But I'm not here to wax nostalgic about wax and fold-out sleeves and such. I'm here to break them. Or at least tell you how I used to (as with most things connected with albums, it's a "used to" story) break them. Not that I was pathological about it or anything, but by my count within eight years I deliberately broke three albums, basically for provocation purposes. Like most discoveries that turn out to be useful and very fun, my first broken record was a spontaneous, un-meditated thing. It was a small gathering of friends around the end of high school, a gathering that included a guy named Mike who was enamored of Led Zeppelin, especially their second album (I know the mere mention of that album makes the more cognizant reader immediately start air-guitaring and mouth-guitaring the gargantuan riff from [more accurately, riff that is] "Whole Lotta Love." Mike was an interesting fellow. During our high school years he was passionate about exactly four pieces of music: "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band, "Lola" by the Kinks (kinda until he finally realized--after a good year or two--the song was about a guy being picked up by a transvestite), and the entire Led Zeppelin catalog (diverse and wonderful as it is, isn't really the entirety of Zeppelin just one piece of music? I mean you don't hear Zeppelin fans arguing over which is the best album like Stones/Beatles/etc. fans. For Zeppelin fans it's all Zeppelin and it's all kick-ass)--any other music was just filler for Mike until one of those four popped up on the radio. Anyway, I had a very beat up, used copy of II (at the risk of being called a heretic and milquetoast, let me confess that as much as I love Zeppelin--really love it when I hear a particular song [just about any]--I've never been one to sit and listen to one of their entire albums straight through much). Eventually during this gathering, something wicked this way came into my soul and I told a couple friends, "Watch this." I took the album, went over to Mike and said, "Should I put this on?" The personification of ecstasy--that was Mike. "Or should I do this," I smiled and took the piece of scratched up vinyl out of the sleeve and right in front of his eyes started bending the thing in, as if (well, not as if, truly) trying to fold the thing in half. "What the--" was all Mike was able to manage before I managed to complete the folding. Shards of scratched up vinyl containing the holy engraved codes of "Whole Lotta Love" and all the others snapped and exploded all over the room. Roars of laughter from the peanut gallery as Mike's ecstasy instantly transformed to disbelief, grief, and anger (I think our friendship never recovered from that moment). God did that feel great.
My next record-breaking performance came four years later (something about being a senior, I guess), and I may have already told this story here before (if so, find it and see how accurately I re-tell the story). The house I lived in in college was a chaotic collection of individuals. One was Mark, a rather nice but rather rabid Beatles fan (and this was the mid-80s by which time the Beatles were already rather nostalgic; to be a rabid fan then was, in my mind, a bit passe). Anyway, Mark was sitting there reading the latest Rolling Stone when he exploded indignantly with these exact words, "How can anyone have the audacity to name an album Let It Be?" (Rolling Stone was reviewing the Replacements' epic Let It Be album, my favorite album at the time, and one that has never left my all-time top ten since.) "Maybe because," I assholily retorted, "It's a much better album than the Beatles' one of the same name." I received a look thousands of martyrs must have received just as the stakes were being ignited. Should have been the end of it, I know, but college is the time for excess, no? Later that night, much later, I took my pretty vintage (red Apple label) copy of the Beatles' Let It Be--sleeve, dustjacket, album all--and hurled it several times against the holy wall in my room on which I had been writing graffiti for months. Satisfied only when I could feel that the vinyl disc had been reduced to dozens of pieces, I then proceeded to go upstairs and shove the whole thing under Mark's door. Have I ever been crueler in my life? Forgive me, I hope not, but after all, this was only rock'n'roll and as much as I've always loved the Beatles, they're not above having their pedestal rocked and rolled over a bit (which reminds me of the time I somehow wound up manning a beer stand at a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert; there was no orderly line and we were selling cans which had to be opened and poured into cups [most inefficient]; so of course right before the show we were overrun with I-just-wanna-be-swilling-beer-and-screaming-"Refugee"-man-not-standing-in-this-clump-of-the-same-you-call-a-line-waiting-for-you-to-open-pour-and-gimme-my-beer-man folks; just as I was on the verge of another nervous breakdown the first chords of the night started up [possibly "Refugee"] and the pushingshovingyelling got worse; one dude screamed in my face, "Come on, man, the concert's starting"; folks, let me tell you, when Sheer Genius comes accompanied by a Guardian Angel, you've reached a perfection in life you never knew existed: without thinking, duh, I screamed back [probably told this story once or twice before, too; oh well, I'm old, I contain repetitions] at the would-be hooligan, "Relax man, Tom Petty isn't god!"; dead-on accuracy notwithstanding, in most parallel universes such a comment at such a time to such an individual would have gotten me [justifiably if you recruited your jury near the beer coolers at any Open Pantry location] killed rather instantly, but as I said, my Guardian Angel was riding shotgun with Genius that night, and the guy just shrugged his shoulders like "ah, satori to you too" and said, "Yeah, you're right"). Anyway, the next day Mark was not too delighted at the Apple scruffs I had left under his door, but eventually I loaned him my Replacements album, he kind of liked it (and, more important, taking the higher road, returned it unscathed) and we got along fine.
Within a few years I called upon all of this experience to create a truly "teachable" moment in my class of thirty high school boys. We were reading the great Anne Bradstreet's poem about how her house burns down and she ends up thanking God for the lesson that indeed, all earthly possessions are "vanity." So how does one make such a Puritan woman's poesy come alive to thirty late 1980s high school boys who probably couldn't give a rat's ass? Call on the Glimmer Twins, naturally. I brought in my first pressing copy (before the Law made them alter it) of the Rolling Stones' Some Girls album, with its iconic cover of famous girls and Stones as girls. I spieled to the class about how this was the first new Stones album I had ever bought, the collectible (if not for how my cheap needle had worn it out over years of steady play) nature of the album, how despite owning hundreds of albums, this one was still one of my favorites, both in a musical and sentimental sense, blah blah blah. I then attacked the thing mercilessly, cracking up the vinyl into dozens of pieces in my by now familiar way, mangling the cover, etc, and then tactlessly chucking it all into the big round classroom-standard metal trash can. "Vanity!" I harangued the boys (some who were duly impressed, some actually frightened, some, as usual, who couldn't give a rat's ass), "all of it!" I then invited, not mandatorily assigned, them to bring in some symbolically similar item of their own the next day and ritually destroy it in front of class to experience the same thrill of "de-possession." The next day, there were few takers (or, more accurately, sacrificers). But I'll never forget quiet Carl coming up with a pretty valuable baseball card, explaining to the class how he had a big collection and this card was one of his prized ones, dismissing my calls to think twice about what he was about to do and the howls from his classmates not to do such a stupid thing, and triumphantly shredding that card into tiny pieces, tossing them in the trash can, and returning to his seat. Carl, I don't know whatever became of you, and I hope that card wasn't the equivalent of a down payment on a new car these days, but always know you melted this teacher's heart that day.
The feeling of deja vu is overwhelming--forgive me if I said this all before (thus, I, um, guess, coming off sounding like a broken record). But think about it--Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin--for many the holy trinity of rock (I'm saving the Dylan album breaking for my senility, naturally). Destroyed, all of them. Happily, and maybe instructively (and, yes, cruelly) so. Maybe it's in the blood. Every Christmas I look forward to hearing my mother tell the story about how her grandmother sat on her mother's long-sought-after, treasured 78 rpm copy of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas." I think my grandmother's look at her mother-in-law's face was probably akin to the one I received from Mike when Zeppelin II bit the dust.
Ah, nostalgia. What's the fun of breaking a CD or an iPod? Or, God forbid, a Cloud? No, maybe my record of breaking three records will never be broken.
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