Longing For L.P.'s

IN the last few years I've spent most--really, I should say all--of my meager earnings on listening to rock 'n roll. So I've got a state-of-the-art stereo system with speakers that give a wall-of-sound image and a vast, eclectic record collection that would put WHRB to shame (I should know, I hear it on my telephone all the time).

But I've got not a single compact disc. Not even a C.D. player. All I own are L.P.'s that I play on my turntable.

People find this surprising. They think that a true stereophile should have the latest, cleanest musical mechanisms. But, as Joan Jett once said, I love rock'n roll, not its machinery. And defects and all, I like everything about L.P.'s. Everything. Scratches, warps, pressing the repeat button and playing the same side of an album all night. Everything.

So I was very upset to read a recent report that L.P.'s hold just 10 percent of the American market for recorded music, compared to 52 percent for cassettes and 34 percent for C.D.'s. In all, L.P. sales were down 23 percent since last year.

These figures are upsetting. Not that I have the sort of dinosaur mentality that makes me cling hopelessly to extinct and obsolete artifacts. I was completely pleased by the demise of that quintessentially 1970s conduit of musical mush, the eight-track tape, which had the annoying habit of dividing songs as it switched tracks, and also seemed to be what you bought for such embarrassing works (mistakes?) as the soundtracks to Grease and Saturday Night Fever, or anything by Andy Gibb, Bachman Turner Overdrive or Barry Manilow (yes, I admit it, I once owned this stuff; anyone who tells you they never did is lying).

I'm glad the eight-track has gone the way of its other inexplicable contemporaries like mood rings, platform shoes, pet rocks and one-night stands. The existence of this stuff makes me wonder what was in the water in the 1970s that created such hideous consumer instincts.

BUT the L.P., now that is quite a different matter. Because music, particularly rock'n roll, is meant to be listened to on records. It's meant to have that slightly distorted sound that you get when there's a bit of lint on the needle. It's meant to sound scratchy when you're listening to that Pink Floyd album you last played when you were stoned and accidentally dropped on the floor in trying to flip it over. (If you couldn't have experiences like this, what would be the point in getting stoned and making spastic attempts to function normally?)

Music is meant to sound warped when you're listening to that Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin or Beatles album that's 20 years old and used to belong to your older brother. Music is meant to sound like it's been places.

Because it has. The great thing about L.P.'s is that they age, they show time. What a sterile experience it will be 10 years from now listening to the Bruce Springsteen or Grateful Dead C.D. you bought in 1989 only to realize that it sounds the same as it ever did. You've grown up, but your album has stagnated in the late 1980s. That Sugar Cubes or Sinead O'Connor album that you played over and over again for a few months until it was warped and then you never listened to it again when the trend faded--if you own those albums on C.D. you won't remember that brief shining moment when you couldn't get the damned records off your turntable.

THE best thing about L.P.'s is the packaging. They're the size that a piece of music is meant to be. You can hold an album's cover and read the liner notes and lyrics and grasp the full meaning--the full cosmic earth-shaking force that rock 'n roll at its best can be. I know they put all the same information in C.D.'s and cassettes these days, but it's always in the form of some fold-out thingamagig like the pamphlets they hand out on street corners about safe sex or finding Jesus or joining the Hare Krishnas. It just doesn't feel right.

And records can turn up in such interesting places. When I was little I got a Chipmunks song on a red colored single in a Captain Crunch box, I found the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" in an issue of Time magazine, and they handed out copies of "Up Where We Belong" at a screening of An Officer and A Gentleman. Of Course, these were all soft and fragile pieces of vinyl not meant to last a lifetime, maybe only worthy of one smudgy play, but they were still nice surprise samplers in odd corners of culture. The soul--or the lack thereof--of the compact disc is such a technological boy wonder that it will never be simplified into fun forms that you find near those ever-annoying subscription cards in magazine centerfolds.

AS I said before, I don't mean to sound like an old fuddy duddy who'd rather walk than take a motor car or who'd rather write long, languishing letters than call (although at least the latter is true). I just think we've got to realize that some people like L.P.'s even if they're turning into musical neanderthals. C.D. players are kind of like car phones or answering machines with remote call-in--sure they're an improvement, an advance, a fine addition to any upwardly mobile life. But they're heartless. They force us to evolve into slicker life forms than we human beings were ever meant to be.

And there's no avoiding these products. They're consumer goods that create a need where it didn't exist before. Private people are beginning to feel that they need to know who called them from far away, and business people are beginning to feel they need to keep chatting with clients by phone while they're driving, soon you've got to have these things to just barely keep up with the Joneses.

And pretty soon, we're all going to need C.D. players because record companies like Warner Brothers and EMI are beginning to phase out the titles available on L.P.

And if the message is the medium, rock 'n roll will become slick, polished and unspirited like the compact discs that play it. It's already happening. I immediately associate the word C.D. with artists like Dire Straits, Steve Winwood and anything on the Windham Hill label--music that sells albums but doesn't inspire much personal devotion because any emotion it peddles is clearly mass manufactured.

And at least part of the fun of rock music is being a fan, being a megafanatic, reading fanzines and probing the deep (or, more often, shallow) recesses of your rock star idol's mind. Only L.P.'s are part of that whole experience. Let's face it, Elvis' Sun collection and Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" and Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" and the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds just had to be playing on records. As it is, music today is getting closer and closer to being embodied in the commodity that can only appear in the forms of gold and platinum. C.D.'s may improve the sound, but they're going to ruin the music.