Life after Vinyl

I wrote earlier about thinking of parting with my beloved record album collection. Here is an update: it's gone. All 156 of them.

I thought about picking out a few to keep, but talked myself out of it. I feared that if I started picking out cherished pieces, I'd start with just one or two but end up keeping a big stack of them. Also, the fact of the matter is that they sat in boxes for over a decade. Whatever I kept would probably sit hidden away in storage, never to be used. So I boxed them all up, ready to go.

I listed the collection on Craig's List. I feared there wouldn't much interest in vinyl these days, so I figured I'd have to price it low. Also, my old cat cc thought cardboard album covers were a dandy scratching post, so a lot of them were in pretty poor shape. So I listed the whole thing for $25. Overnight I had nearly a dozen offers, and the next day they were gone.

Clearly, I underpriced it. But the thing is, the collection went to a good home, so I have no regrets about that.

What I do have regrets about is that I'm having problems replacing some of the discs. It's not that the discs I want aren't available on CD, but some of them aren't the same.

For instance, Thick as a Brick just isn't the same without the broadsheet-sized newspaper built into the album cover. Album art as a whole was greatly diminished by the move from vinyl to CD. Those of us old enough mourned once through that transition. It was sorry to do again. (In some cases, the digital remastering and added tracks make the loss of cover art a little less bitter.)

Some of the albums, such as Stomu Yamashta's Go can be had on CD, but only as an expensive import or collector's item. That makes me sorry I gave up the album, but realistically it's still probably worth getting the CD instead of trying to digitize the vinyl.

I've started ordering CDs to replace some of the most wanted albums. I got my first shipment last week, and I'm ripping them right now. It isn't quite desert island discs (particularly since I'd already gotten CD versions of some albums, such as Dark Side of the Moon), but here are the albums I chose to replace first:

• Dire Straits, Dire Straits
• Grateful Dead, The Grateful Dead (Skull & Crossbones)
• Grateful Dead, Wake of the Flood
• Hot Tuna, Burgers
• Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
• Little Feat, Dixie Chicken
• Little Feat, Sailin' Shoes
• Tom Petty, Wildflowers
• Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed
• The Who, The Who Sings My Generation
• James Taylor, Gorilla
• Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die
• Traffic, Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

By the way, is it just me, or does anybody else out there think that "Let it Bleed" is the best damn rock and roll album ever recorded?