Revisiting My Dad's Record Collection
by Jeff Zhang
Whenever I spend more than ten minutes at Cheapo Records in Uptown Minneapolis (which is every time I’ve been to Cheapo Records in Uptown Minneapolis), I have a sneezing fit. I finally identified the cause over winter break. They had just moved to a new location, from Lake Street to Nicollet. It’s smaller and a bit more out of the way than it used to be, but it’s across the street from the place where I get my haircuts whenever I’m home for break, so it works for me. Hair cut, I walked in, eyed some of the new releases, flipped through the used electronic section (just for kicks), and—achoo/aha! It’s the dusty vinyl itself, not the location. I thought the old place might have been moldy or something. Allergies.
Luckily, they’re not as bad now as they used to be back when I was in elementary school. After my Saturday piano lesson, my dad would drag me to Cheapo (the old location, on Lake Street) since it was close to my teacher’s house. While he hunted the stacks of new classical music arrivals for UK Deccas and Columbia Six Eyes, I would sit often for hours, eyes red and itchy, waiting for him to hurry up so we could return home to dinner and Claritin.
It wasn’t always Cheapo. Some days we went to Treehouse Records. If not Treehouse, then Hymie’s. If not Hymie’s, then Half Price Books, because they also have a sizable collection of used classical vinyl. Once, on a warm summer day, my dad told me to wait in the car for “a couple of minutes” while he scoped out an estate sale (he would frequent those, too). A couple of minutes turned into around an hour, and I remember setting off the car alarm as I tried to open the door to get some fresh air. Sweaty and panicking, I froze, and elected to break another rule—no food in the car—to drink a Diet Pepsi, still cool, in the lunch box. My dad still feels awful about that incident; it reads like one of those negligence stories you hear about on the local news, where the child gets placed in custody and the parents get thrown in jail.1 I remember that he offered to get me anything I wanted as an apology. I honestly didn’t think it was a big deal, so I asked for a new Game Boy game. He did get me Pokémon Sapphire. But he also still got his records.
Given what I’ve just written, you can correctly guess that my dad is really into collecting classical vinyl. My dad boasts that he has around 12,000 LPs in our basement,2 and with the exception of a couple of jazz classics and an inexplicable Dire Straits album, and Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène (he loves it), his collection is exclusively classical.3 You can also correctly guess that I wanted little to do with vinyl anything when I was growing up. Record shops were boring and allergenic. The things I wanted most in middle school were an MP3 player and earbuds so I could listen to Nirvana behind my dad’s back. Once, in a preadolescent fit, I grabbed a London blueback from the basement and threatened to break it in front of him. We’ve never talked about that episode since. From my point of view, he was disappointed. I think I had let him down. Through experiences like these, my dad eventually gave in to my complaints. Our visits to record shops became less regular, and when I transitioned to a different piano teacher’s studio in 6th grade (regrettably no longer near Cheapo), the experience became at first secondary, and eventually a memory.
I am thankful for the recent resurgence in vinyl’s popularity because it has forced me to reevaluate a medium once scarred by boredom and wheezing. As a more mature listener, I have begun to understand the significance of the relation- ships we build with our music. I can see why my dad spends his weekend afternoons immobile on the couch, transfixed by his Mahler and Brahms, because I have spent afternoons engaged in the same experience, albeit with My Bloody Valentine and Boards of Canada. I appreciate vinyl’s ability to enhance these relationships. In an era where everything is on the internet, it’s cool to be able to physi- cally hold the music that is most meaningful to you. It’s cool to see the seconds of silence between tracks represented as small concentric rings. It’s cool to mute your speakers and listen to the raw, unamplified sound that the needle makes as it tracks the grooves pressed in the wax.
Nevertheless, the comeback of the record feels alienating sometimes. Modern vinyl is expensive. With some recordings, I question the appropriateness of the format; for modern albums meant to be played continuously, front to back, CDs may be more faithful to the goals of the artist.4 With others, especially reissues, I wonder if the quality of the mastering source justifies a vinyl pressing at all. Portable record players, complete with built-in speakers, exist.5 Vinyl is sold at Urban Outfitters.
In spite of all this, my record collection is growing, though it currently stands at 0.08% of the size of the collection in our basement (if you take the 12,000 LP count to be accurate). I think my dad is secretly very proud of me. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, when I finally opened up to my dad about my preference for non-classical music,6 he gave me his copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I didn’t even know he had it. When I bought my first pair of headphones, my dad, after first cautioning that I should spend my money responsibly, took me to a local hi-fi audio store so that we could try them out in a listening room.7 I suspect that he sees himself reflected in me; maybe he is simply relieved to see that I no longer hate that which he loves.
I don’t think he is aware of the full extent to which vinyl has rebounded in the past decade. Absorbed in his world of classical music, my dad finds plenty of treasures in the dusty piles of forgotten vinyl that accrue in garages and basements until they are sold at yard sales for want of money—the piles that have existed and will continue to exist regardless of how cool vinyl is. “Jeff, you’re going to inherit my collection one day,” he tells me. “But whatever you do, don’t sell these records off like these people do for 10 cents each. They think classical music is a waste of space.”
My dad shies away from the trendier record stores in Minneapolis (or maybe they’re all trendy nowadays), like the Electric Fetus, because they don’t stock enough classical on their shelves. Consequently, he is oblivious to the growing rows and rows of new shiny shrink-wrapped LPs, the ones that go for $35 and advertise 180-gram vinyl and a free MP3 download code. When I told him I spent $20 on a reissue of Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reissue, he gawked and asked me why I bothered to buy any album new. But he also told me that, if I wanted to, I could listen to it on his speaker system, the one in our basement, the one where you have to turn on the pre-amp 90 seconds before you turn on the amp—the one I’m still never allowed to touch. I accepted the offer. Downstairs, I sat on the couch as my dad put on the record.
Silent kid, no one to remind you You got no heel, no reels to remind you
My dad remained standing. He wasn’t into it. “The production on this sucks! It’s shallow and messy.”
Come on now, talk about your family Your sister’s cursed, your father’s old and damned, yeah
He looked at me, shrugged, smiled, and left. I don’t think he will ever be willing to interpret hazy production as an artistic choice. But I shrugged and smiled, too, because I finally understood what he was hearing.
1“I doubted that I was ever going to be a good father,” he told me years later.
2 Always the skeptic, I checked last time I was home and estimated around 6,000—7,000 records, not 12,000. Even so, 6,000 is still a lot.
3 My dad likes to trade the extra copies of the records he already owns, and occasionally at the dinner table will brag about his latest online sale. When writing this piece, I recalled his eBay profile (classical33, get it?) and discovered that in the past six months, he sold an RCA Living Stereo record for $344. Considering that he usually purchases these records for less than a dollar each, he earns some massive profit margins, so I will concede that having an eye for collectible vinyl is something worth bragging about.
4 I came close to purchasing Dawn of Midi’s 2013 album
Dysnomia on 2x vinyl LP, but abandoned the idea when
I realized that it made absolutely no sense. The album plays
seamlessly for 46 minutes and presents one cohesive listening
experience. Why interrupt that experience three times, just to
flip and change the record?
5 The Crosley CR49-TA Traveler Turntable with Stereo Speakers and Adjustable Tone Control is available on Amazon and advertises a belt-driven turntable with an integrated case “for listening to vinyl on the go.” In the Q&A, Diane wants to know if the turntable can be configured with external speakers, and asks, “[W]hat sort of outputs does this have?” Alison responds, “I have this and don’t see any outputs at all.”
6 I’m sure that my parents knew I listened to rock in high school, and I’m sure neither of my parents cared. Nevertheless, so great is my dad’s distaste for non-classical music that I felt immense pressure to keep my iTunes library a secret from him. When I started driving, I would manually adjust the tuner to 89.3 The Current, because saving it as a preset would reveal too much, and when I got home I would switch it back to 99.5 Classical. In hindsight, this process was totally unnecessary.
7 “What’s wrong with the Apple earbuds? Headphones just aren’t worth it. A pair of bookshelf speakers are much more cost-effective. Or—if you really need a good pair of headphones, get Stax.” Stax’s flagship SR-009 “earspeakers” boast 6-strand cables, require an amplifier, and run for $4,450. I thanked my dad for the helpful advice.