When Oldies Were Hard to Find
Little sisters can be a big pain, as
any brother will attest. I managed fairly successfully to ignore mine throughout most of
my childhood, except on one disastrous occasion when one of them hit me where I was most
vulnerable: in the record collection.
One summer, as the departure date for summer camp
approached, my sister made a deal with a buddy: the friend would take her family's
portable record player to camp, and my sister would take some records. Mine.
Normally, touching my records would be a killing offence,
but I was away at the time and knew nothing about it. What I also didn't know was that the
friend's record player was an old wind-up 78 acoustic job with a tonearm whose tracking
weight could probably be measured in pounds. It apparently never occurred to them that you
couldn't just throw any record on any old record player and expect it to work.
The steel needle on this machine did a thorough job of
carving up the soft vinyl of my 45s. Amazingly enough, my dear sister and her pal did not
say "Oops! This doesn't work" after wrecking the first disc. Instead they ruined
all of the half-dozen records they'd purloined. By the time I got them back, they were
gray and unplayable.
Nowadays, after wreaking some horrible revenge on her, I'd
just go out and buy new copies of those songs (preferably at her expense), but things
didn't work that way in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They were irreplaceable, at least for
the time being.
It seems remarkable, in these days when kids are listening
to and buying the records their parents (even grandparents) grew up with, that music back
then was as ephemeral as, say, magazines are today. There were no oldies sections in
record stores, no oldies labels, and only the mildest attempt by radio stations to
exercise their back collections.
The local rock station might play a "Solid Gold"
oldie occasionally (rarely more than five years old), and at least one radio station of my
acquaintance did have a nightly oldies program that ran for an hour in the middle of the
night. My friend Joe and I would listen to this and keep score, noting how many of the
tracks that they played we had in our own combined collections. The average was about two
thirds.
That we could do it at all was the result of our feeling
that if we liked a record when it appeared, we'd probably continue to like it. So the
first time something good showed up on the radio, we'd trot down to one of the record
shops and buy it. There was some urgency to that because, unless it was a major hit, the
stores might only have a couple of copies, and were unlikely to restock it. Even with
bestsellers, when the radio stopped playing them, they disappeared from the stores.
The occasional reissue did appear. Columbia had a Hall of
Fame series that made a very small selection of catalog material available. And it was
sometimes possible to find older hits reissued on one of an artist's LPs, although that
was usually too expensive a way for us to buy music in those days.
One place we did visit from time to time, and did manage to
pick up a few bargains, was a store that had several bins full of second-hand 45s rescued
from jukeboxes, which sold for a nickel apiece. Occasionally one of these would be fairly
clean, especially if it wasn't too popular a song, but mostly they resembled those discs
my sister brought back from camp.
The frustrating thing was that I knew there were gaps in my
collection: records that I hadn't bought when they were new, and now had no way to obtain.
It was with amazement and delight, therefore, that I
discovered on a visit to New York a store that had a whole section devoted to oldies,
mostly in pristine reissues. I scooped up an armful of these and headed for the till. The
guy behind the counter said "11." I said "Records or dollars?" He said
"Dollars." It wasn't until I was back at the hotel that I realized it was 11
records and should have cost about eight bucks, but I didn't care. I had found several old
favorites I thought I'd never own.
The floodgates opened several years later when an
enterprising local woman launched a service called The Record Hunter out of her apartment
in 1973. A little blurb in the newspaper alerted me to her and over the next year or so I
bought dozens of old discs from her, including -- finally -- replacements for those
wrecked records.
At the same time, conventional record stores were opening
oldies sections, and virtually all of the major labels started mining their back catalog,
both with reissued 45s and LP compilations.
Ultimately, I managed to put together a pretty good
representation of ‘50s and ‘60s music (I arbitrarily cut it off at 1970, for
some reason, although I certainly kept buying records after that).
The challenge all of that represented seems very improbable
now. My musings on it were prompted by a recent visit to the local discount store, where
earlier I had noticed a rack of cheap CDs ($6 to $10) with a bunch of old tracks. At that
price, I could justify buying a disc for one or two cuts. But even if I was starting from
scratch, I could put together a fairly decent selection from those discs alone, without
ever visiting a music store.
And yes, I have mostly duplicated my old vinyl oldies
collection in digital form. And no, I'm not going to lend them to my sister.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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