One of the positives about going to the used bookstore is there’s so much more than book bargains. In addition to great prices on used paperbacks, bookstores have games, toys and nostalgic items.

I was in such an establishment this past Saturday on a hunt for bargain comic books. While sorting through excess issues of Superman, Wolverine and Batman, I saw a crowd of young people browsing through the vinyl records.

With music available for free on streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, it never occurred to me that young people would want to purchase old vinyl records. But that section of the store had the biggest crowd, and they weren’t baby boomers like me.

A story on CNBC last year states that vinyl record companies can’t keep up with the demand for vinyl records. The biggest buyers are the millennials because they feel the quality of the music on a digital file can’t come close to the depth of the tones on a vinyl record.

I thought I’d kept my old vinyl records, and I was so disappointed when I came home and realized I’d sold them years ago when we were downsizing. At the time, I thought digital was so much easier and we didn’t have a way to play vinyl records.

Now I’m wishing I still had them.

My first memory of vinyl records came courtesy of my Uncle Vinny. He was a teenager when we were growing up, and he had a stack of 45-rpm records he’d let us play.

I remember stacking the 45’s on a tube in the center of the record player and listening to Leslie Gore sing “It’s My Party” over and over again.

My mom got a stereo for Christmas one year; and if I listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass belt out “A Taste of Honey” once, I heard that song a thousand times. Luckily Mom was generous, and she’d let us borrow the Philco and play records in our rooms.

My favorites back then were The Beatles, the Dave Clark Five and The Monkees. Before judging, remember, a 14-year-old girl can have eclectic tastes. I didn’t say good taste, I said eclectic. Still the albums not only had the dinner-sized plate records, there was a lot of information about the band on the back cover.

Part of the nostalgia with vinyl records also involves the beautiful art work on record album covers. My favorite cover was the ornate and quite colorful “In a Gadda Da Vida” from Iron Butterfly. Carol King reminded us that talent doesn’t always come in a glitzy package as shown on her folksy “Tapestry” album cover.

Nothing will ever beat James Taylor’s “Mud Slide Slim” album cover with Sweet Baby James sporting a slick smile and wide suspenders.

For simplicity, I loved the black-and-white “James Gang Rides Again” cover. Those first few notes from Joe Walsh on “Funk 49,” the first track on the album, are classic rock. Those guitar licks take baby boomers back to the days of platform shoes, wild hair and bell-bottom jeans.

As I walked toward the check-out line, I smiled at the millennials crowded around the vinyl record section because, despite a generation gap, they were searching for the same thing we boomers were looking for in music – to live in the moment when we believe we can be anything.

Instead of auto-tuned voices and micro-managed mega stars, let that music fill the air around us with strong, if not always in-tune voices, rockin’ guitar solos and thundering drums sets. Because that’s real and every generation seeks out the truth, even if it’s not perfect.

And maybe that gap between the generations isn’t as wide as we once believed.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.