Brenner / Gessner collection
In May 2022, my parents, who are both in their 70s, moved full time to a beach house and sold the house where I grew up in Rockville, Maryland. When clearing out their basement, they gave me their old turntable, a Yamaha “Natural Sound” YP-211, and my father’s New Advent Loudspeakers from 1977. In addition, I got 208 records, almost entirely from the mid 1960s through the mid 1970s.
All of my earliest music memories are of car radios and cassette tapes, and I have no memory of my parents ever playing any of these records. Many of them, however, represent the songs that I grew up hearing – at least until I was old enough to make my own musical choices. They’re the soundtrack of my childhood years in the 1980s and 1990s.
My mother’s preferences were folk, pop and singer-songwriters, while my father was a fan of pop, rock, anything psychedelic, country, jazz and blues, bluegrass, cosmic American music and some classical.
The missing box
My parents’ collection has a ton of great music in it, along with some weird and confusing choices, but it’s also missing a lot of music that I absolutely would expect them to have owned (such as American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, which my father considers a desert island album) – and they agree. Why wasn’t it included in what they passed along to me, and where did it go?
Their belief is that when they last packed up their belongings in boxes and moved from one home to another – in 1982, when the three of us moved from Washington DC to Rockville – the movers must have lost one of their boxes of albums, and that all the music that they should have had, but somehow did not have, must have been in that box.
Is it true? I don’t know, but it sure would explain a lot of gaps.
View all reviews of the Brenner-Gessner collection.
Selman collection
At the same time that my parents moved in May 2022, their friend and neighbor down the street, whose family I’ve known my entire life and whose sons grew up with my brother and me, offered to send his record collection along as well, and I gladly accepted. 173 records in two large moving boxes soon arrived.
I assumed that his tastes would have been pretty comparable to my parents’, but evidently he used to work in radio and, as a result, accumulated a highly eclectic collection that covers everything under the sun. In addition to music like what my parents owned, his includes comedy, soundtracks, compilations, disco, Motown, and much, much more, largely from the 1970s and some from the 1980s.
Many are marked with radio station notations; many state explicitly that they are “promotional and not for sale,” with drilled holes, clipped corners, record company stickers and handwritten taped track lists.
View all reviews of the Selman collection.
Friedman collection
In April 2023, my cousin sent 37 additional records my way, in part to make sure that I would have enough to review one every day for a full year, and also in part to get rid of some excess in his own collection. Though very clear that he was not giving them to me because he thought they were good or because I would like them, I suspect that I may give them higher ratings on average than those from the other two sets.
His tastes are solidly in the blues, along with some country and folk, a bit of jazz, cosmic American, and what would broadly be considered “roots.”
View all reviews of the Friedman collection.
Essex collection
In October 2023, my parents’ friends bought a home near where my parents now live, and the home’s previous owners left a ton of stuff in it that they didn’t want any more, including a record collection. They donated 23 of those records to me, mostly a mix of country, rock, blues and jazz.
View all reviews of the Essex collection.
It’s an honor to have brought these collections together and to play these vinyls that were mostly pressed before I was born (and I’m not young…)! My intention is to listen to all the records that I’ve received and to write a review for each one. I hope you’ll enjoy following along!
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