Read Online Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel - Free Book Online

talked in reassuring tones, like you’d want from a nurse or a doctor as they’re preparing you for major surgery—they took my records and they put them into a pizza-style brick oven, shoving them into the flames with one of those wooden pizza-loading peels. I tried to object, but they put a finger over my lips, and then took me by the hand and led me deeper into the store.
    They picked out records at random for me, records that would change me, that would give me the confidence to realize that I was fundamentally better than everybody at my high school, with their unapologetic lack of originality or musical adventurousness, who would listen to Phil Collins and think, “That’ll do.” It wouldn’t do for us, goddammit! Because we were different! We felt things! We knew the world in ways they were incapable of knowing the world, even though we’d all seen pretty much the same amount of the world, which didn’t extend beyond the Chess King at the mall or the mostly abandoned parking lot near JCPenney, where everybody went to get hand jobs.
    But I owned Camper Van Beethoven’s
Telephone Free Landslide Victory
. And the Cramps’
Bad Music for Bad People
. And the DeadKennedys’
Frankenchrist
. And Tom Waits’s
Swordfishtrombones
. How could I have these records and not know more about the world? Other people had based their knowledge of the outside world on things like Bryan Adams’s
Reckless
. And Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam’s
Spanish Fly
. And that fucking
Miami Vice
soundtrack. And that “We Are the World” record. And Wham!’s
Make It Big
, a band that added an exclamation point to their name, just because they were so excited about their blow-dried hair and white pants. I didn’t need to travel anywhere to know that they were wrong. So very, very wrong. I had the evidence in these records.
    I went into Record Swap an insecure kid. And I came out just as insecure. But now I was a Lou Reed type of insecure, where your insecurity just makes you cooler.
    I know my hindsight isn’t to be trusted. It’s all overromanticized. A few things are true. I did discover the Dead Kennedys because of a particularly generous sales clerk willing to take Billy Joel off my hands. But I think the ovens were in my imagination.
    It was beautiful though. It’s what high school was for some people. I didn’t discover anything about myself at my actual high school. But in the Record Swap, digging through those bins, building a record collection that was like a never-ending scavenger hunt, getting into afternoon-long conversations about the minutiae of Dinosaur Jr. with twenty-three-year-old guys who look exactly like J Mascis, this is where I felt the most normal, and the most like myself.
    I never expected to walk back into it and have everything be exactly the same. There’d be different people working there, obviously. The Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth posters would likely have been taken down, replaced with, I don’t know, Animal Collective and the Black Keys maybe? Or something more obscure and confusing to forty-year-old guys? It’d have a fresh coat of paint, it wouldn’t smell as much like clove cigarettes, the jazz section would be wherethey used to keep the country stuff, and god only knows what they did with R&B. I was prepared for all of that.
    I wasn’t prepared for it to be gone.

    â€œCan I give you a tour?” the nice guy in the unnecessarily tight karate gi asked me.
    I’d just been standing there in the lobby for I don’t know how long. I finally found the courage to walk in, after passing the entrance several times. This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be the same place. Although the Melody Mart across the street was still there, as was the Chinese restaurant next door. Everything looked right. Except in the spot where the Record Swap should’ve been, it had been replaced with something called the