Vinyl is heavy, man.
My record collection weighs approximately 369 pounds. This estimate is based on the average weight of a piece of vinyl—plus the album cover—being 9 ounces. Then you multiply that number by 600 records and add another 30 pounds for the milk crates that keep everybody upright. I've carted this assemblage from Los Angeles to New York, then to Virginia, and now Baltimore.
I decided to turn my record collection into a piece of visual art to lighten my load. With each passing year I let go of more stuff. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting. I remember laughter, I remember heartache and I remember love. My record collection spans the years from 1952 through 1992—a time before I was born to a time nearly 30 years ago. I've carried my past across the country. I respect the journey of my ancestors and myself. But today I am lighter. And here's the truth—I didn't know I had a record by Dave Van Ronk until I started this project. Like Dave, I have no interest in telling a lie when I open up my heart. I open up my heart by meditating, which is weightless, and meditation opens my awareness. My awareness has no age.
My earliest recollection of vinyl was back in the early ‘70s, which is one of the reasons why 41% of my collection is from that era. The record that got the most rotation back-in-the-day was this little pumpkin:
Everything about the album resonated with me until I was deep into my 20s, my 30s, and maybe forever. So many fun times with family and friends, laughing, dancing, getting stoned. Harry's hand casually tucked in his pocket, the other hand cradling his pipe. The gentleness of it all. The cozy ass kitchen with the refrigerator calendar. If we weren't letting the good times roll in the living room, we were in the kitchen, cooking Italian, playing games, conjugating until the wee hours. Harry was a God, my role model. And so was Uncle Tom, my Mom's brother, the cool cat who introduced me to Harry Nilsson. We all just wanted to be free, to be lighter, to drink it all up.
Another reason I have a ton of records from the ‘70s is because of my friend, Kent. Back in the early ‘80s, Kent had a Monday night gig spinning records at the Whistle Stop, which was a small club in the South Park neighborhood of San Diego.
Kent and I loved to have fun together. One day he invited me to join him on Mondays to play our favorite records, drink beers, smoke weed, boogie down, and eat hot dogs. It was heaven. Kent loved music from the ‘70s, so this naturally rubbed off on me. Even though I moved back to Los Angeles after graduating from UCSD in 1986, I always imagined we would play music again. So Kent was on my mind whenever I was at a thrift shop looking for fresh wax. I would say to myself, "Kent would dig this." We never got that opportunity to spin again, but if we did, this is the first record I would play for him:
I always thought my records were kinda groovy. Although the collection was cumbersome, the nostalgia of it all was definitely worthwhile. Collecting records was a thing. I mean, just the cover art alone was worth the effort and mondo trippy, not to mention the crazy music. The act of holding an album in your hands, studying it, reading the liner notes, pulling out the record, cleaning the vinyl, hearing the pops and cracks as the record spins around-and-around. The whole thing was romantic and visceral. And thanks to Kent, making sure your collection had both the classics and the schmaltz. Be diverse, have fun. So that's what I did.
In 1990, my record collection became truly vintage. That's when my father's wife, Gloria, gifted me the record collection that belonged to her husband, Chuck, who passed away in 1984. And speaking of the ‘80s, my father took me to see the Steelers play the Rams at the Superbowl in Pasadena in 1980. We had great seats on the 50 yard line courtesy of our hosts, the Biltmore Hotel. I was 16 years old, the weather was perfect and everyone was drinking beer, including me. Before the opening kickoff, a friendly fella from the hotel bought a bunch of hot dogs for everyone to munch on. I was stoked and hungry. I had no idea who the guy was but he was instantly a major dude. That man was Chuck. It wasn't until I flipped through his record collection in 1990 that I realized Chuck was a full-on jazz head. His collection made my collection go from cabernet to cognac.
One sweet piece of vinyl from Chuck’s repertoire is this:
I collected most of my records while I was living in Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. When I moved to NYC in 1995, I pretty much turned to CDs and then bootleg mp3s. But those post college years in LA were a great time for vinyl enthusiasts, and thankfully, I had some decent jobs to support my jones. During this period of deep accumulation, I became a huge fan of reggae, and consequently, a regular at the Kingston 12 in Santa Monica on Thursday nights. It was a ritual for me. I would roll up in my yellow VW Rabbit, smoke some ganja, and then dance for a couple of hours with the other Rastas. Jah! In honor of these irie times, I would have to say that my favorite album cover is this piece of candy right here:
Creating an archive of my vinyl was a calling. I was in a p-funk and I needed to heal my chi, so I created a self-help project that required absolute focus, dedication, and love. Operation Free My Mind.
Each album cover was scanned four times: top-left, top-right, bottom-left, and bottom-right. I merged these four sections in Photoshop and cropped the result into a perfect square. I color corrected the final images to best resemble the original artwork, but I didn’t retouch anything because I wanted to see the wear and imperfections of each cover. I created unique titles for every digitized file according to the year, the artist and the title of the album. My last step was to create a collage of all the records, in chronological order, left-to-right, top-to-bottom, which I did in Photoshop. I worked on this project every day for five weeks and I worked eight hours a day, or 280 hours in total.
My intention was to make the record collection feel as though you were actually in my living room thumbing through the dusty stacks. Wine, weed, and snacks—totally optional.
Jimmy Cliff was singing about those good old days. I guess I am too. Archiving my record collection was a blunt way for me to confront the past in order to find peace in the present. Did it work?
The best days of my life are right here, right now.
My mind is free.
P.S. The songs on this blog were recorded by me from my actual record collection which is why you might hear some pops and cracks.
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