In the light of the picture-perfect springtime weather today in San Francisco, I could think of no better way to observe Record Store Day than by going for a goodly stroll that just happened to terminate at one of the City’s few remaining record stores.
As it happens, my neighborhood (Upper Market/Castro) is blessed with several dandy record stores. Streetlight Records on Market near Noe is a Castro district stalwart, and a store I visit often. Record stores won’t stay open if we don’t buy any records from them, remember. A bit farther down Market, at the infamous intersection at Octavia where unwary pedestrians have been sent off to their maker at the hands (and hood ornaments, grills, bumpers, and headlights) of impatient drivers attempting an illegal right turn onto the freeway entrance, there stands a sweet and sometimes overlooked record store called Grooves. Charming and quirky, the perfect oasis in the midst of the Market & Octavia desert, Grooves has the vibe of a used book store but instead stuffs itself with LPs, seasoned with a sprinkling of 45s and open-reel tapes. No CDs here.
Grooves doesn’t assault you with stomach-churning volume when you enter, just a nice record playing at human volume levels. Its mood is quiet and unruffled, in fine contrast to the gritty urban blare of a certain large record store out at the end of Haight. The gazillions of LPs are on the whole clearly organized. Nobody bothers you. You’re free to paw around to your heart’s content and find that elusive something that’s just the ticket for your mood of the moment.
As befits a store catering to collectors, the classical section at Grooves sports dedicated bins for RCA Victor Living Stereo, Mercury Living Presence, Westminster, and London blue-backs. Some of those puppies can be expensive rarieties indeed. Mostly it’s just nice to have them all in one place.
There’s a lot more to LP collecting than mere nostalgia. The current resurgence of interest in all things 33 1/3 rpm is partly fueled by trendy hipsters, to be sure. But I’m far from being a trendy hipster and yet here I am joining in the fun. Vinyl LPs have their special charms and their valuable place in the scheme of things. For one thing, any number of recordings haven’t made it out of their original formats and thus remain locked in their own time and place. That’s especially true of second-string performers. The big name ensembles have typically been remastered and re-released with dependable regularity over the years. As long as there’s still money to be made out of Toscanini’s recordings, Sony Classical will keep producing remastered editions of his umpty-million RCA and EMI discs. But that isn’t necessarily the case with, say, Anatole Fistoulari—a perfectly fine conductor and excellent musician whose sizeable recorded output has mostly gone missing in today’s digital world.
I was reminded of that absence just last night as I listened to an MGM Records album of Fistoulari and the London Symphony in Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite from Ivan the Terrible. MGM’s sojourn in the classical record biz was short, but from about 1953 to 1955 they produced a bevy of responsibly recorded and well-produced albums. A slight sub-bass rumble during one section of the Rimsky-Korsakov reveals that this album was made in London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall, one of the finest recording venues in the world despite being a horrid dump of a building that was plagued by noise from a subway line running underneath. But there it was: the London Symphony in Kingsway Hall, recorded by an A-list (or at least B+) conductor. It could easily have been a Decca record, re-released in a stellar digital remastering, as has been the case with countless other LSO/Deccas made in Kingsway. But it was on MGM, a label mostly concerned with releasing sountrack albums of the studio’s movies, later something of a force in pop music, but almost completely forgotten as a classical label. Thus the Fistoulari/LSO recordings have gone into limbo. You hear them on LP, or you don’t hear them.
Vanished titles aren’t the whole picture, however. Plenty of older recordings have made it firmly into the modern era in convenient, click- and pop-free digital remasterings. In most cases the remasterings present the original recording with all due fidelity. Some, alas, are far less responsible. Pierre Monteux’s recordings in San Francisco, for example. From 1941 through 1947 the orchestra recorded via a dedicated phone line running from San Francisco’s Opera House down to RCA’s studios in Los Angeles. It worked well enough but mandated a sharp cutoff in the upper frequency ranges, and no amount of jiggering is going to put treble into a recording where no treble exists. That hasn’t stopped some of the modern engineers from trying, nonetheless, with shrillness and stridency resulting.
Even if fine modern remasterings are easily available, there’s a lot to be said for having an original anyway. Just the larger album size, with liner notes in readable font sizes, is a good reason to indulge in an LP. Sometimes those recordings just sound better in their original incarnations. I find the treble blare on Mercury Living Presence recordings to be slightly offputting in modern digital remasterings, but on an original LP it doesn’t seem as noticeable.
At any rate, there’s all the reason in the world for LPs to stick around. Unless they’ve been terribly abused or overused, most LPs are ready to sing again with nothing more than a good cleaning to remove decades of accumulated dust, goo, and grease. They’re not really all that much bother to store; for one thing they’re skinnier than CDs even if they’re overall bigger, and from time to time they might turn out to be surprisingly good investments.
I celebrate Record Store Day as I sit here listening to Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony play the Brahms 2nd Symphony on a Mercury Living Presence LP just acquired this afternoon, only a few clicks and pops here and there. I’ve got a bag more of records to explore; stuff by Milstein, an intriguing Munch/Boston affair, a Kubelik, even a Kirsten Flagstad singing Sibelius songs. A nice afternoon in a sweet record store, now home with the goodies. What’s not to like about it all?