Flip Sides - personal account: cleaning out a record collection - Brief Article

The trouble began when my wife and I went to a thrift shop for books on Crosby Street. It is one of several thrift shops in the city run by Housing Works, a charity for homeless AIDS patients, and like most gay enterprises, it is attractive and well designed. The AIDS cult is one of the few established religions in New York, and people of all orientations and degrees of sobriety donate to Housing Works, just as royal mistresses in the Middle Ages built chapels in honor of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. This particular shop, in addition to books, offers an extensive selection of old LPs, which gave Jeanne the idea to cull our record collection.

The thought was mother to the deed, and the next day we set to work. Flat is about as easy as it gets to store, but space is at such a premium in New York apartments that even records take up serious amounts. We calculated that by giving our unwanted records away we could liberate a shelf and a half. Rollback never accomplished so much.

A few brands escaped the burning, either because they were too precious or too eccentric to part with, or because we didn't expect to find the substitute CD at Tower Records anytime soon. Artwork was a factor in some reprieves. The Joy of Belly Dancing, by George Abdo and his Flames of Araby Orchestra, has a babe on the cover who shows more cleavage than Denise Rich. Jeanne, who had been a fan of Glenn Gould since her adolescence, saved his debut album, the famous recording of the Goldberg Variations, with 30 unposed sepia shots, taken at a recording session, of his almost painfully ingenuous ecstasies.

But how many more fell by the wayside. An ancient Scheherezade, whose bright and ethnically typecast jacket would now be banned on three continents. Bernstein, slashing with his baton. Bob Dylan, young enough to be carded. People you never heard of, recording for Nonesuch, the label that was its own music-appreciation course. My first album of Chopin: The pianist rated a B, but the cover art was A+: a shy smiling princess, painted by Winterhalter. So M. Chopin's students must have glowed when the exquisite foreigner, as polite as he was poetic, praised their fingering.

Many a column of liner notes was scuffed and worn, and many a cardboard jacket corner was dinged by drops and shoves. But the records had survived multiple moves, from ranch house to dorm to apartment, stacked in liquor boxes and loaded into the trunks of cars. They had survived the cars, even the parents who drove the cars, but now they would be consigned to the souk of other people's lives. The wares that pleased a teenager in the Johnson administration would have to summon their faded charms to tempt the worldly bargain hunters of Bush II. But the worst of it (did I mention that this was upsetting?) was that we were not chucking our records simply because they were as old and big as the Soviet Union. The real reason for their dismissal was that we had not played them in years.

Part of the reason is technological. The invention of the compact disc made the act of putting a record on a turntable seem as fussy and pointless as sharpening a quill to indite a letter. No more whisking dust off the needle, no more worrying about the damage that an old needle might be doing to fragile grooves. But the biggest change was not in science, but in me. I don't listen (never to records, seldom to CDs or tapes) because I don't think to anymore.

This was not a predictable outcome. For 20-some years, I was intimate with spit valves, pitch pipes, and the metal tongues, long and flicking, of metronomes. I did my time with Hanon and Czerny; I led my college singing group at mixers of bellowing drunks; I studied species counterpoint, just like young Wolfgang and young Ludwig, though to less effect. Certainly New York, of all places, offers the opportunity to keep up. I know a couple of music reviewers who gorge on concerts like gluttons. I can't keep that pace, but I have my seat at chamber-music concerts, and in the andantes I still try mentally to take down the bass line in C major, at least until it modulates beyond the dominant.

But when I come home I shut the door. When I sit down to write or read the silence proclaims itself. Professionalism tells me that as I am being paid to find or parse these words, I'd better concentrate. It also tells me, more damningly, you could never play with Alfred Deller or Bob Marley; stick with your strong suit. Is it, finally, one of the signs of accumulating years, along with too much back hair and not enough head hair, that one redefines certain stimuli as distractions? As irritations? These were the hard thoughts the tasteful angels of mercy engendered.

But every record has a flip side. Some aficionado, whether a prosperous burgher like myself, or one of the peculiar 20-year-olds who flock to New York like swallows, will find David Oistrakh playing Mozart, or Joan Baez in her angel phase, even before she discovered Ho Chi Minh. He will acquire them, moreover, with all the retro sheen and hiss of vinyl. He will study the jackets like an anthropologist; perhaps one image will prompt a paper on the social construction of genius. Maybe he will learn from liner notes, as I did, what Martin Luther thought of Josquin des Prez.