My Return to Vinyl

Today's blog post comes directly to you from the Hardly Newsworthy Files. 

As you can see, I have completed the decoration of my new home in the bucolic foothills of Pasadena. Which now includes a new stereo cabinet, purchased on Etsy, and built by a craftsman in Turkey, or Turkie, as they like to put it. 

His name is Bunyami. And I only know that because there were several conversations, via text, about the missing hardware (eventually found) and the wobbly legs that needed to be affixed to the cabinetry. Bunyami -- I affectionately call him Yami -- is currently in the process of building me new iron legs and then shipping them to me close to 8,000 miles away.

I chose not to wait and purchased some heavy duty steel legs that have already been locked into place and are solid as a rock. As Ms. Muse can tell you, I'm kind of a Handy Jew and can still work a power drill set on low torque.

So why? You might be asking did I go to all this trouble especially when for $12 a month I pay for Apple  Music, I can listen to anything, anytime, anywhere I want, via the interwebs.

Chalk another one up to nostalgia. 

I have close to 200 albums that have been with me for more than 50 years. I even have a copy of Emerson Lake & Palmer's Trilogy album which my father bought for me when I put my first bargain basement stereo together in 1974. 

His company, Brownell Electro, a division of AVNET, had just signed on to be the cable and wire provider for BIC Turntables, British Industries Corporation, and their revolutionary belt drive system. I can also work a keyboard and the Google. And my father wisely snagged one for 1/3 the selling price.

I suppose I could have tossed the collection or sold it to some hipster who had just discovered the beauty of vinyl but I didn't want to part with my past. And remembered, hazily at best, all the hours I spent listening to music while not boning up on Economics 101 or Math 398.

Besides, I love the album display design. And because I need to update the collection, now find myself at Cantebury's Records on Colorado Blvd. Just two doors down from Sweet Flower, where I buy my weed (my low dose edibles, more accurately.)

I'm in total regression mode.