My Three Great Loves Are My Record Collection, My Dog, and My Husband

Familiar sounds/sounds familiar

Photo by Eric Krull on Unsplash

When I walked into the Toronto Downtown Record Show, I went straight to the punk section in the first booth as if it were preordained. I flipped through the discs with purpose even though I had no agenda. I stopped to admire a beautiful pressing of Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. Technically it was a record sale, not a show: here was no spectacle, just a few pricey bootlegs and rarities displayed proudly behind a dealer. In the end, I left the $80 This Is Hardcore behind. I chose Eat to the Beat by Blondie, Runt by Todd Rundgren, and a Dolly Parton record my husband doesn’t want to ever hear to the same magnitude that I don’t want to hear the Deep Purple record he bought.

In that stalemate between Dolly and the Deep lies marriage—the tension between knowing what you can quietly live with and what will lead to an argument, and fantasies of solitude. My husband isn’t a great or prolific hater, but he’s committed to abhorring reality TV and country music. I like both. But I cannot stand anything with a whiff of prog, and I'm choosy about the undifferentiated category called rock.

I saw a gorgeous new box set of Bob Dylan’s back catalogue remastered to play in both stereo and the original mono. "Blonde on Blonde," the record dealer, Nick, said to me. “That’s the one that really works on mono. Life changing,” he said, and I found myself nodding.

“Of course, because it’s the sparsest,” I said. “There’s too much going on in Highway 61 for mono to capture it.” Across from him my husband was with a dealer had who a milk crate full of Led Zeppelin concerts on cassette he’d found at a garage sale. We talked about how tape culture is dwindling in the digital age, but vinyl is having a resurgence.

“Audiophiles,” I said with a healthy dose of scorn.

“Customers,” the dealer replied.

This is how it started. I was 16, five-foot-two, dressed in ratty men’s shirts I wore as dresses, black tights, and wrestling shoes. I lived on Long Island in what is usually called an affluent suburb, where the houses got progressively bigger and grander as you drove from the Long Island Expressway to the rocky beaches of Long Island Sound. It had been a bedroom community for Broadway stars in the 1920s and had a spirited KKK march in the 1930s. The population when I grew up there was roughly 70 percent Jewish, families who had trod the familiar path from Eastern Europe to the tenements of the Lower East Side to the middle neighborhoods of Brooklyn and finally to Long Island, only for my generation to glamorize the tenements of the Lower East Side and zealously gentrify the middle neighborhoods of Brooklyn. I longed for a life without someone constantly doing the math about where my GPA was relative to the other kids in the clutches of the gifted and talented program. I kept my music habit to myself, with the exception of a few guys in bands I was friendly with and an all-consuming crush on a guy I'd run into at a Robyn Hitchcock show.

Record shopping fueled me in my awkward yet obdurate teenage years: it was a way out of the simmering social pressure of the suburbs, a space far from the leafy neighborhoods and quaint main street of what the locals called town. The city, of course, was New York. The stores in Manhattan I hit regularly—Bleecker Bob’s, where a Ramone or two were often hanging around, listening to bootlegged garage rock, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the remnants of skunk weed. The hidden 99 Records that specialized in British imports nestled on an East Village side street. It was closet-sized and sold Doc Martens, which were also hard to get as they too were import only. At Sounds on St. Marks, the staff were all churlish man-boys who would Old Testament judge you if you bought the wrong record; if you asked to see something on their bootlegs and rarities wall and didn’t buy it, they practically spit on you.

This was all in the days of indie rock, pre-Nirvana and pre-alternative as a category. There weren’t that many of us, maybe a few hundred people who followed indie bands and each other. I’d see those Sounds guys at shows and make reluctant eye contact, but they had no interest in a high school girl. I suppose that sounds like taking the moral high ground not only in life but in your infinitely superior musical taste. I admit snobbery came with the territory and fueled a round robin of heated arguments between customers and staff.

I learned about records and about the men who love them at a long defunct store called Prime Cuts on Northern Boulevard in Little Neck, Queens, across from a McDonald’s with a sad playground in front. On paper, Prime Cuts was a hostile environment for a teenage girl, but I never felt unsafe there. The worst that could happen was one of the guys would question how I could think Songs in the Key of Life was better than Innervision. A Stevie Wonder throwdown never hurt anyone, and in those disagreements, I found I had a strong voice and liked to use it.

The guys at Prime Cuts were in the same ilk as the guys in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity: highly opinionated, medium correct, low on tolerance. I was young enough to be arrogant, too, to think my opinions mattered as much as theirs. Before I could drive, I had to rope a friend into taking me there; and most of the guys I hung out with hated it there because of the wrath of the staff.

The other girls at my high school didn’t have the passion for music that would lead you to afternoons getting lectured about Krautrock or the importance of Gram Parsons in a thick Queens accent. I liked listening to them speechify, and I wasn’t pretty enough for that to be a distraction. When I’d best them with a song name, or date, or other bit of trivia they’d tease me; but as it happened more and more, I earned the unlikely respect of the scruffy and prideful Prime Cuts staff, guys with many more records in plastic sleeves than females to talk to. They even let me make fun of the life-sized Bruce Springsteen cutout from Darkness on the Edge of Town which was as sacred to them as Jesus on the cross. It was an act of defiance to have Springsteen watch over your store on Long Island, where the hometown favorite was Billy Joel.

As the record show reminded me, I am still happiest idly rummaging through the crates. I am happiest when I am forced to think quickly back through Todd Rundgren’s discography. I am happiest when I banter and parry with doughy guys wearing semi-ironic t-shirts behind a folding table with crates bursting with possibility. I am a shopper: I research everything from the stickiest Band-Aids to the best sourdough bread. But record shopping fills a hole: first, it takes me back to one of the first places I felt like I belonged. Second, it's home, of a sort; I love it like I love my husband and my dog, who make my home life feel like a life and not the series of lonely apartments I'd had in New York. To bottom line it, I was cool at the record show, and who doesn't want to be cool? I left feeling like the woman these men wished would talk to them back in high school.

I also still think about the gatefold in that copy of This Is Hardcore I left behind. Gatefolds are the great secrets of the vinyl world, where you open the covers and fall into another world. If we meet again, I'll take it home.

Lisa Levy is a writer, essayist, and critic. Her work has appeared, among others, in the New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the CBC, and LitHub, where she is a contributing editor. She was the Noir/Mystery editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, created the crime content for LitHub, and helped found and conceive of Crime Reads, where she is also a contributing editor. She is presently working on a book, Funeral in my Brain: A Biography of Migraine, a narrative of the author's 20-year chronic-migraine life, as well as the lives of other sufferers; a hands-on examination of migraine treatment that is finally evolving; a consideration of creative works by migraineurs from Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud; and a paean to the solidarity she has found in the joining the ranks of migraine patient-advocates.