{"id":26984,"date":"2015-09-09T12:01:28","date_gmt":"2015-09-09T17:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=26984"},"modified":"2015-09-19T00:23:53","modified_gmt":"2015-09-19T05:23:53","slug":"playing-records-at-rangely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/playing-records-at-rangely\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Records at Rangeley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"236alvarezrecords-quote\"<\/a>I thought I was pretty cool back in the first grade\u20141964, white-hot ground zero of global Beatlemania; knew there was no turning back once I took hold of the Jerry Vale pompadour my parents sent me to school with, combed it straight down across my eyebrows, and took a pair of kiddie scissors to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

For good report cards, I received Beach Boys albums, knowing in my six-year-old soul upon first listening to \u201cIn My Room,\u201d that Brian Wilson was a genius with years to go before hearing Pet Sounds<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"236alvarezrecords-poppinscover\"<\/a>Pretty darn cool until recently, lakeside in Rangeley, Maine, with my wife and her extended family\u2014reading Middlemarch<\/i> in the sunshine at a camp where her father learned to walk more than a hundred years ago\u2014I stumbled upon the original soundtrack to Mary Poppins<\/i> in an old cardboard box of LPs.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I remembered that no matter what I may have thought at the time, I was still very much a little kid back when Ringo was shouting, \u201cAh, rock on George, do it one time for me!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For my birthday that year, my Aunt Sylvia\u2014knowing I was Beatles crazy\u2014called and asked me what record I wanted. And I said, without reflection, Mary Poppins<\/i>. She asked me if I was sure and I said yes and that\u2019s what I got.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mary Poppins<\/i> When The Fabs Had Just Put Out Something New<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s good to be reminded that the kid inside the kid knew a few things that the leather-clad rocker waiting to break out did not.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had seen Mary Poppins<\/i> with my Polish grandmother (who loved putting her grandchildren on a transit bus and going downtown to see \u201ca picture\u201d) and the song that stayed with me was not \u201cChim Chim Cher-ee\u201d or the film\u2019s hit, \u201cSupercalifragilisticexpialidocious,\u201d which charted at No. 66 in 1965.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"236alvarezrecords-edwynn\"<\/a>My favorite song from the movie was \u201cI Love to Laugh,\u201d sung by the great clown Ed Wynn [1886\u20131966], who belted it out between guffaws and chortles while floating near the ceiling of the room, the very alchemy of mirth making him a human balloon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Windex and paper towels\u2026 Internet vinyl geek approved, though the super nerds suggest a \u201cvacuum recorder cleaner,\u201d which is somewhat out of the question in that I don\u2019t even vacuum my car or house, much less my LPs.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"236alvarezrecords-1\"<\/a>There was a little boy with us in Rangeley, a smart and beautiful three-year-old named Julian (for the great-grandfather he never met, Julian S. Stein, Jr.) and I brought him over to the 1970s Magnavox turntable (complete with \u201cbuilt-in\u201d cassette deck) near the window, put on the Poppins <\/i>LP, and together we sang, \u201cI Love to Laugh.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

When the song was over, he scampered away to play with his trucks and dinosaurs and I began combing the box of Stein family treasures: original Beatles\u2019 albums (including Something New<\/i>, with \u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand\u201d in German,) my wife\u2019s middle school handwriting across the cover of the Beach Boys\u2019 Endless Summer<\/i> (which I had on 8-track), and true, true blues: Albert King\u2019s Live Wire\/Blues Power<\/i> on Stax, Johnny Winter\u2019s 1969 debut for Columbia Records, and The Last of the Great Blues Singers<\/i>, by Lightin\u2019 Hopkins (Time Records, 1962, its cover missing.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The albums were in disarray\u2014in the wrong jackets, caked with dust and dirt and gunk, lying flat upon one another without their sleeves\u2014and I went for the Windex, paper towels, and an old milk crate made of steel.\"236alvarezrecords-albertblues\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

[The vinyl geeks on the Internet say there\u2019s nothing especially wrong about cleaning record albums with Windex and paper towels but for a truer fidelity\u2014\u201cwas ever a woman in this humor wooed\/was ever a woman in this humor won?<\/i>\u2014a record \u201cvacuum\u201d is desired.]<\/span><\/p>\n

So the rest of the family went out their outdoor fun\u2014kayaking, hiking, bicycling, none of it for me\u2014and I spent a quiet afternoon sipping coffee while cleaning records, curating records, repairing LP covers with tape but most importantly, playing records.<\/span><\/p>\n

I love to laugh, I truly do, but I what I really like to do is rock and roll myself back into childhood.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rafael Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com\u00a0 <\/span><\/i><\/span><\/span>\"The<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I was pretty cool back in the first grade\u20141964, white-hot ground zero of global Beatlemania; knew<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":26985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,542],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-writing","category-records"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/rangelyrecordsFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}