The Freelance Retort: Rolling with Records

The Freelance Retort by Brian Moloney

Every so often I get nostalgic so I travel down to the basement and pull out all my old record albums.

Actual vinyl gold, which may or may not still reproduce something that resembles music, if I actually owned something called a turntable to play them on.

There they sit before me, upright in plastic egg crates, all neatly stacked; original presses from America and the Beatles, to Springsteen and ZZ Top, because I needed something to complete the alphabet.

This then gets me thinking about the various aforementioned music conveyances that we utilized through the years to enjoy these “stacks of wax” as some old radio DJ from the past referred to them

Or…basically…the different things we played our records on from the late 50’s onward.

I think my first so called record player was this little tiny plastic thing that played little tiny plastic records. Not sure what was actually on the records, but somehow the sound of farm animals resonates through my head…

ee-eye, ee-eye oh…

These little yellow records were pretty indestructible as well as the actual needle and arm, which I also think were made of the same hard plastic, and probably exist to this day, on the bottom of landfills all over the country.

From there we graduated to what out grammar school teachers, who ran with Ben Franklyn and Tom Jefferson, called a “Victrola”, which I think had something to do with a dog and some sort of horn like device. Anyway, the “Victrola”, which was obviously not an actual Victrola, was this kind of suitcase like item, with a platter that allowed you to place a single record on top, plop on the needle and, voila, music emerged from this tiny little speaker in front.

And archaic as this may sound, these machines were not without their sophistication…there was an actual knob that allowed you to raise and lower the volume, at will.

Yep…at will.

And you could even play multiple styles of records ranging from the 33 ½ LP or Long Play album to the popular 45 singles with their A and B sides…provided you had some sort of adapter to accommodate the larger hole.This consisted of a little disk placed over the center of the turntable pin or one of those little yellow spidery things you plugged into the actual 45 hole itself, if you wanted to stack and play more than one at a time.

There was even a setting to play your old 78 rpm Rudy Valley platters.

Hi-Ho, Everybody!

Let the good times roll!

Eventually we all stepped up in class to the somewhat larger Hi-Fi’s which included a tall spindle that allowed us to now actually stack the wax so we could watch them drop onto the platter, as the automated tone arm set itself down perfectly, gently into the appropriate grove…sometimes. Other times it missed its mark completely and transmitted a horrendous scraping sound all across the neighborhood.

These scraping sounds invariably lead to scratches on the record itself, which of course gave all our music of that era it’s signature snap, crackle & pop dynamic.

However, if all went well, you could lie back and listen to hours of uninterrupted Hi-Fidelity magic…unless of course a record breaking dust ball the size of something you might find at a road side tourist attraction, somewhere in Wisconsin, accumulated on the needle.

Of course if you weren’t picky, you could ignore the dust ball and pretend Mick Jagger always sang with a pair of socks in his mouth…which in reality is possible.

But if you were picky, you would drag yourself up from the couch, bed or floor—wherever your record spinning preference was at the time—and proceed to employ one of several needle cleaning methods available at the time to remove said, ball of dust.

First, you’d simply try...

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