Licorice Pizza: My History With Vinyl

By Jesse Roth

It was an otherwise forgettable commercial for some product or service that was of no use to a middle school kid like me. Airing several times during evening broadcasts in the mid-1990s, it featured several scenes of children around my age with a voiceover expounding on the values and traits of this new generation—the one later to be known by the rather uninspired label “Generation Y.” One scene in particular showed a young girl leaning against the window on a school bus listening to a Walkman. The image was rather innocent but was coupled with the following line:

“They’ve never owned a record”

The now-defunct Mooncurser Records, New York
Photo from A Brooklyn Life

For me, the line smacked of revisionist history. Sure, I could just barely remember the 1980s, but by golly I knew what a record was! In fact, I didn’t just know what it was, I owned quite a collection of vinyl, one that was by that point gathering dust on a shelf in my room. Though I had been faithfully listening to my own Walkman for years and had just started building my CD collection, I still felt a fondness for those shiny black discs that had brought me such joy as a child. Through vinyl records, I received a rather haphazard introduction to the colorful array of musical styles that would forever shape my taste in music.

From an early age, I was surrounded by records. Literally. The living room of our home in North Myrtle Beach had been especially designed by my father to accommodate the rather large book and record collection accumulated over the years by both my parents prior to their union. Spanning several shelves, the records covered a wide variety of musical genres with few duplicates amongst the merged collection, a variety that spoke to my parents’ differing tastes. My father loved classical and jazz (and its numerous variations) and made the effort each and every school year to cart a good portion of his holdings to his school in order to enlighten (or torture, depending on what your tastes are at that age) the students in his art classes about the history of music with some sort of tie-in to an art lesson. He wore out numerous copies of Getz/Gilberto and Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and my mom never failed to point out the poor condition of his Beatles albums as compared to her pristine copies of the same records.

My mother’s tastes were more the famous 50s and 60s rock, pop, and folk acts that defined her generation, though her exposure to music reached far beyond those boundaries. The daughter of an A&R man for RCA who had worked on many famous albums in the 1950s (the gold and platinum records were still hanging in the den of their retirement home during my childhood), she would often give my grandfather advice on what acts would rock (or flop). Her childhood home was filled with records of every genre brought home from work by her dad, along with a rather impressive collection of classical albums. This collection was often trotted out by her stepmother, who would always make sure to blast said albums at high volumes for the “enjoyment” of my mother. It was a “joy” I would later experience when she would occasionally baby-sit me. I’m pretty sure that it was these moments that kept me from actually enjoying classical music for a long time.

Photo © Robert & Liz Oliver

Despite being barely old enough to read or perform many other functions on my own, my parents deemed it necessary for me to own my own record player and record collection. Like most other items that adorned my room and closet, these items came from various yard sales around town (or items culled from the vast collection downstairs). The player itself was a tan and white Fisher-Price Phonograph, especially designed for young future music aficionados like myself. It featured two speed capabilities (33 and 45 rpm), a volume control, and a small orange turntable and needle arm—about all a four-year-old like myself could really handle when it came to messing with electronic equipment.

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