Old Records Never Die

A PLUME BOOK

OLD RECORDS NEVER DIE

© KELLY KREGLOW SPITZNAGEL

E
RIC
S
PITZNAGEL
writes for magazines such as
Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Men's Health, Billboard, The Believer
, and the
New York Times Magazine
, among many others. He's the author of six books, one of which was translated into German and features a cat on the cover for no apparent reason. He lives in Chicago with his wife and son, the latter of whom wants to be a “mad scientist” when he grows up. (That's now in print, so the author intends to hold him to it.)

Praise for
Old Records Never Die

“I can't remember when a book had me get out my black pen and underline so many wonderful things. Maybe never. Loss and laughter and all those denizens of sonic ghost town record stores willing but often unable to make us all whole again. Something on every page to stoke the geek heart with sad recognition and hope.”

—Marc Spitz, author of
Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York City in the '90s

“Spitznagel's quest for the actual records of his youth could have been a gimmick. Instead it's a touching exploration of loss: of opportunities, of loved ones, of the ability to even remotely discern what's hip. Hilarious and heartfelt, this is a book for anyone who has ever spent entire years of their lives haunting record stores, dissecting the merits of
Doolittle
, and studying liner notes with the intense focus of a Talmudic scholar.”

—Jancee Dunn, author of
But Enough About Me

“A funny and heartfelt memoir about music collecting that gives birth to a new branch of social science: Gen-X archaeology.”

—Neal Pollack, author of
Alternadad

“Eric Spitznagel is the only music nerd in the world who's not entirely insufferable.
Old Records Never Die
will make you wish you were his roommate.”

—Martha Plimpton, actress

“To say
Old Records Never Die
is a book about music is to say
On the Road
is a book about cars. Really, Eric Spitznagel's energetic and endlessly engaging memoir is a book about the ways we seek to discover and recover our essential selves. Music lovers will love this book; unrepentant nostalgics, like myself, can expect to be absolutely riveted.”

—Davy Rothbart, creator of
FOUND
magazine and author of
My Heart Is an Idiot

“Eric Spitznagel is just like Captain Ahab, if Ahab were chasing Billy Joel albums instead of a white whale. As he recounts in this very funny book, Spitznagel found way more than he bargained for. And just like Ahab, he dies in the end. (Spoiler alert.)” 

—Rob Tannenbaum, coauthor of
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

PLUME

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Eric Spitznagel

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

REGISTERED
TRADEMARK—MARCA REGI
STRADA

All photos courtesy of the author.

LIBRARY OF CO
NGRESS CATALOGING-IN
-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Spitznagel, Eric, author. | Tweedy, Jeff, 1967– writer of foreword.

Title: Old records never die : one man's quest for his vinyl and his past /

Eric Spitznagel.

Description: New York, New York : Plume, [2016] | 2016

Identifiers: LCCN 2015038989| ISBN 9780142181614 (trade pbk.) |

ISBN 9780698168046 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Spitznagel, Eric. | Collectors and collecting—United

States—Biography. | Sound recordings—Collectors and collecting.

Classification: LCC ML429.S66 A3 2016 | DDC 780.26/6—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038989

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's own.

For Kelly and Charlie,
the beginning and ending of
everything

A FOREWORD OF SORTS

by Jeff Tweedy

T
he first records I remember buying with my own money were forty-fives. It was 1974 or thereabouts, and I was maybe seven at the time. My sister was home from college, and she took me to a Record Bar. I bought “Dream On” by Aerosmith and “Magic” by Pilot, because I'd heard both songs on the radio and I thought they were miraculous.

The first LP I bought with my own money—which, admittedly, is kind of a ridiculous thing to say because I wasn't pulling in an income, and whatever money I had was just what I'd managed to scrape together from allowances or cash stuffed into birthday cards—anyway, I'd gone down to visit my sister in Tucson, Arizona, where she was living at the time. We took a day trip to Mexico, and I bought a Spanish version of
Parallel Lines
by Blondie. The songs were in English, but the sleeve was written entirely in Spanish. And it was a very, very, very cheap pressing. Like a flimsy, fifty-gram vinyl. It was almost see-through. It was the same quality as those cutout records that used to come in cereal boxes.

The forty-fives and the Mexican
Parallel Lines
, they were my vinyl training wheels. My collection really started thanks to my brother, Steve.

I'm the youngest in my family by ten years. Steve came home from college when I was very young, probably around eight or nine. He caught me filling out a Columbia House Record Club mail order form. He snatched it out of my hands and said, “What are you doing? Are you serious with this?”

“What?” I said. “They're offering twelve records for a penny. Where else am I going to get twelve records for that kind of money? Twelve records.”

“Fine, you want records?” he said. “You can have my records.”

He just gave them to me. An entire crate. And it was the weirdest collection of records. He had very eclectic taste, stuff like Harry Chapin and Aphrodite's Child and Kraftwerk and a bunch of Zappa records.

My sister heard about the Columbia House incident, and she gave me some of her records. Her vinyl hand-me-downs included a lot of the Monkees, Herman's Hermits, and the Beatles—it was an education in pop music.

All of a sudden, I went from having nothing to having this amazing, diverse, wide-ranging collection. I immersed myself in it. There was never a record where I was like, “That looks weird. Let's skip it.” Everything seemed worthwhile, because somebody had bothered to cut it onto a piece of vinyl and sell it.

As a naive young kid, I was so trusting of the notion that if somebody had found this music important enough to make a record of it, then obviously it had value. If it exists, it has value.

I still have all of my records. All of them. The forty-fives and the Blondie Mexico import and the records from my brother. I know exactly which ones belonged to my brother, because they still have a little white sticker on the sleeves with his initials, SKT.

Even the records that don't have any physical markings, I could tell you which ones are mine, just from the pops and scratches. I could tell you exactly where they are. On my copy of the Clash's
London Calling
, there's a skip during “Death or Glory.” To this day, it sounds weird to me when I hear it without the skip. It's not as good. I don't find it as appealing.

If someone offered me a replacement, something that's been remastered and remixed with a fuller, crisper sound quality, I don't think I'd take it. I'd rather keep my old vinyl. Because I don't need better sound from
London Calling
. What I need is that skip. When I hear it without the skip, it breaks the spell for me. I'm taken out of it.

Also, the record represents something meaningful to me. Not just the songs, but the physical object that contains those songs. It's an album that was hard-won, that has a backstory to it.

Growing up, there was a Target in a nearby town that my mom would shop at occasionally. I'd go with her and just hang out and look at the records while she finished. They had a copy of
London
Calling
for sale, and I desperately wanted it. But it had a sticker on the front that read
PARENTAL ADVISORY, EXPLICIT CO
NTENT, STRONG LANGUAG
E
or something to that effect. This was before Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center, so I don't know if it was the label or the store that put it on there. Either way, I had to get it off. There was no way my mom was buying me a record with an
EXPLICIT CONTENT
warning on the front.

I tried scratching off the sticker with my fingernail. It didn't go so well. I got only about a third of it off. And then we had to leave. So I hid the record in a different section and vowed to come back for it.

We returned two weeks later, and
London Calling
was still there. I went to work on it, scratching at the sticker like a cat on a new couch. This time, I got another third of it off before we had to go. Those stickers were surprisingly resilient.

A month or two passed before we returned, and I was convinced the
London Calling
would be gone. But it was still there, and this time I finally got all of the sticker off. I took the record up to my mom and asked her, as casually as I could manage, “Hey, can I get this?”

She glanced at it, shrugged, and said, “Sure, fine.”

I threw it in the cart, amazed that I was somehow getting away with the perfect crime.

I still have that record. You can distinctly see my fingernail imprints on the jacket, from where I dug into the shrink-wrap, attacking the
EXPLICIT CONTENT
sticker. I like that those gouges are still there. It's evidence that this record didn't come easy. I was like Tim Robbins's character in
The Shawshank Redemption
, slowly digging his way to freedom with a rock hammer, chipping away at the wall, hoping the warden didn't notice.

It reminds me of what it felt like to be amazed that I was able to hear the Clash. This wasn't music you bought and listened to a few times and then put back on the shelf and forgot about. It was contraband. Every time I put
London Calling
on a turntable, there was a palpable sense of danger. I was pretty sure a SWAT team would kick down my bedroom door and take it away.

I still have some records from when I worked at Euclid Records in Saint Louis. I know exactly which ones came from Euclid, because they're all marked with a
Z
. When somebody brought in a big pile of records to sell, you had to scope out the ones you wanted. The way it would work, you'd give them fifty dollars for a stack of maybe one hundred records. And then you would put a sticker on each record, that had a code for how much we paid for it, so the owner could go through the records later and price each one.

When you were buying records and there was something in there you wanted, you had to make sure you didn't overpay for anything. There was a code for free, which was
Z
. If you raised the price
for every other record by a dime, you could make the ones you wanted be a Z pretty easily.

Any Z record, you could just take. Even if it was out in the bins. But you had to game the system a little bit. I'm not proud of it, but I definitely have a few records in my collection with a Z sticker on them that probably weren't Zs.

Have you heard
The Flowers of Romance
by Public Image Ltd? It came out in 1981, when I was fourteen years old. I put it on a list of records that I wanted for Christmas from my parents. I never expected to get it. But somehow, unbelievably, they actually found it and bought it for me. When I opened it up on Christmas morning, I was gobsmacked. It was like
London Calling
all over again, but this time, it'd been too easy.

And then my dad said, “Why don't you put on one of your new Christmas records and play it for everybody?”

We had a house full of family. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins—they were all there. Even a few neighbors had stopped by. As they waited, I tore the shrink-wrap off my
Flowers of Romance
, brought it over to the family turntable, and dropped the needle onto the first song.

If you're unfamiliar with the album, the first song is called “Four Enclosed Walls.” And I played it at full blast in my family's living room on Christmas morning 1981. It's a really spooky song, with decidedly non-Christmasy lyrics like “Doom sits in gloom in his room” and “Destroy the infidel” and “Joan of Arc was a sorcerer.”

I still have that record. And there's still a scratch across the first song, from when it was yanked from the family turntable with extreme prejudice. I believe my father's exact words were, “What in the hell is that? Boy, are you trying to kill me? Why would anybody listen to that! What is going on?!”

I have every record that ever meant anything to me. I never sold
any of them. When CDs came out, I wasn't that impressed. The sound quality was kind of iffy. Any CDs I bought were more for the convenience than anything else. I liked that they were portable, that I could put them in a Walkman or a boom box and take them places. And when digital music came along, sure, I'm not an idiot. I listen to music on an iPod. But it's never been a replacement for vinyl.

So I feel a little weird writing this introduction to Eric's book. Because the thing he did, which you're going to read about in the following pages, I don't really understand it.

I don't want to spoil this for you, but seriously, something is wrong with this guy.

Eric and I have had a few discussions, trying to figure out what I should write. 'Cause I honestly don't know what to say, other than “Why would you do that? That's such an insane thing to do. Stop doing things that are insane.”

I'm not even talking about losing your records. I'm talking about trying to find the records you've lost. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a completely noble effort to try and track down all the records from your youth that you somehow let slip away. But if I was in his shoes, I would probably . . . I don't know . . . not do that thing. I would argue for letting go and moving forward and making new memories.

So he asked me, as a sort of experiment, to put myself in a hypothetical. My house is burning. After I save my wife and kids, what records from my collection do I save? Do I go after
London Calling
, with the “Death or Glory” skip and my prepubescent claw marks across the sleeve? Do I save any of the records covered with
Z
s or
SKT
s? Do I grab
The Flowers of Romance
that still has the skid marks of my father's outrage?

I thought about this. And my first response was, probably none of it. I'm pretty pragmatic about things. I'm sure, in the moment, in the trauma of the situation, it would occur to me that there's
something significant being lost that I'll never be able to retrieve. When I think of the rarest records that I own, I'd be sad at the loss. But would they really be irreplaceable?

But then, as I'm trying to imagine this scenario, I think of a Tyrannosaurus Rex record.
A Beard of Stars
. And I'm not sure why. It's one of the records that my brother gave to me. For reasons I couldn't begin to explain, it's important to me.

This record, this one record, has been passed down through several generations. I got it from my brother, and I listened to it incessantly. And now my sons, Spencer and Sam, have become fond of it. From an early age, they were listening to it. I don't know what it is about that record that resonates with Tweedys. It's not like it's an especially important or popular record in Marc Bolan's body of work. But it means something to us.

Maybe it's the songs. Or maybe it's because I can't think about that record without imagining the SKT sticker on the front—proof that it once belonged to my brother and had a history long before I ever discovered it. That sticker, inexplicably, makes it valuable.

Also, why the hell is my house on fire? Why can't I save my guitars? Everything about this is starting to sound
fishy.