[Razor]

I grew up around records for a good period of time, and I find that there's a certain inauthenticity to "how it was" when I happen into a record store nowadays.

What I mean is that it we all went down to Records on Wheels or Sam The Record Man on pay days from our part time or summer jobs and bought 45 singles or the latest album from Foreigner, Def Leppard, "the Rezillos" or whatever at the time, got home, admired the inner sleeve workings and played the shit out of them..If you had a few brothers and sisters with friends coming over all the time like our household, then your turntable became a de facto juke box with everyone's singles or albums stacked up jockeying for position. Carefully preserving them like we are seeing collector's doing nowadays wasn't a thing.

Sure we all had our milk crates of neatly stacked albums or 45's stacked on those holders, but in reality records became scratched and warped really easily, especially amongst us careless youths. Sure, there was always that one anal audiophile kid on the block, or rather that older anal brother of that kid who always had that diamond record needle, cleaning cloth, and bottle of record cleaner, but he was never any fun no matter how great of a sound he was milking out of his Sansui's turntable system. The enterprising ones became the resident DJ at the youth dances.

Try as we may, albums and singles were rarely kept in pristine condition.They were played and enjoyed and were eventually either thrown out after they got too scratched or stored away in boxes after people got tired of listening to them.

Now when I trip past one of these record stores and see these cork sniffing collectors gingerly thumbing through all these same albums that we misused I can't help but think to myself. "Were there really that many browsing meticulous music aficionados then, or did I just miss them because I was just an inattentive kid?"

Obviously, there's a romantic novelty market for old albums otherwise you wouldn't see these stores still in business. I'm not knocking them , but I just don't get it. Different strokes I suppose. Instantaneous digital through my studio monitors works fine for me. I can appreciate people wanting that vinyl sound though. It's just that records were originally mishandled and ultimately thrown away from most people, and the care you see towards handling them from collectors nowadays certainly wasn't in keeping with the original reckless norm. It goes with the collecting territory I suppose. Stamp collectors are the same.