☮ vinyl records = peace and love ☮

Hello Wildflower Friends!

If you know me or have been reading my blog long enough - you probably know that I have a love for vinyl records.  I've always had a love for old things. 

Ya gotta love The Best Of The Doobies and Grateful Dead's Shakedown Street.

I sure as heck do! :)

Some of my favorite memories as a child are about family history and my personal and Southern heritage - whether it be looking through my grandparents' keepsakes and asking questions about my heritage and the memorabilia they saved for us or reading the old letters and Bible notes in their former books and diaries. I never just wanted to know names of the people in my genogram,or just basic info like their ages at death, where they lived, or how I was related to them. I was always the little girl who was more interested in their personal stories. I remember a large amount of my childhood was spent wishing I could know the people in the previous decades.  Countless hours of my youth went by with me reminiscing with older generation relatives that could recall some of the stories I wanted to know. Like, seriously, one of my favorite things to do was visit the "family cemetary" where many people of my geneology are laid to rest. Creepy? Maybe... but, I respect the past.  I respect the stories. I respect the things that statues, memorials, antiques, and classics respresent.  I'd wander antique shops with anyone who would accept the so-called "boredom" of my slow browse through any dusty, old, store of "junk" (not to me) but what that they called it. Most of my loved ones and close friends usually oblige to my love for vintage shopping and antique browsing and cemetary visiting because of the excitement & passion I have about all things historical. 

The vintage cassete case Daddy also had. 

I love it, too!

I mean, every single person and every single thing has a story.  Every generation.  Every era. Every culture. Every group.  And for a music lover, every song tells a multitude of stories that send a message to the people who will listen. Now, don't get me wrong, I am aware that not all music is about peace, love, and happiness.  But my music is.  Well, sometimes it is about broken-hearts and gettin' whiskey-bent and hell-bound but what's more real than love, heartache,loss, and Southern pride?  I say, "Keep on sangin' Willie, Waylon & Hank!" Even country music was way better back in the record playin' days...

Country boys CAN survive! 

Alabama Mountain Music; Hank Williams, Jr. Habits Old and New; Waylon & Willie's Album

SOLID. COUNTRY. GOLD.

Honestly, no one will ever convice me that there was a time in music history that was better than the vinyl record era.  Before video killed the radio star and before MP3s made browing record stores a "waste of time" to most people.  Back then, music was still an art - it was sometimes even a strong political message (and we see that happening now too.) Songs, bands, and musicians were worshipped (in that secular way) because a social movement - powered by music - was changing (and did change) the world.  I see my generation carrying the torch for this sort of environmental, musical, social change movement.

And I DIG it.

For anyone who has been touched by music in the deepest part of their soul like I have... I bet you respect this kind of music and it's place in music history. In my personal opinion, the mid-60s to early-to-mid-70s was the musical era that touched the heart and was about soul and passion. It was before technology "enhanced" it and made it unreal... instead, it was the era when music was made raw and real... at it's best! And best heard on a record player.

Rolling Stones Made In The Shade

Luckily for me, I have a pretty groovy player. Even if it is a replica of what a Crosley wooden record player was like - I love it because it representative of what it looked like back then. And, I love the fact that it only looks 60 years old but has a little better quality than that of an actual one from the 1960s.

I just truly dig it - it is a "belonging" of mine that portrays me and my personality in more ways than one. It says more about me than just this: I'm a weirdo who buys and uses music technology from 60 years ago.

My Confession: I don't own an iPod. I have had an iPod once - but never used it. I am blessed to have the type of Dad who likes to buy my sister and my mom and I nice things for Christmas and Easter and Birthdays. He's probably the best gift-giver in the world.(Can't say that about 85% of men.)  So, the year that the iPod was introduced and was all the craze, my sister and I were naturally knew that we would probably be getting one... and we did - the Pink Mini iPod. The very first one made! (do you remember it?)  Obviously, I am showing how far back this was because I still liked PINK, I guess. You do know that I absolutely do not dig pink very much, right? Well, this iPod had a black and white screen with a nice, frosty,and very pink outside casing. Just funny that it was considered the "mini" but it's size is more resemblant of the iPad now. (It's definitely the Zach Morris cell phone version of the iPod now, haha!)

I had lost several vinyl records and CD's in the fire last year, so I didn't feel guilty for long about claiming the iPod. Even though it wasn't used, it still was ruined in the fire and was on the insurance claim. Plus, I lost a Mac computer AND a HewlettPackard computer that both had a butt-load of songs on them.  The "mysteriously vanishing boyfriend act" was supposed to give me his iPod since he no longer used it, and I actually went ahead and paid him for it (I should have kept a tab for all the things I did for that kid) - but he never gave the iPod to me.(Shoulda been a red flag of his scumminess but oh well!) So, I was still without an iPod almost a year after the fire, but because of my love for vinyl I didn't really care and wasn't missing an iPod much since I never was a huge user of one.  Well, I lost my cell phone a couple of weekends ago (RIP CrackBerry) and I'm a faithful Verizon customer, so I was pumped that I could now purchase an iPhone and knock two birds out with one stone since it serves as an iPod also. These days I am an iPhoner and I LOVE it... even after all those mean things I said when I was on Team CrackBerry!  I take it all back and since I am a trator and joined the iPhone family, I can now say I have an iPod as well. 

Except... do you think I've set up my iTunes account on this phone yet? Hell no. That's a good job for one of my tech-savvy guy friends to do for me.  

AND DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THE BEST PART ABOUT IT? Before the Mysteriously Vanishing Boyfriend act, one of the last convos I had with him was about me sending him his external hard-drive that has about 8,000 songs on it.  (If you can remember - back in the relationship days - I blogged about how excited I was that he let me borrow this hard-drive that was jam-packed full of groovy rock, reggae, psychadelic, and jam music.  I had hit musical jackpot!  We shared the same taste in music, so it was like this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  I had been so distraught over losing all of my iTunes from the fire (which I hate to say were mostly pirated and illegally downloaded - except at the time I didn't know the server was illegal... deleted now!)- and I felt so blessed that he had let me "borrow" that external hard-drive.  Well, let's just say this - he ain't gettin' it back.  Not after the way I've been treated, and not if he wants me to write up an invoice of all the money he owes ME.  Hahaha, that'd take a while, wouldn't it "Mystery Man?"

Oh. My. Goodness. 

My own little vinyl heaven :)

So, NO WONDER why I was so stoked when I got to rummage through the rest of Daddy's old records that he kept for me. It's pretty IRONIC though. When Santa brought me my record player for Christmas 2009, Daddy got his two big boxes of vinyls down from storage and let me take a few of them with me back to school.

"Only take a few with you and I promise I will give you the rest of them when you graduate," he said.  "It's not that I don't trust you with them, I just don't want them to get stolen if y'all get broken into or God forbid if a fire happened."

Yes, he said that. God forbid if a fire happened.

I didn't argue with him, but I did want to stress the fact that I didn't think anything like that was going to happen.  I'd been up at school for four years and nothing like that had happened to me, personally so I just let it be but wished I could assure him that I'd take good care of his old records from the 60s and 70s.  But I couldn't have.  Only four months later a fire would come and melt some of those vinyls into big black globs of nothing.  It made some of the albums' cover-art look like roasted marshmallows. All I could think about when we cleaned out that horrific aftermath was "damn, Daddy knew best."

The Best of The Guess Who; Fleetwood Mac Rumors;

Eagles Hotel California; Aerosmith Toys in the Attic; BeeGees Main Course

I had forgotten what wonderful records he had waiting for me when I returned home. Home to a place where house fires don't haunt me and my thoughts, as much, and where random college-aged people don't enter and exit my residence everyday like they used to in my Bama dwellings. Plus, he's got this groovy little cleaning kit that I'm going to polish my records with. :)

If you want to know what I have been doing this evening... take a guess!!! 
Correct answer: JAMMING MY FACE OFF TO THESE AWESOME VINTAGE RECORDS & NOT THINKING ABOUT ANYTHING STRESSFUL & THANKING THE LORD FOR MUSIC THAT HEALS THE SOUL. Duh. 

This. This is what makes me happy.  Being at home - my real home.  Sitting in my re-decorated and re-arranged childhood bedroom, blogging to my wonderful readers, and listening to the music that has spiritually, emotionally, and mentally aided me in this recovery process.  

Just recently began listening to this one tonight (Goose Creek Sympony Words of Earnest).

Then I freaked out when I heard this ensemble cover a Janis Joplin song, Mercedes Benz.

Perf.

I hope I am or can become more like a vinyl record - not considered worthless but considered valuable and artistic and able to leave my own little sport in history.  I hope I am rare, but timeless. Respected by the ones that value things with "a past" and am taken extra special care of. Imperfect - with scratches, pops, cracks, and white noise.  Fireproof - because I nor most of my records were destroyed in last April's fire mayhem. Vintage but classic & cool. And most of all, full of positive messages, realness,talent, uniqueness, and inner-beauty. To me, that is what these vinyls represent when I listen to them and I hope I represent these same things in some ways, too!  

 

All I can say is, thank God for music - especially on Mondays.  Rainy Mondays. And THANK YOU TO DADDY for saving these pieces of music history to pass on to me. People tell me I belong in the 60s or 70s by the way I dress and my open-minded, free-spirited thinking.  I just go back to that decade by dropping the needle and letting those records spin.  I'll never cease in my collecting of vinyl and I'll never lose my love for the style of music I listen to on that very special record player of mine.

Do any of you collect vinyl records or have some from the past?? 

Tell me some of your favs! Tell me some "must gets"..

 and fill me in on any other record lover's news that you may know of! 

I bet you can  guess what my favorite or most cherished album is? They're all actually my favorites... but this one means a lot to me - - -

Janis Joplin's post-humous Pearl

*peace and love*

and good music

☮

baily  

<and Mildred Jean>

She is exactly one month away from turning 2!  

PRAY THAT PRECIOUS LITTLE PUPS LIKE THIS CUTIE DON'T GET THE TERRIBLE 2's.

No way... look at that face! She's the love of my life.