asked if I had a turntable. Therein lies one more brief cautionary tale about the future in general.My old console stereo, with built-in LP "changer" (called that, I think, because you could pile a stack on the spindle and another record would drop onto the platform in turn as the needle withdrew from each terminal circuit) died while I was still in High School in Missouri in the '70s.
I made do for a time, it was the 8-track era and that's what I listened to in the car. I loved the
chunka-chunka sound of the track switching every three songs. When I think of it I mostly imagine "Magical Mystery Tour" playing as I rolled down I-70 to or from my first college semester at UMSL (U of Mo - St. Louis), in the '72 Dart.
Eventually I bought a nice cheap Technics turntable, which carried me to grad school in Tennessee. I didn't buy many new records; cassettes and the Sony Walkman were big now. And then compact discs.
And then, at some point-- I'm hazy on (or traumatized by) the details, maybe it was in the fog of preliminary exams-- I became convinced that I no more needed that turntable and those LPs and 45s and tapes than I needed an Edsel.
So I gave 'em away.
Dumb dumb dumb.
Now my music is on a large, neglected stack of CDs, on an iPod, and in the clouds of Sirius and Pandora. I miss my records!
The moral, of course: don't give away your rich, textured (ok, scratchy and hissy) and memory-laden past, in the present, for the unsecured promise of perfection in a shiny but hypothetical future. And don't assume that new and different is always necessarily better.
But: keep aiming for the stars anyway.
Postscript. Thank you, Harrison & class, for this wonderful parting gift. It was pressed by Third Man Records in Nashville, whose leader says "people are paying a couple hundred bucks each" on Ebay for this very rare item. Wow. I'm now officially shopping for my next turntable.
That's the great thing about the future: you don't know what you're gonna get!
Charles Darwin (
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