vibrations sneak through) under a planed and leveled slab of wood with high specific gravity under a solid turntable under a record under a needle. Can I crank it up loud enough to create feedback?

Regardless, my mind will loop back to first listenings. Fresh rebelry, Reagan's spectral shadow, loving life but not knowing it, other blatherings of the insomniac. Why speculate? This was about nostalgia, not what's next.

Good night.

Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.