Walking the Vinyl Track

(This was published in National Geographic Traveller India, November 2012)

“This will change the way you listen to music,” the note read. When I unwrapped the cheery red record-player that came with the message, little did I realise that the birthday gift from my husband would became an obsession. I didn’t know that we would spend the rest of our weekends of the year 2009 hunting for rare albums, quirky cover art and our favourite artists on vinyl.

While LPs had made a comeback and were available freely in large format music stores in the city as well as online, it was worth its price in gold and a luxurious indulgence for audio aficionados. While we loved music, our pockets didn’t run so deep and although we did pick up a few new LPs, something wasn’t quite right. Two of our brand new LPs turned out to be defective. There seemed to be a strange dissociation as we picked LPs from shelves stocking Blu-Ray DVDs, new indie CDs and pulsating Drum and Bass Mp3 collections. LPs seemed like gawky misfits in their specially proportioned shelves in these neon-lit digital music havens.

And a few hours of research on the internet sent us down the roads our audiophile forbears had walked and the alternative second-hand universe of vintage records. The little record player became my ticket into the dusty underbelly of the city with its cavernous warehouses and alleyway stores.
We dug out second-hand LPs in flea markets across India, from the back alleys of Mirza Ghalib Street in Calcutta to the dusty multipurpose antique stores in Bangalore’s Avenue Road. From the colourful hippie shops of Thamel in Kathmandu to the twisted alleys of Chor bazaar in Bombay, we dug our way through stacks of old vinyl records or forced/cajoled/bribed friends to trawl the selfsame markets with our serpentine lists in hand.

There was something that drew us to the LPs almost immediately. Both the husband and I loved music in our lives and although we weren’t experienced audiophiles, there was a certain purity of sound in a vinyl record that you couldn’t miss. The analog-era richness and warmth was so well...natural. Some LP lovers insist that listening to LPs was akin to having the band performing live in front of you and while I’m not entirely sure of that, listening to an LP is a visceral and involved experience entirely different from the commonplace plug n play digital sound. The soundscapes are different, the associations are different and above all the way we listen to music is different. A record lover is a more vibrant butterfly compared to its modern ipod toting worker bee.

Many of our records had their sleeves restored with duct tape and scratches and dust lines removed by multiple wet wipes. They became a substitute for postcards from kind friends who had been subject to the endless sessions of Floyd’s Medal and Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine (our earliest findsin a decrepit warehouse in Daryaganj sold to us by the enthusiastic Mr Syed Akbar Shah, an enthusiast and an eagle-eyed connoisseur of rare old LPs, who travelled the country in search of records old, forgotten and lost that had the habit of showing up in the unlikeliest spots). We would get emails at odd hours and would snatch calls over skype during our work day and manage to convince the friend in question as to what genre we liked, which group of artists we preferred and which era we pandered to. A few weeks later the selfsame friend would arrive with a brown paper wrapped LP. Needless to say he or she would be welcomed with much fanfare. 

As our pile of LPs increased from a measly two to a more respectable dozen, both the husband and me would itch to come home after a long day’s work and plonk ourselves on the floor with a drink in hand and go through the ritual of unveiling the well-worn record from its sleeve, giving it a quick wipe, placing the needle on the correct groove and drowning in the mellow sound while we lovingly caressed the sleeve and admired its incredible artwork.

However, a general passage of time dulled our initial enthusiasm. Our trips to Chandni Chowk and Daryaganj reduced and by the summer of 2010 we were back to our iPods and the LP player lay in a corner, dusted off for use on occasional weekends.

But all of that changed after a holiday in Melbourne in the winter of 2011.

Melbourne was the second leg on a grand vacation spanning Malaysia and Australia. We had travelled for a good week and a half around Malaysia through luxurious suites and isolated forest resortsand by the time we reached Australia, we realised that the holiday fund had dwindled substantially. Here we were with eight days to kill, little money to spare, and a city full of pricey art galleries, theatre shows, big-ticket music concerts and cutting-edge restaurants.

I quoted Bruce Chatwin to my husband: “Walking is a virtue and tourism is a sin.” What better way to learn a city than to see its underbelly, to sniff its stinks and discover the music on the streets? Armed with a day pass on the Melbourne Tram network, a much-thumbed copy of Lonely Planet Australia, regulation sunscreen and a couple of packaged meat pies, we were ready to take on the city.

Our first stop was Queen Victoria Market—a heritage site and bargain hunter’s paradise rolled into one. We wound our way through racks of faux crocodile boots, dubious Chinese herbs, tacky cowboy hats, artisanal cheese stands and boomerangs. Fate struck. My husband and I had been walking our separate ways, but suddenly bumped into each other at the entrance to a stall selling second-hand records.
I had been drawn into the shop by the sensuous black and white sleeve of Madonna’s iconic Like a Virgin album. In addition to being one of my favourite albums from the 1980s, it reminded me of many evenings spent with girlfriends dancing ourselves silly to ‘Material Girl’ and ‘Like a Virgin’. My husband, on the other hand, picked up Miles Davis’ A Kind of Blue in nearly mint condition. As we jostled each other, excited by the piles of LPs, the owner looked at us with a bemused expression. An elderly man with twinkly blue eyes, he gave us a great discount and also handed my husband a pamphlet. “Well mate, if you like your vinyl, that’s the best kind of tour you can go on,” he said.

The fold-out pamphlet-map had been created by Diggin’ Melbourne, an initiative started by a bunch of vinyl enthusiast, store owners and resellers. The simple Q and A listed on their home page made their conviction for the medium obvious.

“Q: Do they still make records?

“A: Yes—they still make records, they still make turntables, and yes—new bands are still putting out records. To some people the idea of putting out this kind of map may seem a little pointless. But if you’re reading this you know the score. Vinyl will never die.”

Our trip was suddenly given a whole new purpose.

The next day, we started working our way through the musical byways of Melbourne.  We set out for the artsy and bohemian Brunswick Street in the suburb of Fitzroy. By the mid-twentieth century, Brunswick Street, with its low rents, had become the street of choice for immigrants from Europe. With them came open-air Mediterranean cafes serving good coffee and wood-fired pizzas. Music venues, graffiti, vintage clothes stores, edgy pop art boutiques and record stores followed in the subsequent decades.

But instead of getting to the cool Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, we found ourselves in an altogether different part of town in the distant suburb also called Brunswick. Not only were we lost, we also ambled along with different agendas—I wanted the record store and vintage shops, but my husband wanted some food. A florist came to the rescue, pulling out a sheaf of maps to show us how far we had strayed. She gave us a flower for good luck and we clambered back on to the tram.

When we got to Fitzroy, we were thrilled to find that Brunswick Street was everything that the guide books and Internet had promised. The pavements were filled with chic people dressed in alternative fashion while the sound of jazz bands practising for an evening gig. Between drinking the best cider I have ever tasted, nearly inhaling a delicious crisp pork belly in apple sauce and shaking hands with a crazy man who wanted a few dollars for bestowing us with good wishes, we found what we had come all this way for–Dixons Recycled.

Established in 1976, with outlets all over Melbourne, these guys call themselves the ‘original second-hand specialist’. The store had something for ever whimsical buyer on a budget. Neat rows of records awaited us tagged according to their condition, rareness, album art and assorted other categories. We figured that if we’d been brave enough to buy battered records from Shah Music Centre in Daryagunj in Delhi, we could take a chance with Dixons’ lower-quality discs and gain in quantity what we’d compromised in quality. Who knows when we would find such a mind-boggling variety of LPs again?
Soon, our arms were piled high with the classic albums we had first heard on tape and later possessed on CD: Simon and Garfunkel’s sound track for The Graduate, The Best of Cream, Santana’s Greatest Hits, U2’s Joshua Tree, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms. Substantially poorer but much happier, we put our Diggin’ Melbourne map away for another day.

That day dawned sunny and warm after the debaucheries of New Year’s Eve. The first day of January was perfect for a walking tour around Federation Square and the colourful gates of Chinatown in the city’s central business district. Shorn of office crowds, the lanes were deserted, like unopened oysters full of hidden promise. While the city slumbered, we walked through a glorious sunny afternoon and a mellow dusk creating our own stories under the awnings and empty promenades along the Yarra River, the alleys of Flinder’s Lane painted with careless, colourful masterpieces by some of top street artists.  Since rents were high in the CBD, some of the stores on our map had vanished. Others had been transformed into strange animals. One second-hand vinyl shop along Elizabeth Street had become a specialist Japanese supermarket selling odd edibles and even odder pink Hello Kitty-themed bric-a-brac.

Then, as we were walking along a crowded intersection along Swanston Street, we realised that we had dropped our Diggin’ Melbourne map somewhere along the way.  Terrified at the prospect of losing our lifeline to the city, we retraced our steps, peering into dustbins where we had emptied plastic takeaway coffee cups, sifting through the public ashtrays where we had stubbed out our cigarettes, carefully circling every bench and every clump of grass we had trod upon. As we descended into the dumps of despair, we saw a familiar piece of paper fluttering round and round a lamppost. We were on the road again.

After discovering that at least three stores in the vicinity of the CBD had shut down, we stumbled upon the sign and ponderous stairway to Collectors Corner. ‘From the dirt cheap to the ridiculously rare’ is what they claimed to stock. The no-frills space was filled with piles of vinyl stacked in cardboard boxes. We spent so much time browsing and querying that the once-friendly owner soon lost his smile and growled at us till we left the place—but not before we had got ourselves a rare twosome: The Best of the Mamas and Papas and From the Mars Hotel by the Grateful Dead. Gratified by the loot, lulled by the evening nip and stuffed by grilled crocodile in a friendly cafe in Chinatown, we were nearly done with our tour and our time in the city.

We had seen the city through squares on our map. We had smelled a city of slightly stale dust and old paper in vintage stores. We tapped our feet and clapped our hands as an ignored street band belted out some great music.  It seemed that elves had come out of the crevices and taken us on a tour of a parallel city of forgotten music. We had relived our rock-n-roll preteen years, our waspish teenage love for grunge, our pretentious jazzy early twenties and our fun, indie, peculiar whims of the years that followed as we indulged in some good ol’ vinyl love in the land down under.