Hall(s) of Fame

11-21-07 Hall of Fame

Or perhaps “Halls Of Fame”? I have way too many phonograph records and compact discs. It is beyond good or evil. I am not interested in dumping everything to an iPod and selling off the artifacts. I am rather fond of my artifacts. I distinctly think I could be interested in finding a Sony hard-drive unit (an obsolete piece of high end stereo equipment) to accommodate LP’s or CD’s where I only want to retain an individual track or something.

A few weeks ago, I whittled my “Want List” down to a single page of mostly CD titles. I figure by now – the LP’s I want are rather difficult to find, and I’ll know ‘em when I see ‘em. I will seriously be thinking about what to take to Amoeba Records San Francisco in a couple of weeks – I love turning unwanted items into a big ol’ credit slip.

I have five large structures that are filled with LP’s, and there are plenty of boxes on the floor in 2 or 3 rooms. About 3,000 of my CD’s have been put in ‘library envelopes’ – with the back-plates filed elsewhere – and just about as many in an assortment of boxes, some labeled, some not.

It is always fun to think about assembling an “ultimate collection”. In a perfect world, you would have an original LP and a compact disc of each title you are interested in – the preferred LP’s being original pressings from the country the artist is from and the preferred CD’s being Japanese little paper album cover ( = kami sleeves) CD’s that perfectly replicate the original LP sleeve, CD-sized – preferably with bonus tracks.

If I could take over a 4^th room in my home, I would love to have a set of shelves built that would theoretically accommodate my “Perfect Collection” – believe me, not everything from my ‘first’ collection would make it to this theoretical collection! A little at a time, I would move some stuff from my ‘first collection’ into the “Perfect Collection” – with the idea being that you would only want “re-mastered” CD’s (when available) or original pressing LP’s…or both.

Being a 20^th century music kind of guy – I deeply love looking at LP sleeves, discerning all the visual clues that artists provide to help better understand their work – whether it be unusual text or other visual stimuli. I always hated it when CD’s did away with any part of the original vinyl packaging. It is truly humbling to see how nicely the Japanese reproduce CD-sized versions of LP packagings, leaving nothing out – although sometimes, the printing is tiny and very difficult to read.

So, I assemble my “Perfect Collection” – and begin to look for the holes – what got lost that I really want from the first collection? If I sell stuff off, will I regret it? Of course! The whole reason I started buying LP’s again (over a decade ago now) was that I wanted some info that was in the liner notes of “Home” by Procol Harum – and I no longer owned an LP of it. It broke my heart.