Clinging to Vinyl

June 1983. Life is strange. You'll be starting high school in a few weeks. You're not a kid anymore, but you're certainly not an adult. You get up in the mornings and walk to the strawberry fields with your friend Chris Watson. For a couple of hours — before the heat sets in — you pick (and eat) the fruit alongside a gob of Mexicans. You call them "beaners". You make fun of them, especially their oom-pah oom-pah music. But you'll be damned if they can't pick berries faster than you. You quit at nine or ten and take your eight bucks back home. You and Chris each take a dollar or two and bike the five miles into town to go to the video arcade. You play Pac-Man. You play Robotron. You play Joust. Sometimes you stop by Mary Jo's Book Exchange to check out the science fiction books and comics. Saturday afternoons, you go shopping with your mother and your brothers. You've started to buy you own clothes, buy your mom has to drive you to the Oregon City Fred Meyer so that you can shop. You buy OP shorts and shirts. You buy a pair of white pants. You buy boat shoes. But you don't spend all of your money on clothes. In one corner of the store is the music section, which has become your Shangri-La. You spend a lot of time here. You look through the record albums. You browse the 45s. You read through the Billboard Hot 100, which has been posted on the wall. You already know the Top 40 by heart. You've been listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 every Saturday morning while you mow the yard, while you weed the garden. You listen to KMJK ("Magic 107"), to KSKD, to the new Z100. You keep a cassette tape in the stereo to capture your favorite songs (and you pray the damn DJs won't talk over the intros or outros): "Affair of the Heart" by Rick Springfield, "Faithfully" by Journey, "Don't Let it End" by Styx, "Time (Clock of the Heart)" by Culture Club, "Straight from the Heart" by Bryan Adams, "Little Red Corvette" by Prince, "Every Breath You Take" by The Police. You like this stuff. But what you really love is New Wave music: the synthesizers, the strange vocals, the dystopic lyrics. When it comes time to buy records, you buy Duran Duran, Culture Club, Madness, Eurythmics, Thomas Dolby, A Flock of Seagulls, Howard Jones, Thompson Twins, INXS, Human League. For 99 cents, you can get a single with a song you love and a surprise on the flip side. (And sometimes the song on the back is better than the one that charted!) For five bucks, you can buy an album. There's a new UHF station — KECH 22 out of Salem — that plays music videos for a couple of hours every afternoon. From these, you learn about other songs and groups: Berlin, Devo, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Yaz, Depeche Mode. Sometimes, if you're lucky, KBOO will play these songs on a late-night program. You put a tape in each night to record before you go to bed, hoping that you'll catch a new song or two. Time passes. Music changes. The world leaves New Wave behind. Compact discs replace record albums. MP3s replace compact discs. Rap and hip-hop take over the airwaves. Boy bands rule. America has a brief flirtation with country-western. It's all good, but what you really long to hear are those old records you bought so long ago. This is the music of your soul. You're clinging to your memories of vinyl. Fortunately, you're a computer geek — you have the motivation and the technology. And so you begin the process of converting all of your old records to mp3...

This is a collection hand-crafted with love. Each of these songs has been ripped from a single or an album that I purchased about twenty years ago. I've made no attempt to clean up the sound. I want the pops and the cracks and the hiss.

I apologize that this is several weeks late, but I hope the fact I've shipped two CDs will ameliorate your displeasure.

Enjoy!