The Record Player

How the "crackle and pop" reminds us of how little has changed

I slide the black vinyl out of the torn and stained paper sleeve and from inside the tattered cardboard—worn corners, small scratches on the back. On the cover is the infamous image of a tragedy, a crashing and burning dirigible. It seems appropriate to the moment to play this one first. And so, I push the start button and watch the arm move slowly into place, the cartridge hover over the vinyl, and drop smoothly to the first grooves. Then, the unmistakable snap and pop just before the thump of Jimmy Page’s guitar. “Whole Lotta Love” is part of my teenage life, and that album, Led Zeppelin II is from the soundtrack of the early years of a musical dreamer, a boy who spent hours in his bedroom, sitting on the floor, record albums and vinyls scattered around him, the volume high, the speakers rumbling. Playing this record on a new turntable is like pushing play on a time machine.

I am not the first to experience this moment. Record players have been a new trend for years, a hipster’s joy ride, the Pabst Blue Ribbon, if you will, of the 30-something. Two things to note: I am not a PBR fan and I’m certainly no longer a 30-something. So, this act of nostalgia (a word I don’t like much) is not a new-old trend for me, it’s about something else, something deeper. Certainly, my first step toward this experience is about hearing again the music of my youth on a machine meant to send me back to former era. But listening to Zeppelin, The Beatles’ Revolver, and Elton John’s Honky Chateau, including my favorite John song, “Mona Lisas and Madhatters,” in this particular way is a kind of meditative act.

With vinyl, you cannot fast forward or rewind, or skip a track as you can in the modern digital world. If you want to do any of this, you must physically move the needle, flip the record. The process takes a little time and a little care. You listen and manipulate vinyl in the present. Our entire media lives are experienced in an on-demand world. We can, in essence, adjust time today. We can watch and listen through manipulated time. Do it whenever we want. That is not the case with vinyl.

Sitting on the floor with Zeppelin playing through the record’s side-one tracks, I remember, nearly uncannily, the exact sequence of these songs. I anticipate them. I know what’s coming. My musical memory is intact. And when I move on to side-two and the song “Moby Dick,” the record begins to skip, a scratch in the vinyl forces John Bonham’s snare to keep on snapping, on and on, over and over. I smile, recalling other skips and scratches in so many records of some 50 years ago, and how recently when I heard an old song on Spotify and it came to one moment in the tune, I didn’t hear the music, I heard the scratch, the skip from the record of my youth. I expected the impairment not the melody, a memory so ingrained that my brain didn’t first recall the song itself, it remembered the damage. Another beautiful thing about vinyl—the imperfections, and the fragility. A record is like a relic, an ancient piece of pottery that if handled poorly will break.

I return to the Beatles and again hear the crackle and pop, the preview to George Harrison’s slightly distorted guitar riffs on “Taxman,” one of Harrison’s best compositions. I am then instantly reminded that this record is not mine, it’s my son’s, who also just started his own record-playing era, a 30-something who inherited his father’s old albums. Revolver is one of them. He’s gonna want this record back, eventually. But for now, it’s mine again.

“Eleanor Rigby” plays through the speakers. And I notice McCartney’s voice. It’s different. Not like I’ve heard before on the digitized version. It’s rougher, as if he needs to clear his throat. It’s perfect, like the song. Would I ever have noticed that before if not for analog? Not sure. But it’s there, something lost in the modern rendering.

And this is part of the experience, too. The discovery. Technicians say “warmth” is what we lose in digital music. There’s a sound quality that cannot be captured in the electronic versions, kind of the difference between a phone call and a text. The text communicates, but there is much lost without the sound of the voice. Digital music erases nuance.

As “She Said, She Said” begins to play, I lay on my back with my head near the speaker and close my eyes. Those lyrics, how incredibly groundbreaking for the time. In an era when popular music was mushy and over-sentimentalized, John Lennon sings “I know what it’s like to be dead.” I could go on and on in my head about the significance of Revolver, but that would be cliche, a story told so many times over. There is no need. Because what’s more important is that I’m here in 2024, listening to this revolutionary music from 60 years ago on essentially the same type of machine that was first introduced in 1857, and feeling the sensations of a singular moment, a so very present moment, lost in the echoes of time yet the starkness of now.

The Beatles’ album ends, I sit up and change the record, dropping the needle on Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Madhatters,” watching the record spin, and realizing a song released in 1972 about the gritty injustices between the rich and the poor in urban America is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, its message as moving and as true as the hiss and crackle of a stylus on an old vinyl record.

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David W. Berner is the author of several award-winning books of memoir and fiction, short stories, and poetry. His memoir, Daylight Saving Time is due out in July 2024.