#and thats because I spent 90% of the time chasing it through the map because it wouldnt stop flying

[galacticsabc]

If Monster Hunter World has taught me anything, it is that I am bad at the video game.

[adambstingus]

Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel – the real High Fidelity

Eric Spitznagels account of a chase for old albums ends up as a tale of a midlife crisis, albeit one which sadly neglects to notice that women, too, love vinyl

I am writing this review at my teenage record store in Boise, Idaho. According to Google Maps I am approximately 5,147 miles away from my current home in Berlin, Germany, and 2,468 miles away from Brooklyn, New York, where, for seven years, I ran a twice-monthly vinyl club. It involved hauling two turntables and a mixer to our local bar in a granny cart so that I and several dozen friends and total strangers could play the same records we played in our teenage bedrooms, but with the beer we could now drink and the professional sound system we never had.

This is the same store where, during my unfortunate hair metal phase, I bought Bon Jovi and Cinderella. Its also where, three years ago, I rifled through the rare 45s box and came back with the first Green River single for our annual Grunge New Years Eve party. Its where I scored my first Dead Kennedys records (carefully hiding the parental advisory stickers) and my first Bauhaus T-shirt (later gifted by my little brother to his girlfriend, sadly). And its where, two nights ago, I had beer with my high school friend right before she snuck off to see a Peter Murphy acoustic set that ended with her giving him a surprise greeting in his tour bus.

Walking into his childhood record store after 20 years, Eric Spitznagel, journalist and author of the memoir Old Records Never Die, sees the usual posters arranged in seemingly haphazard order Tupac, Tom Waits, Dylan, the Ramones and writes: These were posters you might see in any record store in any city in the world and the placement felt comforting and familiar, like the stained glass windows at the church you went to growing up. Youd seen the same colors and designs a thousand times before, but somehow the windows in your church seemed unique and inimitable. So true, my friend, I think, swiping my debit card to pay for a T-shirt with the logo for my own imitable church of vinyl.

Picture Rob Gordon, the record-obsessed protagonist of Nick Hornbys High Fidelity, then add 10 years: At 45, Spitznagel has both a wife (Kelly, whom he met when both worked at Chicagos Second City) and the kid (a charming three-year-old named Charlie).

But while Robs records (temporarily) cost him his girl, our friend Eric has the family but misses his discs: sold throughout the 90s when selling records was a victimless crime, for beer money, tacos and Trader Joes wine (all six Clash albums including the Hitsville 7-inch! paid for a a week of groceries at the liquor store down the block). In his day job as an entertainment reporter he interviews Questlove, who tells Spitznagel he still has every record he ever owned, all 70,000 of them. Spitznagel, inspired, finds his mid-life mission (or crisis): never mind the mistress and the sports car, hes going to get his records back. And not just copies of the same records. No, this guy is out to get the exact same records he sold more than a decade before, which will lead him back to his childhood home, his college radio station, muddy crawl spaces, and the musty basement of some dude who, a few decades before, once owned his now-defunct hometown record store.

Vinyl is making a comeback, even among kids who never grew up with records (many of whom showed up at my vinyl nights). But for those of us of certain age born in the 70s, the generation who lost our collections to exes, moms basement clearing and iTunes the idea that one would know an album is ones own original copy is less lunatic than it first may seem. Records, writes Spitznagel, are are bulky, inconvenient, easily damaged objects. Vinyl is like skin that changes, in good and bad ways, over a lifetime. Skin gets damaged, intentionally or by accident maybe it gets burned, or tattooed or scarred but it always retains some of its original character. Its the same skin its just weathered some life.

Spitznagel has a few clues to go on: his copy of Elton Johns Greatest Hits smells like cherries from the Lions Club garage sale, held in 1977 in a former cherry processing plant. Billy Joels The Stranger smells like Calvin Kleins Obsession. The Replacements Let It Be smells like weed. Bon Jovis Livin on a Prayer will have a girls phone number from a 708 area code. Around this time, an overarching theme begins to emerge: the records he most wants involve hot girls from his past he either had sex with, or wanted to have sex with. Maybe were not so far from the mistress and the sports car after all.

Records, like comics, have long been considered a dude-centric pastime, and Spitznagel, whose previous six books include Planet Baywatch, Fast Forward (Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter), and Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Show Business, isnt breaking any molds here. He compares selling his record collection to the guy who gets kissed by a hot girl and decides to get rid of his porn collection immediately because I wont be needing this anymore. At the Pixies reunion show, he sees a sea of fortysomething dudes with Black Francis man-nipples, (were there no Kim Deal fans in the audience?); at the Replacements reunion show, he mourns his uncool dad status. One is tempted to remind him that Westerberg, now 56, is also a dad, and that chicks, too I am one own Let it Be, on TwinTone.

When he goes to a record swap, I laughed at the line when he realizes that harrowing moment when you realize the only thing separating you and a civil war re-enactor is better underwear but wondered if he may have passed, say, the divorced fortysomething mother who used to DJ with me twice a month and whose teenage kids now buy her records for every holiday and birthday. And when he blows the daycare money buying records in Nashville prompting a VHS cassette of Cocksucker Blues to be hurled at the wall by his exasperated wife I thought of the hundreds of hours I have spent crate-diving and DJing next to my own boyfriend, and say, my married friends Jake and Lisa who host their own DJ show together. Arent there any records Kelly might like? If they cant get a babysitter to make date night to the reunion shows, couldnt he at least make the woman a mixtape?

But around this time, Spitznagel seems to be thinking along the same lines. When he finally scores a copy of Van Morrisons Dweller on the Threshold, the song that was playing when he lost his virginity no wait, when he first realized sex could be fun he admits he finds it totally unsettling to see his three-year-old son do a silly interpretive dance to a song whose only other association from me were three months in the early 90s when I was having regular wild-monkey sex with a sexy blonde on a busted-ass futon. And around this time Kelly, too, begins to ask some questions.

Is this the same girl whose number is on that Bon Jovi record? What? Oh no, thats a totally different girl. Do any of these records you want have stories that dont involve women youve slept with?

Around then, like Hornbys Rob Gordon, Spitznagel gets the message: its time to play grownup. He finally looks for a way to use his records to connect himself to his past: childhood friends, his family home, and the actual family he has now. There are field trips to his old college radio station (where he and a friend hang at their old fraternity house and depress the hell out of its current inhabitants by informing them that Nobody tells you that the girl you titty-fucked in the bar restroom when you were 20 is going to get breast cancer in 20 years and you will go to her funeral with very complicated emotions.) There is a hilarious incident involving a dessicated box of 1978 Boo Berry crunch, and a woman or two from the past show up to provide non-marriage-ruining plotlines of their own.

Oh, and yeah, he scores a few records along the way. Were they the droids he was looking for? Well, lets just say he finds a few whose scars may well have been inflicted by his younger self, bangs up a few more in the process, and he and his family and friends make up the rest. But as any crate digger knows, its all about the hunt. Meanwhile, back here at my old record store, some dude blasts past blaring and singing and fist-pumping along to Toto. Hurry boy, its waiting there for you!

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/old-records-never-die-by-eric-spitznagel-the-real-high-fidelity/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/178992898197

[allofbeercom]

Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel – the real High Fidelity

Eric Spitznagels account of a chase for old albums ends up as a tale of a midlife crisis, albeit one which sadly neglects to notice that women, too, love vinyl

I am writing this review at my teenage record store in Boise, Idaho. According to Google Maps I am approximately 5,147 miles away from my current home in Berlin, Germany, and 2,468 miles away from Brooklyn, New York, where, for seven years, I ran a twice-monthly vinyl club. It involved hauling two turntables and a mixer to our local bar in a granny cart so that I and several dozen friends and total strangers could play the same records we played in our teenage bedrooms, but with the beer we could now drink and the professional sound system we never had.

This is the same store where, during my unfortunate hair metal phase, I bought Bon Jovi and Cinderella. Its also where, three years ago, I rifled through the rare 45s box and came back with the first Green River single for our annual Grunge New Years Eve party. Its where I scored my first Dead Kennedys records (carefully hiding the parental advisory stickers) and my first Bauhaus T-shirt (later gifted by my little brother to his girlfriend, sadly). And its where, two nights ago, I had beer with my high school friend right before she snuck off to see a Peter Murphy acoustic set that ended with her giving him a surprise greeting in his tour bus.

Walking into his childhood record store after 20 years, Eric Spitznagel, journalist and author of the memoir Old Records Never Die, sees the usual posters arranged in seemingly haphazard order Tupac, Tom Waits, Dylan, the Ramones and writes: These were posters you might see in any record store in any city in the world and the placement felt comforting and familiar, like the stained glass windows at the church you went to growing up. Youd seen the same colors and designs a thousand times before, but somehow the windows in your church seemed unique and inimitable. So true, my friend, I think, swiping my debit card to pay for a T-shirt with the logo for my own imitable church of vinyl.

Picture Rob Gordon, the record-obsessed protagonist of Nick Hornbys High Fidelity, then add 10 years: At 45, Spitznagel has both a wife (Kelly, whom he met when both worked at Chicagos Second City) and the kid (a charming three-year-old named Charlie).

But while Robs records (temporarily) cost him his girl, our friend Eric has the family but misses his discs: sold throughout the 90s when selling records was a victimless crime, for beer money, tacos and Trader Joes wine (all six Clash albums including the Hitsville 7-inch! paid for a a week of groceries at the liquor store down the block). In his day job as an entertainment reporter he interviews Questlove, who tells Spitznagel he still has every record he ever owned, all 70,000 of them. Spitznagel, inspired, finds his mid-life mission (or crisis): never mind the mistress and the sports car, hes going to get his records back. And not just copies of the same records. No, this guy is out to get the exact same records he sold more than a decade before, which will lead him back to his childhood home, his college radio station, muddy crawl spaces, and the musty basement of some dude who, a few decades before, once owned his now-defunct hometown record store.

Vinyl is making a comeback, even among kids who never grew up with records (many of whom showed up at my vinyl nights). But for those of us of certain age born in the 70s, the generation who lost our collections to exes, moms basement clearing and iTunes the idea that one would know an album is ones own original copy is less lunatic than it first may seem. Records, writes Spitznagel, are are bulky, inconvenient, easily damaged objects. Vinyl is like skin that changes, in good and bad ways, over a lifetime. Skin gets damaged, intentionally or by accident maybe it gets burned, or tattooed or scarred but it always retains some of its original character. Its the same skin its just weathered some life.

Spitznagel has a few clues to go on: his copy of Elton Johns Greatest Hits smells like cherries from the Lions Club garage sale, held in 1977 in a former cherry processing plant. Billy Joels The Stranger smells like Calvin Kleins Obsession. The Replacements Let It Be smells like weed. Bon Jovis Livin on a Prayer will have a girls phone number from a 708 area code. Around this time, an overarching theme begins to emerge: the records he most wants involve hot girls from his past he either had sex with, or wanted to have sex with. Maybe were not so far from the mistress and the sports car after all.

Records, like comics, have long been considered a dude-centric pastime, and Spitznagel, whose previous six books include Planet Baywatch, Fast Forward (Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter), and Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Show Business, isnt breaking any molds here. He compares selling his record collection to the guy who gets kissed by a hot girl and decides to get rid of his porn collection immediately because I wont be needing this anymore. At the Pixies reunion show, he sees a sea of fortysomething dudes with Black Francis man-nipples, (were there no Kim Deal fans in the audience?); at the Replacements reunion show, he mourns his uncool dad status. One is tempted to remind him that Westerberg, now 56, is also a dad, and that chicks, too I am one own Let it Be, on TwinTone.

When he goes to a record swap, I laughed at the line when he realizes that harrowing moment when you realize the only thing separating you and a civil war re-enactor is better underwear but wondered if he may have passed, say, the divorced fortysomething mother who used to DJ with me twice a month and whose teenage kids now buy her records for every holiday and birthday. And when he blows the daycare money buying records in Nashville prompting a VHS cassette of Cocksucker Blues to be hurled at the wall by his exasperated wife I thought of the hundreds of hours I have spent crate-diving and DJing next to my own boyfriend, and say, my married friends Jake and Lisa who host their own DJ show together. Arent there any records Kelly might like? If they cant get a babysitter to make date night to the reunion shows, couldnt he at least make the woman a mixtape?

But around this time, Spitznagel seems to be thinking along the same lines. When he finally scores a copy of Van Morrisons Dweller on the Threshold, the song that was playing when he lost his virginity no wait, when he first realized sex could be fun he admits he finds it totally unsettling to see his three-year-old son do a silly interpretive dance to a song whose only other association from me were three months in the early 90s when I was having regular wild-monkey sex with a sexy blonde on a busted-ass futon. And around this time Kelly, too, begins to ask some questions.

Is this the same girl whose number is on that Bon Jovi record? What? Oh no, thats a totally different girl. Do any of these records you want have stories that dont involve women youve slept with?

Around then, like Hornbys Rob Gordon, Spitznagel gets the message: its time to play grownup. He finally looks for a way to use his records to connect himself to his past: childhood friends, his family home, and the actual family he has now. There are field trips to his old college radio station (where he and a friend hang at their old fraternity house and depress the hell out of its current inhabitants by informing them that Nobody tells you that the girl you titty-fucked in the bar restroom when you were 20 is going to get breast cancer in 20 years and you will go to her funeral with very complicated emotions.) There is a hilarious incident involving a dessicated box of 1978 Boo Berry crunch, and a woman or two from the past show up to provide non-marriage-ruining plotlines of their own.

Oh, and yeah, he scores a few records along the way. Were they the droids he was looking for? Well, lets just say he finds a few whose scars may well have been inflicted by his younger self, bangs up a few more in the process, and he and his family and friends make up the rest. But as any crate digger knows, its all about the hunt. Meanwhile, back here at my old record store, some dude blasts past blaring and singing and fist-pumping along to Toto. Hurry boy, its waiting there for you!

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/old-records-never-die-by-eric-spitznagel-the-real-high-fidelity/