Category Archives: Sh*t I Play On My Crosley

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1977)

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I was a big Charlie Brown fan as a kid.  And I do mean BIG.  I had at least 30 Charlie Brown books and the complete set of Charlie Brown ‘Cyclopedias.  I suspect I related to him in many ways, ways that went beyond my inability to kick a football, and though while Snoopy came more and more to the forefront, my primary interested was in “Chuck” (as Peppermint Patty always referred to him), the lovable loser.

Holly’s mom dropped of some of her old stuff the other day, which included this book/record combo A Charlie Brown Christmas.  I’m not even sure if they make stuff like this any more, the little 7″ record that tells the same story as the book so you can follow along (adults once again tricking kids into learning!), but I remember having a handful of them too.  This one dates from 1977, which is about right for both of us – we would have been little kids who still believed in the Christmas spirit.

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We inaugurated a new tradition last night, the Christmas Eve playing of A Charlie Brown Christmas while enjoying a cocktail.  The story actually covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time.  Charlie Brown is bummed about the commercialization of Christmas, goes to Lucy for advice, gets named the director of the Christmas play, buys a sad looking little Christmas tree for which he is ridiculed, and tries to decorate the tree anyway but screws it up before his friends decorate it and wish him a Merry Christmas.  There’s also a part of the play where Linus delivers a pretty heavy religions Christmas sermon of sorts, something you’d probably be less like to find in something like this today.

All in all it was a pretty fun trip down memory lane, albeit a short one.  So with that, I wish all the Life In the Vinyl Lane readers a hearty “Happy Holidays,” regardless of which holiday you do or do not celebrate!

Duran Duran – “Seven and the Ragged Tiger” (Sh*t I Play On My Crosley #5) (1983)

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My musical awakening happened in 1983, the same year that Seven and the Ragged Tiger came out.  Back then as an insecure middle schooler the kind of music you liked seemed like some incredibly serious business, something along the level of being a Trotskyist versus a Stalinist, or preferring the cop in the Village People to the construction worker.  What you listened to defined who you were as a person and what you were about.  Kind of like being part of a cult.  Even though, of course, that was all bullshit.  But it seemed real at the time, and I chose to define myself as a “rocker” by listening to Ratt and Quiet Riot and Van Halen (including wearing a Van Halen painters hat with VH buttons on it, which just oozed cool at the mall).  There were certain tweener bands an aspiring rocker could still confess to liking, like maybe Big Country or Dexy’s Midnight Runners or Toto.  One of the bands you could not confess to liking was Duran Duran.

I secretly liked Duran Duran.  A lot.

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I could never admit this, of course, because that would have invited ridicule and wedgies.  But to see the “Rio” video on MTV was captivating, and when “The Reflex” came out I just about lost my mind.  Fortunately my mom worked at the mall, so during the summers I’d sometimes go to work with her and hang out there all day by myself, much of which was spent in whatever mall chain record store we had in Columbia, South Carolina at the time. Which gave me the opportunity to secretly buy a copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger on cassette, a format that was much easier to hide in my room without the risk not of my parents finding it, but one of my friends.  Such things seemed very important back then.

A year or so later we moved from South Carolina to Seattle, which of course could mean only one thing to my parents – road trip.  We drove.  In a van.  With a dog.  It took a few weeks as we made some visits to friends and family along the way.  We went to Canton, Ohio to visit friends and see the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and then made a stop off in St. Louis to visit some other family friends.  Their son Tommy and I had been quite close as little kids when our families both moved to Seattle (my first stint here) at the same time and both families were living in the same hotel for what seemed like forever.  Tommy and I would run up and down the halls between our rooms and trade football cards – he wanted the Cardinals, I wanted the Eagles, and we both agreed that Kenny Stabler was cool.  These are the things upon which friendships are based.

Tommy also had a sister who was a couple of years older, and though I’m not sure how it came up during our visit to St. Louis, she learned I had a copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger.  She also thought she was pretty good at Intellivision baseball, which led to a bet – she put up a dollar against my Duran Duran tape.  I was even more entrenched in my rockism to the point I couldn’t even allow myself the guilty pleasure of “Union of the Snake” any longer.  As I recall I won the game pretty handily, but gave her the tape anyway.  I wonder if she still has it…

This was a no-brainer for a Crosley record – an album so popular that it sold a ba-jillion copies, yet is dated enough to have landed in lots of dollar bins, making it supremely un-rare.  I found a playable copy the other day at Half Price Books and figured “why not” since I had some store credit.  And I’m glad I did.  Because at my age I can admit to liking whatever I want, and as the Beastie Boys said, “and if you don’t like it then hey fuck you.”

Purrkur Pillnikk – “Tilf” 7″ (1981) (Sh*t I Play On My Crosley #4)

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purkurrtilfPurrkur Pillnikk‘s Tilf may seem like an odd choice for me to play on my Crosley.  After all, it’s a desirable early 1980s Icelandic punk 7″, and while far from being one of the most valuable ones, it still sells in the $50+ range.  This copy, however, isn’t worth anywhere near that due to some very unfortunate and heavy warping.

My friend Ingvar of Lucky Records fame gave this to me for free a few years ago, figuring maybe I could somehow flatten it out enough to play.  So for nearly two full years it’s sat in the middle of a nearly foot-high stack of large format music books on top of my record shelf.  I did try using a hairdryer on it at one point without success, and while I considered the old sandwiching it between two panes of glass and putting it in the oven trick, that seemed like a lot of work and almost certain to destroy it completely.  It turned out the books worked, sort of.  I think it flattened out a bit, though it’s still a mess, and while I wouldn’t want to put it on my Rega, I figured I’d give it a try on the Crosley since one of the knocks on that player is the heavy weight/pressure the tonearm applies to the records.  Maybe that weight would keep the stylus in the groove, and even if it puts way more wear on it than a better record player would, it’s not like Tilf is something I’ll be playing a lot, nor do I need to worry about its condition since its already pretty atrocious.

And I’ll be damned if it didn’t play fairly well.  The opening song of side B was a bit warbly, but all-in-all it played OK and didn’t sound half bad, even out of the little tiny speakers built into the Crosley.  The Crosley doesn’t seem to like how close the grooves run to the inner label, as it’s auto-stop function kicks in prior to the end of the last song on each side, but that can be turned off, so not a problem.

Purrkur Pillnikk cram 10 songs onto the Tilf 7″, which ain’t easy to do.  All the tracks appear on the two CD band compilation called Í Augum Úti that came out back in 2001 (a 44-song monster that you can buy via iTunes for $19.99), so none of these songs are “new” to me, but it was cool to see this record find a new life long after it appeared it had given up the ghost.  I certainly wish it was a nicer copy, but it was a gift and I was able to make something out of nothing, which is exactly what Ingvar was hoping would happen.

So a big “Takk” to you if you’re reading this Ingvar, and we’ll be seeing you in Reykjavik in a few weeks for Iceland Airwaves ’15.  I’m bringing a pocket full of kronur and an empty record bag…

Winger – “Seventeen” b/w “Poison Angel” (1988) (Sh*t I Play On My Crosley #3)

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She said,
“I’m only seventeen,
(Seventeen),
I’ll show you love, 
Like you’ve never seen.”

She’s only seventeen,
(Seventeen),
Daddy says she’s too young,
But she’s old enough for me.
— Winger – “Seventeen”

I’ve heard a lot of music in my 40+ years.  Some of it good, some of it bad.  Some of it that can bring you to tears, some of it that makes you feel like you could charge head first into a brick wall and blow right through it without a scratch.  I’ve heard lyrics that are funny and sad, poignant and stupid, classy and gross and juvenile.  I’ve heard songs that are flat out disgusting and even a few that are downright offensive.

But god damn man, Winger’s “Seventeen” takes the cake for the creepiest lyrics of all time.

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Now look, I bought a copy of Winger’s self-titled debut when it came out in 1988.  And frankly I don’t apologize for it – while “Seventeen” may be beyond creepy, it’s a catchy tune that was all over the radio, and I was awfully close to being 17 years old myself at the time.  Kip Winger, however, was something like 27 when that song blew up and made his band a household name.  And a 27-year-old dude singing about naughty 17-year-old girls… that’s a bit much.  Daddy says she’s too young / But she’s old enough for me.  C’mon bro, that’s just creepy as hell.

Now to be fair to poor Kip, who will never live down that his biggest hit was about statutory rape, KISS actually beat him to the punch about 11 years earlier with absurd “Christine Sixteen,” a song that is about EXACTLY what you think it is.  BUT.  In the KISS song it’s basically a guy who is a perv talking about a 16-year-old girl he’s desperate for – I’ve got to have her / Can’t live without her.  It’s creepy, but not next-level creepy.  In the Winger song, though, the girl is aware of the whole age thing and playing on it, and even though the dude in the song knows she’s 17 and that that’s too young, he’s going to do what he’s going to do anyway (or at least try to).

A buddy of mine dropped off a big box of old tapes and singles the other day, and this 7″ was part of that material.  We actually laughed about the absurdity of this song, since we both had the album back in the day and “Seventeen” is the only Winger song each of us could even remember.  I knew as soon as I saw it that I had to play this as part of my Crosley series.

The B side is a song called “Poison Angel” that, shockingly, is also about a chick.  Fortunately this time we’re spared any mention of the woman’s age.

I just wish the song wasn’t so damn catchy…

Culture Club – “Colour By Numbers” (1983) (Sh*t I Play On My Crosley #2)

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Karma karma karma karma chameleon…

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Colour By Numbers was released in 1983, right when I started getting into music and when MTV was replacing radio as the way you experienced music.  But it wasn’t cool for a boy to like Culture Club, at least not in my circle, so like many of my male classmates I pretended not to like them or Duran Duran or Wham!, when secretly I’d turn up the sound on the TV when their videos came on.

This slightly warped copy came to us courtesy of the $3 bin at Easy Street Records.  It seems like in many paces the “dollar bin” has become the “three dollar bin,” or at the very least the “two-for-five bin,” but that’s OK, because it means we can still sit on the back patio and listen to “Karma Chameleon” and “It’s a Miracle” while we sip cocktails on a warm summer night.  And I suspect Boy George himself would be perfectly fine with that.