I miss LP's

The first album I ever owned was "Wings Over America." It was Christmas 1976, and we were spending the holidays in Florida. Fortunately for me (since we didn't have a turntable in our hotel room) the album was huge, with oodles of artwork to look at. Imagine my disappointment as I started my album collection, in finding out that not all of them had three fold-out pages.

For those of you under 30 or so, you've probably never unwrapped an LP. Instead, you started out by wrestling with the cellophane on a CD, and now just buy them digitally. I do too -- I'm listening to my new "One X" CD from Three Days Grace as I write this, having just added the CD to iTunes. Most of my new music today comes from iTunes. It's so bloody convenient.

But it's not the same.

The LP came wrapped in shrink wrap, but not the hard cellophane that encases CDs. Instead, it was a softer, plasticy-feeling sort of thing, that you could cut with a thumbnail. Maybe the softer wrapping was akin to the fragile vinyl disc instead, while today's CD's are tough polycarbonate, encased in hard plastic.

You bought the album at store, like Harmony Hut (it was a mall-based music store in the 70's. It's long gone. Even Wikipedia's never heard of it). In my case, being a country boy, it was a long ride back home before you could play it -- we didn't even have a cassette deck in a car until I was 18, and I only knew one person with a turntable in his car, and he was insane. So instead you'd fiddle with the album while Mom drove back, hoping for liner notes or something cool inside. And the smell... the smell of new vinyl was like magic. Echoes of a musical world that existed somewhere Out There, but now you owned a little of it.

The covers were huge, about a square foot. All kinds of real estate for artwork. Some were bifolds, giving you four feet of canvas, plus the sleeves. Not everyone put effort into the album packaging, but a lot of them did. Boston's "Don't Look Back" seemed so lush and colorful, the perfect match for its dreadfully overproduced sound.

Album etiquette was big. You wouldn't lend your discs to anyone. To a wannabee audiophile like myself, how you stored your albums told me if I should lend them out; people who had five feet of them in a row, the ones on the end leaning on a cinder block, were off the map. Those of us who used an anti-static disc brush on a crackling new album, and who agonized over the counterbalance of our tonearms, we knew better.

CD's were such a revolution. I bought hundreds over the past twenty years, my first being a Beatles CD that I won on a radio show (The Harris Challenge on WCXR 105.9; the question was "What county was Georgetown originally part of?") But even with my then-young eyes, it was very hard to read the tiny type inside. Manufacturers quickly started printing little booklets that fit inside the jewel case, but it still wasn't the same. And is anything uglier than a cracked jewel case? I don't know why it's so bothersome...

But the intangibility of an online purchase is somewhat unsatisfying. I recently purchased a Green Day tune. Clicked "download" and Apple took 99 cents from Visa, and we were done. If my Mac ever crashes I'm not sure what happens to my purchase. I guess I wanted a nice 12" chunk of cardboard to magically come out of the screen...

I still have my 250 or so 12" LP's, even though I don't even own a turntable anymore. Five of my favorites are housed in black picture frames, hanging in my living room. So maybe it was the album art that was the most appealing aspect after all...