I received a fair amount of Dolly Parton merch for Christmas. I got to interview the country legend in the fall for a travel story I did on Dollywood, so I guess my loved ones were still associating me with her in their minds. I am not complaining.
One of the Dolly-related items I got as a gift was the 1974 Jolene album on vinyl. The giver was one of my brothers-in-law, who drew my name in the annual Sibling Gift Exchange.
I did not have a record player, though. In fact, I don’t think I had ever possessed a record player of my own, seeing as how I first became acquainted with recorded music during the era when cassette tapes were the dominant format, later giving way to CDs and then to MP3 files and then to streaming services.
My older sister did have a Fisher-Price phonograph, however. One of the records in her collection was an audio book called Baby Pac-Man Goes to the Market. This was in the early 1980s, when Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man were so popular there was evidently an audience for tie-in works concerning the grocery shopping of the couple’s infant offspring.
All that I remember about the tale told on the record is that the narrator kept saying “vegetables” with four syllables—i.e., vej-uh-tuh-buhls instead of vetch-tuh-buhls, which is what you’d hear when Baby Zac-Man Went to the Market.
Anyhow, I ordered a record player via Amazon after I got the Jolene album.
I know vinyl enthusiasts are very, well, enthusiastic about the sound you get from turntables, which produce to my ear a kind of homey fuzz in contrast to the chilly clarity of digital audio. But my favorite thing about records is the packaging—you get the artwork and lyrics and liner notes in a nice big square, like an old-timey issue of Life magazine.
Remember how tiny all those accompanying materials were with cassettes? Plus, the little foldout sheet of lyrics was often perforated, so after just a couple unfoldings some sections would be hanging on by only a chad or two.
What was the purpose of that perforation anyway? Were we supposed to tear out our favorite Amy Grant lyrics and trade them like baseball cards?
Since buying the record player in January, my husband and I have acquired three more LPs, bringing the total number in our collection to four: Dolly Parton’s Jolene, Barbra Streisand’s Guilty, the original Broadway cast recording of Gypsy, and Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins by Sparks.
The one we have played the most is Streisand’s Guilty, her 1980 collaboration with Barry Gibb. The usual line on Guilty is that it’s basically just a Bee Gees album with Barbra swapped in on lead vocals. Sorry, but I’d say that’s a marked improvement on the Gibb brothers’ typical output.
When I saw Streisand in concert back when I lived in Brooklyn, she refused to sing Guilty’s #1 single, “Woman in Love,” because, as she’s quoted saying in a concert review in The Guardian from around the same time, “I don’t believe in the philosophy.”
To which, if you’ve listened to the lyrics, you might feel inclined to reply, What philosophy?
Not to mention that it’s easy to find YouTube footage dated after that Brooklyn engagement in which Streisand can indeed be seen singing “Woman in Love” in concert.
Maybe Barbra explains the seeming contradiction in that door stopper of a memoir she wrote. I still haven’t read the book. Normally someone would have given it to me for Christmas, but I got Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones by Dolly Parton instead.
Indirect Objects 