A Record Player and a Little Reminiscence

My daughter, Emma, turned 17 last week.  My wife, Laura, bought her a turntable, one of those Crosley models.  So maybe I was a little more excited about the gift, but I’m the one with Rubbermaids full of old albums, the fruit of my lawn mowing jobs starting sometime in junior high. 

Record albums.  Large. Bulky.  Space-hogging.  The collection of songs on my albums could fit into the memory of an iPod which slips easily into a pocket or clips to a sleeve.  But let’s forget about convenience for a moment, and talk about aesthetics.

I look at the front and back sides of an album cover, and sometimes the inside, if it opens up, and think of them as canvases for a display of the musician’s or band’s individuality.  Photography, paintings, illustrations, and even literature.  The display area of a compact disc is, by necessity, minimized.  And except for the display area of your mp3 player, nonexistent. 

I ceremonially chose a Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska, to christen the player with, an album so acoustically stark, that it begs to be heard through a needle pressing down upon its grooves.

I found my Buffett albums, going directly for his 70’s Key West sounds.  I started with A White Sport Coat and A Pink Crustacean, and placed it on the record player, before studying the beauty that is album cover art, and, in this case, the literature that follows.

The entire front cover is a photograph of Buffett taken by one of his old Key West cronies, Guy de la Valden.  In blue jeans and barefoot, his head adorned with a cowboy hat, and wearing a white sport coat with extra-large lapels, he sits on lobster traps in front of a wooden fishing boat at the docks, a blue Florida sky in the background.

The back cover is simple, the lyrics to every song of the album displayed in order of appearance on the record.    But what struck me was the ode to the musician and album by Tom McGuane, who reached his literary fame after writing 92 Degrees in the Shade in the 70’s.

The folk orientation in recent music has always been selective and a little arbitrary. We are the beset by the quack minstrels of a non-existent America, bayed at by the children of retired orthodontists about "hard times" and just generally depleted by all the clown biographies and ersatz subject matter of the drugs-and-country insurgence that is replacing an earlier song mafia. In fact, maybe your stereo has already shorted out with slobber anyway.

Nevertheless, it does not seem too late for Jimmy Buffett to arrive. He is dedicated as ever to certain indecencies and shall we say reversible brain damage; his duties toward the shadowy Club Mandible of Key West have yet to be explained. And of course he was among the first of the Sucking Chest Wound Singers to sleep on the yellow line. And as a souvenir of some not so terrible times, this throwback altar boy of Mobile, Alabama brings spacey up-country tunes strewn with forgotten crab traps, Confederate memories, chemical daydreams, Ipana vulgarity, ukulele madness and, yes Larry, a certain sweetness, But there is a good deal to admire in Buffett's inspired evocations from this queerly amalgamated past most Americans now share. What Jimmy Buffett knows is that our personal musical history lies at the curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet with somewhat less animosity than the theoreticians would have us believe.

And just like they don’t dance like Carmen no more, music isn’t packaged as prettily as it was once upon a time.