When the inscription, Medicine for the Soul, was etched over the door of the Library at Thebes, I have to believe there was some vinyl mixed in with all those books.
Music – can there be a more powerful medicine? Perhaps one thing – a vinyl apothecary. And I discovered one seven years ago.
While browsing through the aisles of a used bookstore in Youngtown, Arizona, I heard
the unmistakable clarinet flair of a Pete Fountain tune playing in the background. The slight crackling sound told me that there was a turntable somewhere in the building. I found the proprietor sitting at a bench in a small workroom carefully placing record album jackets into an old Andre Cellars wine box. He looked up at me and said, “They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“The music and the turntable,” I replied, thinking of my thirty-year-old stereo
system at home that played vinyl records and eight-tracks. “Do you have any
jazz or Dixieland for sale?”
“Next door,” he said. “Thirty-five boxes worth.”
Several hours later, after I had unloaded the last box of albums onto my living room
floor, I sifted through the lot, admiring the motley album jackets from the decades when vinyl was king.
There was one album portraying trombonist Jack Teagarden surrounded by armored
knights, and there was another one featuring Colman Hawkins playing sax at the
Savoy in 1940. There were images of instruments encircling Louis Armstrong, and an image of Dinah Washington
singing at a microphone on an album titled Dinah ’62.
For the next two years, over morning coffee, I listened to nearly three thousand
albums, from blues and jazz to country and classic rock. I still play them
today – gospel and doo-wop, Irish and classical. They’re vinyl pharmaceuticals,
my spinning prescriptions.
