WHY I LOVE RECORDS!
Part One: My First Exposure to Vinyl
I love records. CDs are great, but records are my first love. To me, there’s nothing like the feeling of putting a record on a turntable and setting the tone arm on it – especially when you can hit the empty space between tracks perfectly. Flipping an LP over between your fingers being careful not to touch the grooves. Holding a stack of 45s with one hand, your finger through the hole in the middle.
When I was a small child, I used to play with my mother’s 78s. I broke a few accidentally. Family lore is that I asked, “Can you sew records?” It bothers me when records break. There’s a scene in “Blackboard Jungle” where the students break the teacher’s records. I hate that part!
I got my first record player when I was about 5. It was one of those square suitcase models; beige and non-descript. I played my Golden Records on it – those primary colored 78-rpm kids records. They sounded so old fashioned and indeed they were! I have many older siblings so nearly everything I had was a hand-me-down.
The record player was old-fashioned, too. It was electric, of course, but the tone arm was like the kind on a Victrola; you turned the whole needle housing up when it was at rest. And the needle really was a needle, about a half-inch long! I remember they came in a little envelope – a whole bunch of them – and you had to unscrew a screw to release the old needle and install the new one. And if you weren’t careful, the needle would fall into the speaker holes!
Of course, I also played 45s on my little record player. I loved “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” – not only for the song, but the record label, too. It was on Cricket Records and the label had a drawing of a cricket on it. He looked kind of like Jiminy Cricket. The beginning of my attraction to cool looking record labels. It’s funny to listen to now. It has that sideways warp. The tone arm moves side to side instead of up and down.
I did actually get two new records when I was a kid. “The Bare Necessities” from “The Jungle Book” was a cool, modern-sounding song and it had a picture sleeve. And my absolute favorite was 
an H.R. Pufnstuf EP. I sent away for it
from Kellogg’s. The record has 8 songs on it and came with a lyric sheet and photo suitable for framing. I loved Pufnstuf and I listened to that record to death. It was my “fix” after the show went off the air. Now I have the DVD!
And it was always fun to play songs at the wrong speed. At 16-rpm, songs are boring, but everything sounds better at 78 when you’re a kid.
