My record player! And some of my records!

Dear Readers,



This is my record player. I got it for Christmas of 2006, or maybe it was the Christmas of 2005. It's a Crosley Stack-O-Matic. The Stack-O-Matic just means that it lets you play one side of up to 5 records without having to get up. Even though my record player may look like it was made in the 1960's or 1970's, it was actually recently manufactured. It was just designed to look vintage.

Some of you may not realize that new record players and records are still being made. Even though 8-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs and mp3's have been invented and popularized since records came around, the record medium is still surviving. I'm not exactly sure why records have still survived and yet 8-tracks have gone the way of the dodo bird. Mp3's are definitely the most convienent and cheap way to store and re-play recorded sound. There's some people that claim that records actually sound better than CDs and mp3's. And I think there actually is a smoothness in the sound of a record that you don't get with digitally encoded music. With records, the music is physically put into these tiny little grooves on the record, and when the needle scratches over the tiny grooves and bumps, the sound comes out.

But if you want to listen to music with the volume down, CDs sound better. A record player (at least my record player, anyway) has some ambient humming noise whenever it's on that never goes away. And records have some scratchy sounds and some pops when the record is just a little bit scratched. So you can hear that annoying stuff when you listen to a record queitly. But if you want to listen to music loud, then maybe records sound better than CDs and mp3's. I don't know.

If I had a lot of money, I would buy a whole bunch of nice new cool records of musicians that I really like. I've seen lots of cool records at Bookman's and at Amoeba Music in Hollywood and at Zia, but most of the cool ones are over 10 dollars.

My finances being what they are, I get a lot of my records from the discount racks at music stores, or from thrift stores. I've gotten the vast majority of my records from The White Elephant, a wonderful thrift store in Green Valley, Arizona. They sell records there for a dime each! You can't beat that price. Most other thrift stores sell records for a quarter or 50 cents or more.

But wait! Before you go out shopping for records of your favorite musicians at your local thrift store, be forewarned: Most of the records at thrift stores are going to be lame. Like, really really lame. We're talking Perry Como lame.

But after you sift through all the lameness, you find some real treasures. Here are some of the treasures that I've found and taken home:

Pavarotti is so incredible. I have him singing that funny Figero Figero song and also O Holy Night, and a bunch of other cool ones. His music kind of reminds me of Bugs Bunny. It's fun to try to sing along to, when no one else is around. Unless you can sing opera- then it's fun to sing along to when lots of people are around. I don't usually dig opera. Opera is usually for fuddy-duddies and snobs. But I saw a real opera once. It was Cosi Fon Tuti by Mozart. Well, it was a student production at Northern Arizona University. I was bored out of my mind. I couldn't understand it because it was in Italian. And it was three hours long. But Pavarotti rocks. And Paul Potts is pretty cool, too.

Bolero by Ravel. All I can say is mmmmmmmmmmm...

Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. If you haven't heard this, you need to. Trust me.

Montana Slim sings a lot of old-old-time country music that I adore. And he yodles a lot. He does a great version of You are my sunshine on this record.

Remember Harry Belafonte? He's cool. Sometimes his music gets old, but doesn't everybody's music get old now and then? Thank goodness there's lots of music out there!

Fiddler on the Roof might be my favorite musical of all time.

I really like the Kingston Trio. They were part of the American folk music revival scene in the 1960s.

I took a chance on this Leo Sayer record because I thought the album cover was outrageous. And taking a chance isn't very chancey when records cost a dime. I'm glad I picked it up, because I actually really like the music. I mostly like the song that goes, "You make me feel like dancing. I want to dance the night away!"

This is the record sleeve insert thing that came with Leo Sayer's Endless Flight record. It's the little paper-pocket thing that helps protect records from getting scratched. I included a picture of it here because, well, just look at it! Doesn't it crack you up? In case you're wondering, that's a green airplaine he's got pinned to his suspenders. Leo Sayer is soooooo intense!

This one's a gem. The 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack. My wife got me this from Bookman's for one of my birthdays a few years back, if I'm not mistaken. 2001: A Space Odyssey might be my favorite movie. I remember renting it from Green Valley Video about 4 times when I was a teenager. Then I finally got my own VHS copy of it. The soundtrack has great classical music. It's kind of creepy sometimes. I remember there's a CD version of this soundtrack with a lot of Hal 9000's dialogue. Very creepy. Very good.

Legend! Bob Marley's Greatest Hits! On Record!! Can you believe I found this album at The White Elephant for a dime?! The old folks at the thrift store who sort through the incoming merchandise must not have realized that they could have made a lot more money off of this record. I was so happy when I found it, and I was so happy when I brought it home and I was so happy when I listened to it. Of course, I had already owned Bob Marley's Greatest Hits on CD, but still...

Funny story about this record, though. Most of the songs are altered. Um, it's hard to explain, but this record sounds different than the Bob Marley's Greatest Hits album you would buy from a music store or from iTunes today. A lot of the songs have an added backdrop beat to them. It's like the people who marketed this music to America were this trying to make it more palpable to American audiences who were used to synthsizers and keyboards and faster, pop-music beats. I've had some Bob Marley fans listen to it and they say they've never heard the songs that way.

Hey, I think I just figured out this mystery. I looked on the record package and I saw asterisks after some of the song titles, and in small print at the bottom it says, "remixed by Eric Thorngren." Well, honestly, I think Eric Thorngren should have left Bob Marley's masterpieces alone.

(Say that reminds me, The White Elephant is also where I got one of the best albums I've ever owned- Homework by Daft Punk, on cassette tape. All the cars I've ever had -all two of them- have only had tape decks, so I like to keep a few cassette tapes laying around the car. I must have listened to Homework by Daft Punk a bazillion times as I was driving across the beautiful Arizona desert. I'm not really into techno music, except for Daft Punk. They're awesome.)

Have I ever told you how much I love the Jews?

Whenever my wife is mad at me, I just crank up track # 4 from "If you love me... let me know" by Olivia Newton-John. It's the ultimate love-ballad of all ultimate love-ballads, I honestly love you. Ha ha ha. Then we return to marital bliss, and whatever happened between us is OK again. I first heard that song at Camp Raymond Boy Scout Camp, in a hot RV, when I listened to KAHM 102.1 FM, an lovely old-fogey type of radio station broadcasting out of Prescott, Arizona. When I found this record in a thrift store in Payson, Arizona, and I saw that it had I honestly love you on it, I just had to get it. (By the way, it's true that one of the advantages of CD's and mp3's is that you can jump through tracks with the push of a button. But you can also skip tracks on records, too. It just requires a little more skill and effort. You have to count the number of thick grooves on a record that indicate song breaks. Then you have to manually move the needle to the right groove. Be careful, though, not to have jittery hands- you might scratch the record.)

Barry Manilow is lame. Ha ha ha. But I must admit that sometimes I find myself singing along to "Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking, but I sent you away! Oh Mandy!" Ha ha ha. Just look how smug he is.

Here's another shameful record I own. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. It will probably be left behind when the Rapture comes, but I really like it. I'm just a sweet transvestite... ha ha ha!

A Treasury of Gregorain Chant sung by the monks of the abbey of St. Thomas. Beautiful music. It's a cappella, with some organ solos thrown in. I'm listening to it now, and it's just beautiful. I really like old Catholic singing and chanting. It's good for meditation and it's good for feeling religious. Sometimes on my way home from work at 10:30 at night, when I'm driving on the 60, and I'm driving on Ironwood, I listen to 1310 a.m., Immaculate Heart Radio, a Catholic station, and every once in a while they play this chanting type of a cappella music. But then other times 1310 a.m. has a priest saying Hail Marys over and over and over, vainly and repetitiously, and it drives me nuts. It's funny, with all that repetition... at first I kind of like it, and I think it takes a lot of discipline to say those words over and over, and I think it's good to say prayers like that because after a while it really gets inside your soul, and the words to the prayer are beautiful. But then I'm reminded why I prefer the style of prayer in the latter-day-saint tradition of worship.

It's the Juno Soundtrack on record! And the record is ORANGE!!! I got this record from one of my wife's old co-workers who accidently ordered two of these records from Amazon.com. So she gave one to me, since I was probably the only person she knew who had a record player. And I think the Juno soundtrack is a great. Sometimes its teenage outsider-angst is obnoxious, but other times I really like it. I welcome it into the world. The Juno soundtrack deserves its own place on music store shelves everywhere. And what makes it extra cool is that it's orange. But it's not quite as cool as this red heart-shaped record of the groovalicious single Just Ain't Gonna Work Out by Mayer Hawthorne. I wish I had that record. I have that song on my iPod, though, and it's really happening.

I've got a lot of other cool records.

And I have a lot of other records.

Ha ha ha. I think I have over a hundred, but I haven't counted.

Sincerely,

Telemoona

P. S. Does anyone know how to play a record backwards? I've fiddled with my record player a little, but I can't figure it out. I really want to know, because I've heard you can get secret Satanic messages and killer vegetarian recipes that way.