I think every generation waxes poetic about how great their youth was and that’s what I’m going to do here. However, I have to say I don’t know how “The Greatest Generation,” those born between 1920 and 1925, can get a warm fuzzy about living through the Great Depression and World War II along with rationing rubber. If you have ever seen a yearbook from those years, 18 year olds look like they’re 40. When I saw this story recently about a record store in L.A. that sells vinyl and is thriving I thought, yes I did have a great youth. When I was a teen there were a few years when the only way you could buy records was via vinyl. There were record stores aplenty and you could spend hours flicking through the bins of albums with artwork displayed on a 12 inch sleeve. With the arrival of 8-tracks and cassettes that artwork shrunk down to around 3 inches. Let’s be honest, 12 inches is better than 3 inches. Then when CDs erupted that format pretty much cannibalized vinyl but didn’t completely kill it. And then when the internet locked in the death knell began for the CD but vinyl kept a heartbeat and during COVID surged back to life and eclipsed CD sales by a wide margin. While we’ll never see the volume of record stores anymore like the pre-internet era younger generations have thrown some retro love for the 12 inch disc. Some mint recordings are going for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So my youth was great because I could go to record stores and hang out. Going to The Dollar Store and looking at bungee cords and glow sticks doesn’t have quite the same fizz and talking to the Amazon delivery person for 10 seconds when they drop off your package isn’t really the same sense of community like it was hanging at a Tower Records. Oh and screwing up as a kid was not catalogued and preserved forever like it is today. I’m a Boomer and I approve this message.
Gunga, galunga
Garry