Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020
Images from the Internet
The Vinyl Revival: A
Film About Why the Tables are Turning Again
Directed by Pip Piper
Blue Hippo Media; Wienerworld; MVD Entertainment
43 minutes, 2019 / 2020
www.wienerworld.com
www.mvdb2b.com
Seven years ago,
British director Pip Piper released a documentary entitled Last Shop
Standing (see review HERE). In it, he opined about the closing of Record Stores in favor of on-line
shopping for digital music.
But, as I have stated before, including
in the Last Shop Standing review, social philosopher Marshall McLuhan
once posited that when a technology becomes obsolete, it comes back again as
art (it’s one of my favorite “McLuhanisms”). The revival of the vinyl record is
a perfect example of that idiom.
For a while, after the CD explosion
in the late 1980s and into the 2000s, digital media overtook the physical LP,
largely in part thanks to the greed of the record companies. CDs were much
cheaper to produce, but the costs to the consumer were higher so the profit
margin was chop-licking good. How did they get a way with it? They would
include “bonus tracks” on their CDs that were not available on the 12’-ers, so
fans would buy the digital form for the extra material. Then the record
companies would say, “See, people want CDs,” and vinyl versions of releases began
to disappear.
But the irony is that once music
became digital, it was also easier to copy in almost pristine sound to the
original. At least there was still the CD cover art and inserts, which were
miniscule in relation to the 12-inch jacket. But even that was better than the
elusive digital MP3, which was easily shared, stolen, or whatever you want to
view it as, and was a standalone without art or liner notes. The appeal of
these physical art “extras” had been underestimated by the companies that
released the music, though collectors especially were aware.
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| Graham Jones |
A good way to place this film into a
context is to see it more as either a companion piece to the original, Last
Shop Standing, or better still, considering it is half the length of the previous
one, as an addendum, to bring it up to date. Many of the same people are involved,
such as Piper and Graham Jones, who wrote the books on which this and the
previous documentary is based.
Graham and Pip travel around Britain
to independent record shops (no box stores), talking with the owners and
workers in their environment. The last film was a bit on the depressing side,
but this one has a totally fresh, new, and upbeat attitude which is smile-inducing
to those of us (well, me, anyway) who have had a history of record collecting
and have stood going through racks of used records until our legs were numb and
fingers bruised from flipping.
An interesting point is made early
on, and this is something I have pondered for quite a while, and that is the brilliance
of Record Store Day. It’s a day where all record stores have gigantic sales at
the same time, and people who are generally too busy in their real lives to
journey out for their hobbies, will set aside the time and make a day with it
(note that comic book stores, also having a revival, do the same thing). To a devotional
collector, any day is Record Store Day, but for the casual fan, it’s a genuine celebratory
holiday to save for, like Xmas (though the products are usually for oneself). In
my heyday of collecting, going to stores like Sounds (St. Mark’s Place, NYC,
managed by Binky Phillips), the House of Guitars (aka The HOG, in Rochester,
NY, which included a talk with members of the Chesterfield Kings who worked
there), and Newbury Comics (Boston), was a given, when the opportunity arose,
or on weekends. The people who worked there were chums you talked to,
discussing new sounds and old records. I remember no matter where I went, Greg
Shaw and his Bomp! Records was always a topic that came up.
I mention this here because that is
the vibe you get from the people interviewed by the film crew, that it’s not
just the record, it’s the community, but one needs a watering hole, as it were,
in the case the record shops. It is also a way for the new artists to get heard
with in-store performances. We meet independent bands like the Orielles, a
member of the Horrors, and a focus near the end by the trio Cassia, who explain how the relationship between
the band, the independent stores, and the fans all work together in ways that
go beyond big business record label promotions.
One of the side aspects of films like
this, which is quite a favorite to me, is to keep hitting the pause button when
they show a wall of records and posters, and see if there are any I recognize.
I do this on a lot of documentaries, to see what records (or books) are on the
shelf behind the person being interviewed, but it is especially thrilling (yes,
I’m going with that word) when it comes to record shop walls. For example, it
was fun seeing a sticker for Yo La Tengo, or the Ramones’ End of the Decade LP
from 1987, among others.
Another nice aspect is that most of
the interviews are in situ, meaning in a store or just outside of it. We
get to hear from Nick Mason (Pink Floyd drummer), Philip Selway (Radiohead
drummer, etc.), Adrian Utley (Portishead guitarist), and Joel Gion (The Brian
Jonestown Massacre tambourinist), but also from Professor of Culture
and Philosophy, Barry Taylor (one of his books is Sex, God, and Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies), and the great-named rock
and roll cultural historian Dr. Jennifer Otter Bikerdike, author of Why
Vinyl Matters: A Manifesto from Musicians and Fans, among others. Whether
you question their tastes or not is irrelevant to what they are saying about
the medium.
My favorite interviews,
though, as I said, were with the store owners and workers; there isn’t much by
people who are just fans without the credentials to explain their
love when it isn’t their career. That why I wrote a blog back in 2008 called “Reflections
of a Record Collector” (HERE).
One of the almost
subliminal messages this film seems to suggest is that the present record store
consumer tends to be mostly in their fifties, or in their twenties, with a gap
in-between from the later CD years of the 1990s and early 2000s. I would have
liked to have heard some more information about that, and whether that’s real
or in my head.
This documentary fills
a void just like the record stores are doing, to help explain the psychology of
the modern collector, what makes them different from the older ones like me,
and to just revel in the joy that is vinyl.
And through this all,
I thought of the most fanatical record collector I know, Mad Louis the Vinyl
Junkie, in Buffalo, NY, who has never stopped collecting vinyl (and other media),
and I dedicate this review to him.
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Thanks for this well written review Robert and producing such a great blog.
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