By RAHN ADAMS
I have always heard that books are portals to other times and places. But when Timberley and I went Christmas shopping last week at Barnes & Noble, I wasn’t expecting to step into a time machine and revisit the 1970s without even opening a book.
That’s what happened, though. It really was deja vu all over again, triggered not by the written word or by a smell, as is often the case, but by the sight of something I thought I’d never see again – a roomful of record albums. LPs. Big, beautiful, shrink-wrapped sleeves of cardboard bearing veritable works of art and enveloping the greatest sounds ever pressed into vinyl or committed to any other medium.
With the aroma of cinnamon and mocha lattes in the air, we were wandering the bookstore’s aisles when I remembered to check for a particular DVD that had been released just before Thanksgiving. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years by director Ron Howard hadn’t come to our small town during its limited run in theaters. Having loved the Fab Four since childhood, I still wanted to see the favorably-reviewed documentary film, and I decided to add the DVD of it to my collection of Beatles memorabilia instead of simply watching it online.
As it turned out, I soon forgot all about that DVD. After passing through the security gate into the bookstore’s cloistered audio-video department, I looked to my left and was floored by what Barnes & Noble calls “The Vinyl Store,” row after row of old-school LPs like in the record shops of my youth: Tape Town and Table Rock Records, both in Morganton, the Music Eye in Whitnel, and all the Schoolkids Records stores in many college towns across the state. In addition, most department stores and drugstores – even supermarkets – had decent record racks back then.
Even now I can flip through my collection of around 200 LPs and remember where I bought each one. Often they have stories connected to them, some that I can even share.
The first rock album I bought was Chicago, the band’s eponymous second album, from the old Mack’s department store in Lenoir. After listening to the two-record album from start to finish on my family’s coffin-sized Magnavox console television and stereo phonograph, I slid it into our record cabinet alongside Dad’s Chuck Wagon Gang albums, Mom’s various Southern gospel records, and my scratched-up 45s of kiddie tunes. I hadn’t bothered reading my new double album’s liner notes inside the gatefold cover. But Mom did later. And then I got to discuss them with her, especially the last part about how Chicago had dedicated itself to “the revolution in all of its forms,” and whether or not I had, too. Who me? I was just a band nerd who liked jazzy rock ‘n’ roll with horns. I don’t think she believed me.
That was when my record collection went underground.
It wasn’t long before I was collecting Beatles LPs. I bought most of them – everything from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road, as well as John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, at least – at Tape Town when it was located in the old Bi-Lo shopping center. Every other Friday after I’d taken my paycheck to the bank, I’d spend a good hour perusing Tape Town’s offerings before buying my next album. Then I’d take it home, lock myself in my room, lovingly place the disc on my Pioneer turntable, lie on my bed in the dark, and listen to the new album through my clunky Realistic headphones from the old Radio Shack in Morganton Plaza Shopping Center. I wasn’t about to discuss the White Album’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” or anything from Plastic Ono Band with Mom. Yeah, I was a rebel.
My favorite Beatles album is the first one I ever bought and the last one that the band released before their official breakup in 1970 – Let It Be, for four dollars in August 1976, from the old Rose’s store in downtown Lenoir. Other favorites are George Harrison’s Thirty Three & 1/3, and Wings’ three-LP live album Wings Over America, both purchased at the original Eckerd Drug in Morganton Plaza, and the 1977 release of The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl from the old Woolworth’s in downtown Morganton. That’s the album now being marketed with the Ron Howard documentary, though it isn’t an official film soundtrack at all. For a long time, it was my only recording of early Beatles music because I preferred the Fab Four’s albums after John and Paul started letting George contribute a song or two, and after the one and only Billy Shears joined the band.
I could go on and on with this, and the stories – like Rolling Stone correspondent Mikal Gilmore’s recent essays about his Mother of All Record Collections – would never end, especially if I were to start reminiscing about my subsequent P-Funk and Parrothead periods in the 1980s. But I’ll spare you the stroll down amnesia lane.
No, I walked out of Barnes & Noble the other day without that Beatles documentary in hand. But I didn’t care because I was floating on Cloud Nine after getting to flip through a cherished part of my formative years one more time. And I knew Santa would find a better deal on the DVD later at Target.
Perfect!