I spent most of my middle and high school years sorting through stacks of old records at various Atlanta record stores, working the floor at record shows, pouring over Goldmine magazine and burning up transatlantic phone lines with calls to record shops in the UK.
I was what you’d call a record collector, although I wasn’t much of one in the greater scheme of things. There are record collectors out there who have tens of thousands of albums filling their basements and garages, like John Cusack in High Fidelity. But I was never one of them. I kept my collection small, filling it with records I loved as well as records to “flip”. In fact, flipping records is how my love affair with Madonna started. Like most teenage guys in the 80s, I thought that she was super-hot, but I didn’t much care for her music. But I noticed that her records sold quickly and expensively, so I started buying the occasional Madonna picture disc just to flip it into a rare Cure record I wanted.
Although vinyl collecting almost died, it’s going through a renaissance of sorts lately. Many independent record stores are reporting that vinyl is now outselling CDs, although this has as much to do with people who used to buy CDs now using iTunes as it does people buying more vinyl records. Still, vinyl sales are up, and because of this, I thought I’d dust off this old post and spruce it up some.
