OLDIES

One For the Record Books

My 45s collection went for more than a song

I came home for the summer after my sophomore year of college to face my first personal crisis.

This wasn’t a grandparent’s death, or Daddy losing his job, or Mama freaked out about cancer in the family; each of those were plights on such a grand scale I felt supported as we sorted out details and put our shattered psyches back together.

No, this became personal quickly, as soon as I entered my room and thunked my duffel on the floor. Of course I had a duffel, which had apparently belonged to a soldier once. I was in the “Army-Navy/Thrift Store” phase of my life.

I looked around the space I’d occupied, on and off, for some of junior high, all of high school, and most breaks so far from my college routine.

I flipped through the LPs — several dozen at the start of my collecting years — and picked out three or four. Probably Janis and Jim; perhaps Aretha; never Jimi. Don’t be a hater — I just didn’t appreciate Hendrix back then.

I looked to my left, where my real archival repository resided — “45s” featuring artists such as Sam & Dave, the Beatles, both Sinatras (Frank and Nancy). I’d lovingly labeled and carefully catalogued each since Daddy gave me the first of what I originally called “tiny records” in 4th grade.

But all those discs — hundreds of them — were just plain gone.

A bit of background. My Daddy was a Ramblin’ Man, if you consider driving hundreds of miles on West Texas back roads as a college student to get away from my Nana and her Southern Baptist friends. These ladies, you see, cared for singing, but prohibited dancing for some odd reason. Daddy and his friends would visit watering holes dozens of miles down the road, and pull up a stool to listen to the likes of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or Ernest Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, playing the best in Western Swing.

Then Daddy spent some of his “Army time,” as he called it, in Manhattan. And he spent a lot of his off-time up in Harlem, listening to jazz samplings from Billie Holiday.

Daddy started his own record collection way back then — 78 rpms from his favorite Texas Swing bands, and quite a few offerings c/o Ms. Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, also a fave.

Reckon you could say, then, I came by my predilection for vinyl from my Pops. Daddy favored both live and recorded music, and he loved to get down on the raw mesquite boards of San Angelo honky tonks and the laminated dance floors of NYC clubs.

And Daddy fed my passion. No matter where we lived after I was about 9 or so, he’d find a local record store and scour the local Billboard charts posted by the register. He made sure we had some kind of turntable to play our new discs. We’d listen carefully, and compare notes — did Sinatra’s new Top 40 hit steal from the Beatles? Did Nancy Sinatra sound anything like her dad, or was she just banking on his name? Why did the label say “Four” Tops when there clearly (sometimes) were five? (We figured out that only four Tops performed at a time, but sometimes for TV appearances they switched out singers.)

And, of course, the burning questions I had by the 1970s: Did Diana Ross break up the Supremes? Did John and Yoko do the same to the Beatles?

I was always pretty proud that while a lot of my friends’ parents were listening to Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis — and I just learned Moker’s folks favored Mitch Miller, for cryin’ out loud — my entire family was tethered to what kids were listening to on the radio right now.

When I realized my collection of 45s had been plundered, I immediately stomped to the kitchen, where Mom had the ironing board set up — yeah, she did fight a battle to keep her family wrinkle-free. No easing into this conversation — I pretty much knew who the culprit was; I just wanted to know why.

Turns out Mom needed some spending money. I was away at school. No one had played those records in forever. She had a garage sale. The 45s were the first to go, and brought some cold, hard cash.

I don’t know how much Mom got for my collection, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t go for a song.

I never did replace those 45s. I was fixin’ to fly the coop — I’d spend the next summer in New York, and after I graduated I was on my own. But I kept up with my LPs — the last time I counted, I was a few discs over 700. The only reason I didn’t end up with more is, of course, the evolution of music.

I remember 8-Tracks, which I never got into because I thought they were too bulky and kinda ugly.

Then there were cassettes, which led to mix-tapes and all that goes along with that slice of my coming-of-age. But they got stuck in the player, and sometimes the tapes unraveled, broke or melted in the hot Texas sun.

And then I was enamored of CDs. I’d amassed quite a collection before digital came along and burned the whole industry down.

When we were getting ready to move in the fall of 2020, Moker asked me about my LPs. I hadn’t had a functioning turntable for a couple of years, and had felt that side of my life slipping away. Moker wanted to sell my platters to the guy with the new, used record store in town.

I don’t know what made me say “yes,” but my hubby boxed up most of it, and loaded it into the car. I kept out about 30 LPs — Beatles, James Taylor, my “Motown’s Greatest Hits,” Janis Joplin. My copy of Carole King’s “Tapestry” was warped beyond repair — I know, you can’t fix that kind of damage — so I let it go, thinking I could trick the record shop owner.

Moker negotiated in good faith, but didn’t make a mint. The proprietor also said the oddest thing, which made me think he’s a lot younger or just not as wise as I.

“Tell your wife she’d get more money if she didn’t write her name on the outside jackets,” he said. Guy obvi never lived with a bunch of roomies, where it’s imperative that one label all valuables, including an extensive LP collection.

I’m up here in my room above the driveway, watching the sun set and the large herd of white-tailed deer who live around here graze on some certainly scrumptious azaleas in my front yard. I’m thinking about my Daddy and Mama, and my record collection.

Janis is on the turntable. This is a new development since we’ve moved. The kids bought me another setup for Christmas; sans speakers — Millennials don’t seem to know about those things — but I picked up an inexpensive pair online. Funny — they’re so tiny, compared to those giant woofers and tweeters we used to help hold up our cinder block bookcases back in the day,

“Pearl,” Janis Joplin’s last album, came out in 1971, three months after she died. I always get a little melancholy when I spin this record. Especially when I get to the last cut on the first side — “Buried Alive in the Blues” is an instrumental. Janis didn’t live long enough to record the vocals.

I now officially have 36 LPs in my newly reconstituted collection. Several are double and triple albums, so technically I have more, with no immediate plans to extend my haul.

Think I’ll play the Beatles’ “White Album” next. Daddy brought that home to us when I was in 9th grade. Classic.