Kids Want to Put Hits on Vinyl Records

We called them LPs, 33s or simply ‘records.’ Somewhere in a friend’s basement, I’ve stored a crateful of them, vinyl albums of such artists as the Bee Gees, Abba and the Jackson Five. How cool is that?

Extremely cool, I say, and thousands of people agree with me, so what if they’re all addicted to bingo. One of these days, I’m going to take my records to the local retirement home, just to give people something to get excited about. “Holy mackerel, young man,” an elderly man would say, taking a break from the professional bingo league. “You’ve got quite a collection there. If you come up to my room later, we can play them on my gramophone. I may be old, but I like to keep up with the latest technology.”

I love it when an older person calls me “young man.” It sounds better than when a teen-ager calls me “sir.” I don’t expect teens to call me “young man,” but why can’t they try something in between, such as “young sir”?

I know I’m not really young anymore. I don’t have a page on MySpace.com, I don’t download music to my cell phone and I don’t have “Nelly” tattooed on my butt. But at least I know who “Nelly” is. (I’ve watched enough episodes of “Little House on the Prairie.”)

I grew up in that glorious era of the ’70s and ’80s, when we listened to music on records and cassettes. Every girl wanted to have Michael Jackson’s baby and every boy wanted to have his baby sister.

There was something special about records – you could almost see the music coming out of every groove. And the album covers were like posters you could display, making you look cooler than Kool & the Gang.

But it’s hard to get the younger generation to appreciate records, as I realized when I showed a record to my daughters, Lekha and Divya:

Lekha: “What is this, Daddy? A Frisbee? Can we go outside and throw it?”

Me: “No, honey, it’s called a record.”

Lekha: “A record? You mean like the record Mommy says you set whenever you eat pizza?”

Me: “No, that’s a different kind of record, the kind Mommy sets whenever she’s in the bathroom. This type of record plays music.”

Divya: “It plays music? What do we hit it with?”

Lekha: “Me first!”

Divya: “No, me first!”

Me: “Stop it, girls! You don’t hit it. It’s not a musical instrument. You play it on a record player. The music is stored inside the record. This is how Daddy listened to music when I was a youngster. Pretty cool, huh?”

Lekha: “Yes, very cool, Daddy. But how did it fit in your pocket? Did you have big pockets?”

Youngsters may make fun of records, but I’m going to have the last laugh. You see, vinyl records are enjoying a resurgence. Over a million ‘single’ records were sold last year in England, part of a “vinyl revival,” as CNN’s Jim Boulden called it. “Dance music just sounds better on vinyl,” he said, repeating what I’ve always known. Donna Summer sounds really odd on an iPod.

I’m very excited about this. Vinyl is making a comeback. Could white polyester suits be far behind?