Absorbed

For many people, squinting at the matrixes on the runout portion of 2,500 record albums to determine where they were pressed would qualify as court-ordered punishment. As would individually discerning the condition of those records and their jackets.

It most-definitely is not a job for the ADHD-afflicted.

As a guy with a really long attention span, it's not quite punishment of the court-ordered variety. It doesn't even suck. Being that they're mine, and that it's been over a decade since I've had fact-to-face contact with them, it's actually quite a pleasure.

It is also very time-consuming.

Let me explain.

I had largely forgotten them. They sat, packed away in cardboard boxes since the onset of the Great Recession. One of the lessons imparted by that misery was that possessions are for the solvent. The employed. To have space for things requires money.

And for too many of the ensuing years, money was mostly a rumor.

The boxes sat unopened until just recently. After years fraught with stress-related weight gain, sickness, unemployment, poverty and death, revisiting the flower of my youth, when I obsessively scoured the length and breadth of Chicago's record stores for soul, blues, rock, reggae, jazz, country and western and soundtrack LPs, has been—for lack of a better word—startling.

My passion burned hot.

The covers. The labels. The posters and the stickers and the iron-on t-shirt transfers. Reacquainting myself with the output of some of my favorite fated-to-obscurity bands: Green on Red, Fetchin' Bones, The Family Cat, Blancmange, the Windbreakers and the Silos.

Feeling the heft and the thick, rounded edges of the old vinyl and the sharp, unfinished edges of the newer evoked oceans of memories. Of youthful, uninhibited freedom. Of disposable income. Of turntables and apartments and parties and girlfriends. Of mix tapes and friends in a better, far less-convoluted time.

In a world untouched by the Internet, record collecting was a matter of visiting stores and crate digging. Thumbing through countess bins of vinyl. Of hopes raised—and then dashed—as the vinyl within a pristine jacket appeared to have spent several hours on the the Dan Ryan Expressway.

But the joy of unearthing a pristine copy of Ann Peebles' I Can't Stand the Rain or Syl Johnson's Total Explosion, or of encountering Bob Koester (R.I.P.) at the Jazz Record Mart on Grand, where he regaled me with a story of Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson as I was set to purchase Howlin' Wolf – Live in Europe 1964 were priceless.

As was recognizing a girl from the previous night's Graham Parker concert at Wax Trax and simultaneously striking-up a conversation and a friendship. Or of finding new, still-in-their-shrinkwrap Japanese pressings of Otis Redding's first five LPs at the same store.

The real miracle is that I remained ambulatory.

But it has changed. A few keystrokes on a computer keyboard eliminate countless forays to far-fetched record stores, where imbued with a lottery player's faith I sought copies of Paul Kelly's Dirt or the Ohio Players' Pleasure.

I rarely succeeded, but the search was the thing.

While the Internet has certainly made collecting more-efficient, there is no sense of hard-won satisfaction. Or of the rewards of diligence. No sweat equity. It's record collecting reduced to the same ordinary-ness one encounters in the purchase of frozen vegetables.

There is no context. No sense of rarity. No buoyant joy of discovery.

But I am lucky. Given the choice, I preferred my way. The old-fashioned way. It drew me into parts of Chicago I never would have seen otherwise. And the joy of unearthing a long-sought after record after so many fruitless trips rivaled the Christmases of my childhood.

The goal was always to build a comprehensive vinyl collection. One that would incorporate the multiple influences that went into the creation of the musical chili called rock and roll. Did I succeed? Who knows?

But I've had an absolute ball trying.