Category: Jeremiah

I want to be clear about something before we begin.

I did not choose to listen to this album. Tony put it on, as he does that occasionally. Just wanders back from wherever he's been, sets something up on the turntable without consulting me, and then disappears into the back room like he hasn't just made a unilateral decision about the soundtrack of my morning. I have opinions about this practice, and  have expressed them. It has made no difference.

On this particular occasion, the record was Aja by Steely Dan.

I am aware of Steely Dan. I have always been aware of Steely Dan. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen spent the better part of a decade making technically flawless records that sounded like they had been assembled in a laboratory by people who had read extensively about human emotion without ever having experienced it firsthand. Precision without feeling, I always said. Studio musicians playing parts written by men with calculators.

That was my position, and I held it for years. I was comfortable there.

And then Tony put on Aja, and Delores Krensky did not bang on the wall.

I want you to understand the significance of that. Delores Krensky has opinions about everything that comes through our speakers. She has banged on that wall for Black Sabbath. She banged on it for Led Zeppelin, which tells you everything you need to know about Delores. She has never once, in my recollection, failed to register a complaint when the volume or the content offended her considerable sensibilities.

She did not bang on the wall for Steely Dan.

I'm not saying that's a vote in favor. I'm saying I noticed.

The title track opens the album and runs just under eight minutes, which is either self-indulgent or exactly long enough depending on who you ask. Personally, if you were to ask me, on a different day and you might get a different answer. What I will tell you is that Steve Gadd's drum solo in the back half of that song is one of the finest pieces of drumming ever committed to vinyl, and I'm saying that as someone who has a memrial set up honoring John Bonham. Whatever reservations I have about Steely Dan's clinical tendencies, they hired the right people. That much is not in dispute.

Josie is the one that got under my skin and I resent it for that. It shouldn't work. It's too clean, too constructed, the kind of song that sounds like it was designed to sound effortless rather than actually being effortless. And yet. There it is. I found myself thinking about it later that evening, which I did not appreciate. I have a policy about songs that follow me home uninvited. Josie apparently did not get the memo.

Home at Last is the album's quiet argument for the whole enterprise. If you want to understand what Becker and Fagen were actually doing beneath all that polish, listen to Home at Last. It's Odysseus coming home after twenty years at sea, filtered through jazz and late night FM radio, and it lands differently than you expect it to. Quieter. More worn down. More honest, somehow, than anything else on the record.

I didn't say any of this to Tony. He came back from his office in the back of the shop, heard the last few minutes of the album, and started talking about a customer who'd come in looking for Neil Diamond. I let him talk. The record finished, and I filed it back in the D section where it belongs.

I looked up the credits before writing this. Forty-two session musicians across seven tracks.

I still think that's excessive, but I understand it better than I did before, which is either progress or defeat. I haven't decided which.

Every April, they show up.

You know who I mean. The ones in the vintage band shirts that are too clean. Who ask if we have anything “rare” without being able to tell you what rare means. They pick up a copy of Dark Side of the Moon, stare at it like they’ve discovered an artifact from a lost civilization, and then put it back because twenty-two dollars is “kind of a lot.”

Record Store Day.

I have opinions about this.

Then again, I have opinions about most things, as anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes in this shop will tell you. But Record Store Day brings out a particular kind of feeling in me that I’ve been trying to put a name to since the once-a-year trend started. It’s not quite irritation. It’s not quite joy. It’s something in between that I haven’t found the right word for yet. Maybe there isn’t one, and maybe that’s okay.

Here’s what I know…

I was buying records before Record Store Day existed. I was buying records before most of the people who will walk through that door today were born. I bought records in shops that smelled like cigarettes and old carpet, run by guys who didn’t care if you bought anything as long as you knew what you were talking about. I bought records out of milk crates at flea markets in parking lots at seven in the morning in February. I bought records from estate sales and from church basements. Even from a guy in Duluth who kept his entire collection in a storage unit and would only sell to you if you could first answer three questions about the artist. I failed once. I’m still annoyed about it.

The point is, I didn’t need a designated Saturday in April to tell me that records mattered.

But here’s the thing I’ve had to make my peace with, and I’m going to tell you this because Tony keeps threatening to write this piece himself if I don’t, and my boss has many gifts, but this isn’t one of them.

Record Store Day works.

I don’t mean the limited pressings, though some of those are genuinely worth standing in line for. I mean the whole thing. The idea of it. The fact that once a year, people who haven’t thought about vinyl since their parents sold the turntable at a garage sale in 1994 walk into a place like this and remember something. You can see it happen. Someone picks up an album, and their face does this thing. Just for a second. Like a door opening in a house they thought was locked.

I’ve watched it happen in this shop more times than I can count.

The kid who picked up a copy of Born to Run last April and stood there reading the liner notes for twenty minutes without buying it. He came back three Saturdays later and bought six albums. He still comes in. He knows what he’s looking for now.

The woman who found a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Tapestry in the folk section, who started quietly crying because her mother used to play it. She didn’t buy it. She didn’t need to. She just needed to hold it for a minute. That’s allowed. That’s actually the whole point.

The guy who asked me — and I want to be clear that I am not making this up — whether we had anything by “that band, you know, the one with the guitars.” I asked him to narrow it down. He said “classic, I think.” I sold him a copy of Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs for four dollars and he came back the following week having listened to it seventeen times. His words.

That’s Record Store Day. That’s what it actually is, underneath the limited pressings and the lines around the block and the people in the too-clean vintage shirts. It’s a permission slip. It tells people who’ve been meaning to get back into music, who’ve been streaming everything into a kind of gray paste of sound, that it’s okay to care again. That there’s a place for them. The door is open.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t have standards. I probably have more standards than is healthy for a man my age. I will tell you right now that the majority of the limited pressings released for Record Store Day every year are colored vinyl cash grabs designed to separate collectors from their money, and that a pink pressing of an album doesn’t sound better than a black one, it just looks better on a shelf, and if you’re buying records to look at them rather than listen to them, you and I are going to need to have a conversation.

But there are always exceptions.

This year, if you are standing in line before we open, and some of you will be, here is what is actually worth your time and money. The rest I’ll let you discover yourself, because half the point of being in a record store is the finding.

Look for anything on the Americana or blues side that got a proper analog remaster. Look for the jazz reissues, because jazz reissues on Record Store Day are consistently undervalued and consistently excellent. Ignore the celebrity vanity pressings. You know which ones I mean. If the limited pressing is primarily a marketing exercise for someone’s brand rather than a music release, put it back. Your shelf deserves better.

And if you walk in today not knowing what you want, tell me. Or tell Tony, though he’ll probably just ask you what your favorite song is and then disappear into the back room for ten minutes and come out with something you’ve never heard that will ruin you for everything else. He has a gift for that. I taught him everything he knows, which means I have to take some responsibility for it.

Here’s what I want to say, and then I’m done because I’ve already written more words than I intended, and there are records to price before we open.

This shop exists because music matters. Not as background. Not as content. Not as something that plays while you do something else. Music as itself. The reason you stayed in the car after you parked…because the song wasn’t finished yet. The reason you still remember exactly where you were the first time you heard something that changed the way you understood the world.

Record Store Day, for all my complaints about it, is one day a year when the rest of the world agrees with me about that.

I can live with one day.

Come in. Browse. Ask questions. I’ll answer the ones worth answering.

The turntable is already running.

B-Sharp Vintage Records. Monroe Street, Flat Rock. Open today at 9am — one hour early for Record Store Day. Yes, I know. Don’t make it weird.