Analog

The older I get, the more I look backward with regard to music. I suppose this is natural; the music of our formative years tends to be deeply rooted in the psyche. I still like discovering new music, but I find less that appeals to me these days.

I have over 200 vinyl LPs in the basement, and I've started going through them with the intent of selling some of them on eBay. But I wasn't one of those people who bought duplicates of everything on compact disc when CDs replaced vinyl. I would have loved to do that, but I was making so little money at the time that it was impossible. As time went by I rebought some albums on CD, and I still do once in a while; I recently found a remastered edition of Graham Parker's 1979 new wave classic Squeezing Out Sparks.

Now it's possible to buy many of my old albums as mp3 downloads, but I haven't quite been able to give myself over completely to that notion. I have bought mp3s, of course, but only scattered singles, like the '70s classic "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, or The Pogues' bittersweet Christmas song "Fairytale of New York."

I received an iTunes gift card for my birthday, and spent about two hours looking around, trying to decide what to use it for. I found a best-of compilation by Bauhaus, a band I'd always liked but never got into too deeply (though among my vinyl there is a 12" single of "Bela Lugosi's Dead"). It seemed like a good choice until I noticed the dreaded iTunes words "partial album" in the listing. I went looking for the CD on Amazon and found that three of the tracks are not part of the iTunes version, for whatever reason.

Eventually I settled on a two-volume, 32-track greatest-hits collection by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble. Listening to it reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, not just because of SRV's version of "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" but because he's often compared to Hendrix. I've always loved Hendrix's music, but I've never owned any of it, so I rolled over to half.com and picked up the three original Jimi Hendrix Experience releases for about $5 each. One of the sellers had a copy of the Bauhaus disc, so I got that too.

I don't get why music labels don't make older albums available at lower prices; five or six bucks seems reasonable for something that's been out for twenty years or more. I know I would buy a lot more CDs at those prices, and since the music industry is supposedly struggling, it might boost sales.

All this nostalgia must have caused some sort of brain fever, because I found myself looking through the "vintage electronics" section of eBay in search of an Onkyo analog receiver like the one I had in college (scroll down a bit to the pic with the Yale pennant). I found and passed on a couple of them before succumbing and buying one. I don't really know what I'm going to do with it. I don't have a place to put it, and I don't have any speakers I could connect to it, and looking for vintage speakers is a sure route to madness. But there's some space on top of the dog's crate, and I could haul my old turntable up from the basement...