Bring out the albums

When the family got together a few weeks ago, we may have started a new tradition when we finished our huge meal and sat/lazed around the living room allowing the turkey enzyme to induce a nap-like state. This would have been the time when we would have all got on our I-thingys to text the family member across the room and ask how the dinner was, but after this meal, we sat around and got the albums out. No, not the photo albums — that is so last century — but our record albums. What a joy it was to share so many musical memories amongst three generations.

My bride and I have kept a modest collection of record albums or LPs (Long Play) and these are the recordings our sons grew up listening to. Although, after a few household moves, my stereo and turntables were sold and never replaced, until recently. My wife gave me a beautiful gift of a new turntable that not only plays the record but will digitize the music for storage on my computer. That means the gadget will take the old analog signals and digitize them or convert them into a bunch of ones and zeroes so my computer can store, recall, play, and share. It is not a difficult process but it is a time-consuming procedure. What better opportunity to listen to and enjoy those than when digitizing?

After our huge meal, I played an album I thought I had lost but was recently returned to me by a friend. When my sons heard it, they were able to sing the lyrics word for word. I thought that to be pretty cool but then I wondered if I had been a bad influence on our son’s musical tastes by playing all that rock and roll. All I had to do was think back on how my father would play Scottish bagpipe music and Mitch Miller Sing-a-long records on Sundays and quickly realized that, while I would not go out and buy Mitch’s latest LP, it gave me a good basis to make my own decisions about music. I think that my sons have great taste in music because we played a variety of music,  although a lot of it was slanted to Rock and Country Rock.

That great musical taste was evident when the boys began to go through the LP’s picking their favorites to spin, remembering the songs they picked while playing air-guitar or air-drums and singing (badly). At first my 12-year-old granddaughter might have been embarrassed at the sight of her beloved family acting like rock stars shredding and shrieking, but it was only a few moments before she joined the act by playing air-tambourine. It wasn’t long before Nana dug out her collage of ticket stubs from concerts she has experienced, both with me and before we met and then the real fun began.

We were able to match most of the ticket stubs, beginning with concerts from the '60s. Some albums and the stories that accompanied them were colourful and entertaining to say the least. Nana had a ticket stub from a Rolling Stones concert and when we played the LP, we could not get any Satisfaction…No, no, no, but the 12-year-old in the group discovered that the old folks could get rocking and she liked the Rolling Stones.

I knew she was interested in the Stones because, a while later, she commented that there were a lot of videos of them on YouTube. Then Nana gave a Rolling Stones album to our granddaughter, which seemed to thrill both of them to tears. I just smiled and realized…there is hope for this generation.

Let’s keep LP’s spinning.