Vinyl Vacation: "Talking About My Baby" - The Impressions

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like.


Now's right about the time when you mutter to yourself, "as if the whole 'indie music blog' thing weren't bad enough, now he's upping his pretentiousness game with some paen to vinyl?"


And to you, fair reader, I can only answer honestly, "Yes, yes! A thousand times, yes!" Well, at least those three times.


Maybe it's my freakishly completist nature run amok but I have recently come close to burning out on music. The seemingly upstanding desire to stay informed can, when combined with the seemingly beneficial creation of a vehicle for delivering near-infinite music day or night, become a cruel curse.


I have to just admit it - there's always going to be more good music out there than I can listen to. By an increasingly widening margin. This fact may be a mixed bag in terms of how we consume music but it seems immutable, at least until we're bombarded by Chinese EMPs or something. My reasons for not turning to vinyl (the cost, the pretentiousness, the bulkiness, the COST) were utlimately outweighed by the fact that I knew it would help me slow down and narrow my musical focus. Let's just say that after many years of resistance, I was finally forced to concede a point to my high school economics teacher, the limited nature of physical product has not only increased its value to me, but been a sanity-inducing limit I so desperately need.


Therefore, after a long struggle I finally gave in, bought a garage sale stereo, asked for a turntable for Christmas and myself the hip new bourgeois fetishist collectible. The Vinyl Vacation feature here at On Warmer Music will be my outlet for sharing the fruits of my stroll down the garden path of outdated musical technology, tempting you with the, if not forbidden, then at least forbidding fruits of 45's and 33 1/3's.

The Wayback Machine: Bob Dylan - Self-Ttiled

"Folk songs are evasive - the truth about life, and life is more less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be." - Bob Dylan

At this point it's almost impossible to know who or what Bob Dylan is or ever was. Mystic, poet, singer, sage, revolutionary, reactionary, wise man, fool, bomb-thrower, bible-thumper, washout and phoenix - all of these are hats that he's worn at one time or another. Often at the same time. Even the ones that contradict the other ones. As a public figure he's forever eluding your grasp, leaving behind brilliant music but no stable essence of who he is.


Standing here, on the far side of Dylan's massive career, knowing the seismic impact he would have on both popular music and American culture as a whole, it's almost impossible to put oneself into the mind of a listener first hearing his debut album in 1962 (not that there were many of them). Before he sang for Martin Luther King and dated Joan Baez, before he wrote anthems that defined a decade, before the drugs and the Beatles and the Pennebaker film, Bob Dylan, nee Robert Zimmerman was just a folk singer, a Minnesota boy with big ideas who played the New York clubs and managed to catch a break. He was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond who saw his talent and told him "We're gonna bring you in and record you, we'll see what happens."