retro chic
This past weekend we gave our old record collection to a young friend who’d bought a 1959 Motorola phonograph player powered by a tube amp with a turntable and two detachable speakers that could be separated nearly 8 feet apart to create stereophonic sound. Quite the innovation back in the Eisenhower era! Her buying this 50 year old vintage electronica was probably the equivalent of me buying a Victrola when I was her age. Progress marches on……
I’m told folks are going back to vinyl. Oh ho, right! And next we’ll return to the magic of 8-tracks. You bet. Every album I ever listened to in my lifetime would download on an I-pod and play back through a home entertainment center’s 7 surround-sound speakers, not necessarily a vast improvement over the quadrophonic leap forward of the 70’s, but nicely compact and certainly easier to use than a turntable and its scratch-and-pop aesthetic.
Sure, it was a hard psychic journey deciding to get rid of hundreds of old albums and all that rich cover art, a veritable time trip through our musical pantheon and those many nights, listening with roommates and friends. Probably the same with our grandparents and their 2 pound 78’s listened to on Edison’s magic invention. We have lived long enough to be retro chic, sad to say.
Now I’ve got boxes of cassette tapes, VHS tapes and beta movies. Sure, I could save em. Beta’s coming back, rumor has it. You hang onto anything long enough, it becomes a collector item. I guess that’s why here on the retro chic South End, we keep our cars up on blocks back in the weeds at the edge of the nettle forest. When the world is ready once again for ‘K’ cars, we got the market cornered. You want to beat the rush, order now….. Our operators are standing by.
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