TRIPPING THRU MY VINYL (PART 1)

I’ve been collecting music for almost 40 years. I still remember buying by first record, Michael Jackson’s Thriller in 1982. My dad took me to Yorkdale shopping mall in Toronto and I excitedly went walked into the Kresge’s department store, took the record off the rack and paid for it with my own money. Then my dad took me across the hall to the soft-serve ice cream kiosk for a treat.

Soon after I joined Columbia House for the first (of many times). Over the years I have bought hundreds, perhaps well into the thousands of cassettes, CDs, downloads and records.

Over the past 4 years I have focused on records.

About 20 years ago, my uncle gave me his old Technics turntable, then sat in my parent’s basement for the next 15 years or so. I decided to start enjoying music again (I had taken a break for a while…life and adulting and all that). Not knowing if the turntable worked at all, I took it to a local audio shop (Bay Bloor Radio) with the hope of getting $25 or $50 trade-in towards a new one. The salesman looked at mine and called one of their techs over. They chatted for a minute and came back to me. I thought they were going to tell me that it’s worthless; instead I was informed that for less than $200 I could fix mine up and it would be better than any of the sub-$1500 turntables they had on the shelf. $100 later I brought it home and set it up on my shelf.

I listen to my records on a Technics SL-220 with an Ortofon OM-10 needle connected to a Panasonic SC-PMX70 bookshelf stereo through a Cambridge CB1 pre-amp.

Since I’ve started buying records again, I have amassed a collection of about 250 albums, EPs and singles, all of which can be found on my Discogs.

Through a series of blog posts, I will be selecting a record at random from my collection, and writing about it. You may learn where I got it, what it means to me or anything else I can think of when I choose it.

In the meantime, I put together a playlist with one song from each record in my collection, feel free to check it out: