Why Vinyl Can't Survive

I got thew Avengers record too and School's Out by Alice Cooper, those are good records too.

It would have been easy to see the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood performing that year, though I never did. Its lone record was a sunny mixture of straight-up jazz with a blues spine, a music that wants the latter-day word “fusion,” though that word does so little good. Above all, it was a reminder of the eclecticism of the time. Audiences that would soon diverge found themselves packed in a hall together all night long, like one October weekend at Fillmore West when the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood shared the bill with Van Morrison and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.

I heard “Martha’s Madman” in my head, and I did what I usually do. I went to the iTunes Music Store. Nothing. Same at Amazon. So I walked down to the barn, where all my old albums are stored, and dug out my vinyl copy of “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” which is now sitting on my desk. I no longer have the equipment to play it. Nearly every album in those boxes in the barn was converted to CD long ago — some of them several times over. But not “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood.”

We live, of course, in an age of accelerating digital replication. Before long, it seems, every recording of every kind in existence, along with all the outtakes, will have been turned into a CD or a DVD or a digital file for download over the Internet. But some things get left behind.

Digital conversion seems almost effortless, a virtual transcription of the world as we know it. But there is a financial friction to it nonetheless. These days it’s no longer necessary to produce an actual physical CD to sell in record stores. Downloadable files will do — no packaging required — but even making these has its costs.

What it takes to push a work from analog to digital is a marketing opportunity. The death, for instance, of Johnny Cash and a movie based on his life was a wonderful chance, as one industry spokesperson put it, to revisit his inventory, which, as it happens, is partly on Columbia, a company now owned by Sony BMG.

There will probably never be a movie based on the Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, no commercial incentive to remaster and rerelease this album. The story of the band is a good one but all too familiar — the inevitable clash between the artistic and business sides of the recording industry. The band fell apart disputing the honesty of its manager.

What’s left is an orphaned vinyl LP. The inner sleeve, a space for record company promotion, says, “If It’s in Recorded Form, You Know It’ll Be Available on Records.” Well, I wish it were available on CD.

I talked to Jerry Hahn the other day. He teaches jazz guitar in Wichita, his hometown. He’ll be 66 in September, with grandkids. He sounds good. “You should have heard us,” he said. He also said that the master tapes of “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood” are stored somewhere in New York State. The man who produced the record has retired to Hawaii, where he and his wife own several restaurants. I haven’t been able to track down the manager. I’d like to hear his side of the story.

And as for hearing “The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood,” one fan has posted the whole album in MP3 form — ripped from the vinyl — on the Web. I downloaded it the other day. It’s a digitally compressed version of an analog recording that was, according to Hahn, too compressed to begin with.

Even through the mist you can still hear the brightness of the music. But someone needs to find those master tapes, breathe some air into them, and do this minor masterpiece (and all the outtakes) justice at last. I’d buy a copy, especially if I thought that some of the purchase price might make its way to the artists.

Have you replaced the white earbuds with something else? Makes a GALAXY of difference.

But it's not quite as bad as the sound I get out of iTunes, which only bears some resemblance to music to my frustrated ears. I don't have any explanation why this is the case.

And as for all of those weird complaints about mp3 and sound quality, er -- FUCK A DUCK! Haven't these people ever heard of lossless compression?

poseur. vinyl's nice, i just never play it. i get freaked out by the fucking expertise needed to get the arm/weight thing right.

this doesn't even make sense.

also, why is that dude who wrote that article storing his records in a BARN? either sell 'em or keep them safe to sell them later, don't put them in a fucking barn.

At first I had the gear in the family room (connected to the kitchen/eating space)... competing with the noise of the dishwasher, the kitchen sink, and 'life' in general. I kept eyeing a large den (a favorite room of my wife) where we had a desk and piano. One afternoon when my wife was gone, I moved all my gear into the den. All of a sudden, I had a dedicated room... which was to be my audio home for the next nine years. I got lucky with the den; it had a very high ceiling (almost 11 feet), a bay window and floor to ceiling bookshelves on the rear wall. Soon the desk and piano were evicted and I settled into audio bliss in MY room.

i bet his wife feels really "lucky" too

yournullfame's girlfiend sounds rad

... isn't it?

I've lived with one person who had this setup -- very handy -- while the good Mr. Donut has similar at his place.

Veteran singer Bob Dylan has called the quality of modern music recordings "atrocious" and "worth nothing".

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, the 65-year-old said: "There's no definition of nothing, no nothing, just like... static".

Dylan, who is to release his first studio album in five years, added that his music sounded better in the studio.

He also failed to denounce illegal music downloads, saying: "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

'No stature'

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he said.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really.

"CDs are small, there's no stature to it," added Dylan, who has released eight studio albums in the past 20 years and 44 official albums during the course of his career.

His new release, Modern Times, features 10 original tracks recorded by the musician and his touring band last winter.

Dylan plays keyboard, guitar and harmonica as well as singing on the record.

So you're saying that you don't do cocaine all night?

Thank you NYT for the cheesy vinyl's back article.
Thank you 200X 90's indie rock nostalgia culture bullshit.
Thank you pre-holiday season bullshit.

I was able to sell off most of my vinyl last night for the price of a decent used car.

That is all.

http://www.appalachiananimalhospital.net/baby%20owls.jpg

That Resident Advisor article is dismal.

It's also not wrong.

I hope you bought those owls with your profits, Mackro.

Never going out of style.

http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/7218/imageuploadimageun8.jpg

I was able to sell off most of my vinyl last night for the price of a decent used car.

Just out of professional curiosity, about how many pieces was the collection?

and how many miles was on the car?

You are going to miss those records 10 years from now, trust me.

i think more ppl should sell their old records so i can buy them

You are going to miss those records 10 years from now, trust me.

Mackro can speak for himself but I'm plenty positive he won't.

i think more ppl should sell their old records so i can buy them

― M@tt He1ges0n, Wednesday, September 24, 2008 12:54 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

OTM

I was just thinking of selling off most of my own vinyl last night, in fact. I've got about a couple boxes of it that I just never touch. I'm curious as to how Mackro chose to sell his stuff?

I would buy all these used vinyls

Bimble would be crazy to sell as he is the type that in a few years would want to play it again and regret selling.

It also depends on how rare the record is. I buy old dance records that had short runs on small labels, I have sold records that I am never going to see again unless they get bootlegged.

The other thing that drives me nuts is how much a lot of not great records are worth these days. I have sold more 30 dollar records for a buck in store credit than I care to count.

That being said, I have also sold a shit ton of records and cd's that I never think about/don't even remember owning. I guess I am saying that you should be very careful about what you get rid of because I find myself haunted by the handful that got away.

The story is: I realized I was never going to DJ at clubs anymore, much less DJ using vinyl. I'm approaching my late 30s. There's tons of new blood who are far more connected with bars to get DJ gigs than I am. More to the point, I was still able to hold a weekly (as a sub for Matos) just using two iPods.

I think it's cool that there are younger kids who want to spin out records, have their friends look at them. I wish I could be in that position, but I'm now too old for that.. not mentally but physically. I'm a fucking grandpa now.

I only sold everything that I already had on CD or I know is available on iTunes or Amazon, no matter how rare or not it was. (I sold my Silver Apples LPs for example... that's wow I got many pretty pennies. I mean, I have the two-fer CD for Silver Apples. I didn't lose their music!)

My next phase is to digitize the never-got-to-digital-format stuff, then sell that off. After that, sell off the CDs. It will be a while, but this was part one of the plan.

I know, tl;dr lol

i do think there's an interesting spin-off from this, though: regardless of the fact you "didn't lose their music", you're obviously no longer so concerned about the actual OMG RARE ARTEFACT quality of the silver apples stuff. and i think that's got a lot to do with the changed way we consume music ... i mean, sure, someone was always going to be the iconoclast (or just the skint dude going, fuck, i need to flog my records) but i know i feel very differently now about what was once a treasured collection of vinyl.

for fuck's sake, i can't even remember the last time i played an actual record.

the fact it's easier to make high-quality digital copies isn't, i think, the key issue here (because it's not even what you've done); what really matters is the fact that the physical artefact is no longer seen as THE MUSIC.

I like records. for example just the other day I was cracking up at the merch/hip-hop gear offered in the liner notes of my copy of EPMD's "Business As Usual"

Grimly, you're pretty much OTM with me.

That said, I did keep about a dozen boxes of records, but mainly things, mostly dirt cheap, that I would never see again in any format if I were to sell it. Mostly Incredibly Strange Music fodder.

And I did NOT sell my very first record: "The Harmony Of The Worlds". That was my very first record -- an astronomical data records. It changed my life, although I didn't know it at the time. And that record will die long after I die if I can help it.

I guess my point is: I still do very much have the OMG THE ARTIFACT! attitude towards vinyl. What's changed is: I don't need to have that attachment to so many goddamn artifacts anymore all around me, especially if they're in my way.