I’m the eldest of four boys, and there are nearly six years between me and my younger brother. But, growing up, we shared many interests, including classical music, and we still trade observations and info on our favorite recordings and performers. My brother had a massive vinyl library—thousands of classical and jazz albums. He’s recently taken to downsizing and digitizing and has passed some of the LPs on to me. I still listen to vinyl records. Although “listen” isn’t quite the right description. Luxuriate? Possibly. Indulge! That’s it! I indulge in vinyl records!
What is it about the vinyl record experience that makes it so joyous, so luminously engaging? First, the album jacket. That twelve-inch square package decorated with photos or paintings, or sketches, and the artists’ and composers’ names in fonts designed to draw you in. I can still see (in my mind’s eye, Horatio) some favorite jackets from my youth. Nonesuch had particularly fun jacket art in the seventies: a sort of psychedelic watercolor take on baroque portraiture. Watteau meets Peter Max. And there were usually extensive notes on the back. You removed the shrink-wrap and studied the art and the notes while feeling the flex of the glossy jacket cardboard in your hands.
The record inside the jacket was further encased in a paper sleeve. Some Deutsche Grammophon sleeves were lined in clear plastic, but most sleeves were a kind of off-white butcher paper. For a while, Columbia Records offered The Inner Sleeve—a sort of newsletter printed on the paper record sleeve. Artists’ bios, interviews, stories from the recording studio, promos for upcoming releases—so much to enjoy.
And then the record itself—those grooves—a kilometer of them in the glossy black (or red or blue) vinyl surface. The sonic possibilities are just there in front of your eyes. Like imagining Ansel Adams in his dark room before you see the glorious print. Or Bernstein at the piano, his trusty Blackwing tucked behind one ear, empty staff paper stacked at the ready. And that new vinyl had its own intoxicating scent; the smell of potential: of the preserved about to become live again with each new playing.
There was also the process of cleaning the record using the ubiquitous Discwasher, that indispensable accessory of wood and deep-napped velvet held fingers to thumb and swept along the record grooves to remove any performance-marring debris. Very satisfying, like weeding a garden.
You set the record spinning on the platter, watched the colorful label carousel round and round, then put the stylus to the vinyl for the first time, and at last all that glorious sonic detail rang out from whatever speakers months of saving your weekly allowance could afford. And for about half an hour, you were transported, swallowed up by the performance. Then, of course, you had to turn the record over.
Vinyl albums have made quite a comeback. Of course they have. How could they not? All the predictions of the demise of LPs proved false (as will, I prophesy, predictions of the demise of movie theaters and paper books). We humans, even the much-maligned Gen Z, seek the tactile. The sensuous--in the broadest terms--beckons us, and we do not refuse. And I would submit that when the tactile and the sensuous are engaged, our experience of the art enveloped therein is heightened, more immersive, and more capable of moving us to the realizations and ideations that are art’s raisons d’etre.
A digital file may sound good, but it has no appeal to the senses, really no physical qualities whatsoever. It contains art but has no art in itself. A shiny black (or red or blue) vinyl LP in a delightfully crinkly paper sleeve encased in a beautifully illustrated cardboard jacket, however—that’s the stuff that dreams are made on.
