“We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.”
—The Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell

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With not much else to do around here during these days of bad weather and quarantine, I started digging through my collection of old vinyl.  Somehow, I ended up with about six-hundred vinyl records from my years before compact discs became mainstream enough to start buying them. It’s an oddball collection. Not having much interest in most of the American pop music of the 80’s, my record collection skirted the edges… imports, older recordings, classical, jazz/fusion, experimental, just weird…

I think my earliest acquisitions date back to my very early teens in perhaps 1983… or maybe a little earlier. Later additions became more divergent, often reflecting the influences of some of my older friends. Some of the music was contemporary to the times, but much was the product of an earlier decade. Regardless, it was all reflective of my “Sugar Mountain” years.

Traveling off to college, the mass of records and a good turntable went with me.  The music that gathered my attention during that period of my life changed greatly, much of it acquiring a rather more complex or harder edge.  And then the record (as in evidence) of my music listening abruptly stops in the mid-90s, when I finished my graduate work and moved off to Seattle.

In Seattle, I acquired a then magnificently expensive compact disc player to go with my new audio equipment.  But the old turntable needed the “phono” pre-amp input found on an earlier generation of stereo equipment, so it wouldn’t work properly on my newer amplifier.  The records and the turntable ended up relegated to an out-of-the-way shelf.  And somehow I never got around to putting it all back into working order.

For the most part, I took care of the records, so they’re still in pretty good condition. But I hadn’t heard any of them played in a very long time, despite their being packed up with the old turntable – a nice Techniques “direct drive” that was carefully disassembled and stored away in its original box.  However, I came up with a workaround for getting it operational, and have since played through a number of the old albums.

It’s difficult not to think back about what was going through my mind at the times when the records were acquired. The memories encompass many good moments, much experimentation, and more than a few social influences. And there’s some irony in my still possessing all that old, grooved vinyl. The several hundred CD’s I’d accumulated during my years in Seattle were all given away when I moved overseas. But nobody wanted the records.  And so, they ended up safely stored away in a closet at my parents’ home.

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In April (or March, depending on the source) of 1970, Joni Mitchell released the still astonishingly beautiful album, Ladies of the Canyon. I was born just a little later, on a day my father once tongue-in-cheek commented began with the headline, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”  For the first few days of my life in this world, a billion people united in mutual concern for the fates of three faraway men.  Now, some five-decades later, the fates over which we concern ourselves are much closer to home.

In that long ago moment of “successful failure”, my parents chose to call me their, “Forever Beautiful Child”.  I always questioned why.  But listening to the now fifty-year old recording reminded me of Franz Kafka’s assertion that, “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” I wonder if that extends also to what we hear?

Like the last song on the album, the seasons in the years since its melodies were first etched in vinyl have gone ’round and ’round with astonishing speed.  A once unimaginably distant day of bits in a smartphone now whispers into my ears through a pair of Bluetooth headphones.  But looking back at all of those memories, the breaths of voices scratched from the rough-edged grooves embedded in a bunch of spinning plastic disks, I come back to that one with mixed emotions.

Joni Mitchell has always insisted that she never listens to her old songs, as she hears only the things she wished she’d done differently. Like a nasty skip, the bad spots replay over and over again, and the music goes unheard.  Somehow, I understand.  But the mask and the hand-sanitizer in my bag at the start of this socially-distant fiftieth year also attest to just how important it is to abide through those rough moments, and to take notice of the beautiful melodies whenever they happen…
and whatever their sources.

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