The Wayback Machine
When Dennis Perrin, author of the blog Red State Son, waxed a little nostalgic about a 1973-era production by the National Lampoon called The Missing White House Tapes, it struck a similar chord of nostalgia in me. I was a loyal subscriber to NatLamp in college and further into my adult life than propriety and good sense would have dictated. I still own, for instance, original copies of their brilliant High School Yearbook Parody and its companion, the Sunday Newspaper Parody. And, as I taunted Dennis in an email, I also own an original vinyl copy of The Missing White House Tapes.
The Tapes was an outgrowth of the weekly National Lampoon Radio Hour, which featured budding comics like John Belushi and Chevy Chase, and the simulated Senate Judiciary Committee hearings thereon nicely skewered many of the now-iconic personalities involved in the Watergate scandal. I offered to rip a copy of the Tapes for Dennis, and he accepted, and so I was faced with the technical challenge of actually transferring a vinyl LP to digital media.
I had long ago purchased some recording/ripping software expressly for that purpose, but not only had I forgotten how the software worked, I’d forgotten how to play my turntable through my stereo receiver. I combed through the thicket of cabling in the back of the receiver and eventually got the turntable connected, and located a useable line output to run to the soundcard on my laptop, and the recording went fine.
However, in pawing through my LPs looking for the Tapes LP, I opened an entirely different can of worms. See, I have a ton of vinyl that I started collecting in high school, that’s just been sitting on my bottom shelf silently collecting dust while the noisy clatter of CD jewel cases usurped more and more space on the upper shelves. I’ve always owned a turntable, but the prosaic task of playing vinyl LPs one short side at a time never seems worth the effort. As a result, I hadn’t really visited these nether regions in quite a few years. I had to move a bunch of stuff just to have room to kneel down and flip through them.
It was like opening a time capsule, looking at these dust jackets (dust jackets! that you can read!) containing the records that comprised the sound track of our 70s and 80s. Representing the 70s was Joni Mitchell, Brian Auger, Chicago Transit Authority, Cream, Oregon, Yes, Jethro Tull, Santana, Stevie Wonder, Crosby-Stills-Nash, Led Zeppelin, Weather Report; into the 80s with a bunch of Irish folk music that our kid loved, Tears for Fears, Cyndi Lauper, the Police and our Blues Period with Robert Cray, Albert Collins, Koko Taylor; and a ton of classical albums. And I haven’t even mentioned the embarrassing stuff.
I ripped a few albums to mp3 just for fun; the effect of hearing some of this music is what it must be like to have open brain surgery, where they poke electrodes at your lobes and you relive vivid sensory experiences. I swear there’s still resin on my fingertips. It’s a slippery slope I’ve started down here - there are thousands of miles of waxy black grooves sitting there, and disk storage is cheap. My time, however, is regrettably linear, and I have to refrain from the temptation to digitize the whole shelf.
