Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I went to a little get-together at my in-laws the other night. Since we’ve all been suffering from post-Covid burnout (although I guess it’s technically not post-Covid—not yet), they decided to invite a few friends over for drinks, and—since my brother-in-law Michael is an avowed Abraham Lincoln aficionado, a birthday celebration for Old Number Sixteen.
We had a great time sitting around drinking wine and martinis, talking smart, and catching up on the latest gossip. Michael has a great vinyl collection, and we spent the first part of the evening listening to Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, and other jazz and soul greats. He’s got a great sound system—which probably explained why it sounded so good, but it seemed to me as if the analog sound was a lot warmer and more expansive than digital. I know some of the recording techniques for digital, including compression, tend to suppress the dynamics found in the old vinyl. So, it was that—Michael’s sound system—and probably the martinis that made start feeling all warm and fuzzy about parties in of our youth when the turntable was king.
In high school, back in the seventies, we’d go to friends’ houses, put on our Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or Yes or Rolling Stones or The Who or whatever was hot that week and make an evening out of it. It was a social happening. A few years later, while I was going to school at UW-Madison, for a time, we’d sometimes go to a house that had a turntable suspended by chains from the ceiling to keep it from skipping while we danced. They needed that protection because dozens of people came over to that particular house every weekend and danced to Motown. There were a few other artists mixed in, but it was definitely mostly Motown.
After a time, back at the ranch, Michael broke out his collection of forty-fives, dozens and dozens of them. For those too young to know, these smaller records held only one song per side—the hit and the B side. These little wonders were especially popular in the late fifties and early sixties because these were the hits we knew from our primary source of new music—the radio.
So, Michael started spinning great hits like Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”, Melanie’s “Brand New Key”, and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”. I took a turn, deciding to play whatever I blindly picked out of the case. First came “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart, then “Papa was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations. Michael Jackson’s hit single “Ben” prompted a discussion about the film Willard in which a young man befriends some rats in his basement, eventually training them to kill off his enemies. Classic cinema. Ben, who was one of the vicious rodents, got a sequel and his own song courtesy of Michael Jackson. It actually is a very tender and heartfelt song. Then, when Michael put on “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” we had a lengthy discussion about the Dude and that greatest of movies, The Big Lebowski.
We got to talking about some of the great narratives in these songs: the broken family left behind in “Papa was a Rolling Stone”, the young boy kept by an older woman in “Maggie May” or the bitter reminiscences of the outsider in “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”. True, some of these were pretty cheesy and predictable, but they still—even after fifty some years of rattling around in our memories—hit a chord with us. That led to another discussion about dance beats and how some of these tunes—like Melanie’s “Brand New Key” had kind of a weird in-between beat.
Dave, one of the guests, mentioned that he had been listening to the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of five hundred best songs, saying that so far he’d only been able to get to the low four hundreds. We started speculating about what should be on the list. “Layla”? “Hey Jude”? or “Old Man”? or “Superstition”? Dave mentioned that he was unfamiliar with a lot of the newer stuff, that a lot on nineties songs had passed him by. I had to agree. I know some grunge, but not much, and even less rap and hip-hop, but—I caught myself saying—that wasn’t my generation. No, I reflected later, it wasn’t my generation, but neither was jazz, and that never stopped me from appreciating that. Dave said he was listening to every song on the way down to number one and was gaining a new appreciation for some of the “newer” stuff.
I mentioned I’d been listening to Little Steven’s (Steve Van Zandt of The E-Street Band and Sopranos) Underground Garage station on Sirius XM and that had made a list of the one thousand coolest tunes in existence. I’ve yet to peruse that list—and I know I won’t be able to do it on vinyl, but I hope we can figure out some way to do it together with some friends because although we’d been listening to the greatest hits at a Lincoln Boomer party, by Boomers, and for Boomers, I think it would be great to get together and explore new tunes—just like we did when we were kids.