Vinyl Lovers Still Seek Out Stacks o’ Wax : Fans Opt for the Sound of Records--Even the Scratches

Vinyl records. They’ve been scratched, warped and broken; they’ve ostensibly been buried in the junk heap of obsolescence, pronounced dead--by the very industry that made them--upon the advent of the compact disc a decade ago. Yet they won’t go away.

Today, record stores report that limited-edition vinyl releases by such CD-era bands as Pearl Jam, Lemonheads, the Melvins and Nirvana are flying out the doors, and stores are doing a brisk trade in used LPs as well. A legion of audiophiles prefer vinyl, buying currently made deluxe pressings and spending up to $25,000 on hi-spec turntables to play them. Other vinyl junkies haunt thrift shops and swap meets searching for the elusive rare records of their dreams.

“Vinyl junkie” is not a term to be taken lightly.

“Vinyl’s better than heroin,” says record collector Don Bolles. The one-time Germs drummer says he’s speaking from experience. “I tried to trade my record collecting habit in for heroin at one point. But records are so much weirder, and so much more interesting. And they’re actually more expensive.”

Bolles and hundreds of other collectors were prowling the rare-record swap meet held the first Sunday of every month at Pasadena City College. He and fellow musician Mike Vague also sell records there, to support their collecting. Bolles has some 2,000 records, Vague has 20,000.

Both were once avid collectors of what they termed “old-school punk rock”--one of Bolles’ 45 r.p.m. efforts in that field with the Lexington Devils can command $100 now--but their interests have since branched out.

“I myself am going more for ‘50s easy listening with great covers, Martin Denny, things like that,” Vague said.

They wouldn’t be the same on CD, he said: “A lot of the engineers remastering stuff for CD seem only to be trying to impress people, pumping the bass and the highs, and they lose the warmth and what the artist intended it to sound like. It’s like putting Toyota tail lights on the back of a ’57 Chevy.”

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Michael Gittleman of Monterey Park, hunkered down searching through boxes of used albums, had arrived at the record swap meet at 7 a.m., looking for modern jazz and international music LPs. He buys some 200 records a year--”only vinyl and 78s,” he was careful to point out. Compact discs don’t sound natural to him, and he resents that most record companies have stopped issuing releases on vinyl.

“I’m only 40 years old, but I feel like I’m being outmoded 20 years early. I felt we were given no choice. Never before has an industry conducted a war against a product, a premeditated murder of the product,” he complained.

While new albums routinely still come out on vinyl LP in such countries as England and Germany, U.S. labels phased vinyl out five years ago, and only recently have begun issuing limited runs of records as an interest-getter. Nirvana’s “In Utero” album was limited to a vinyl run of 25,000 copies. Geffen Records publicist Dennis Dennehy said it was issued in that format two weeks before the CD release in order to give college radio stations--which still play a lot of vinyl--a jump on airing the LP.

Stores carrying it and the Pearl Jam “Vs.” album report that they were barely able to keep them in stock. The brisk sales, though, “are due more to kids buying it because they think it will be rare more than because they love vinyl,” said Mike Lefebvre, owner of Pepperland Records in Anaheim.

His and other stores still do a brisk business in used vinyl, which sells, he says, to “people who grew up with its unique sound and still love it, even the scratches.”

Shopping through the used record bins of Aron’s Records in Hollywood, Mollie Gilbert seemed a curious case in point. The 21-year-old has blue and purple strands of hair, a nose ring, and goes by the name the Melting Girl when she’s on the air as a DJ on the UC Santa Cruz radio station.

“I love vinyl, and have over 800 albums. I like the artwork, the size and the collector’s aspect of them. When I was very young I’d save my money and go to Tower and buy early Duran Duran and Depeche Mode records. The main stuff I get is gothic and industrial now, and it sounds a little rawer on records. Often CDs sound so overproduced, because of the digital quality, that they just don’t sound real to me. That takes away from what the music is all about.”

Aron’s manager Jesse Klemtner says, “Used vinyl still sells extremely well. We usually can’t get enough of it. We wish we could buy it new. Those few titles that are coming in, like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, are just going screaming out the door.”

A similar situation stands at Rhino Records in Westwood, where used vinyl sales can range from customers buying stacks of 70 albums for 92 cents each at the store’s parking lot sales, to jazz collectors who pay $150 for a single vintage Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk LP.

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“Vinyl is a good business for us,” said Rhino district manager Rick Giering. “The latest statistics I’ve seen indicate that something like 92% of the country still has a turntable, whereas CD players have only just topped 50% penetration, so there’s twice as many people that own turntables, and the market for records here indicates they’re using them.”

While most everyday vinyl has been sold at bargain prices since CDs came along, collectible vinyl has seen a reverse trend. Rarities like the stereo Beatles “butcher cover,” which once topped-out at $1,000, can go for several thousand now. Classical performances in the RCA Living Stereo and Mercury Living Presence are up to $1,000, and don’t even ask what a Robert Johnson 78 goes for. Other hot, though far less pricey, current collector areas include ‘50s jazz and ‘70s funk. Some collectors will fork over $20 for the vinyl version of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Raw Power” simply because on the CD version Iggy’s between-song burp was edited out.

That’s not all some listeners say they’re missing on CD. “They miss the subtlety, ambience and natural decay of music that you hear on vinyl,” says Bill Low, president of San Clemente’s AudioQuest, a high-end audio wire company that also issues its own line of CDs and records.

When one buys into the realm of $22,000 CD players or $25,000 turntables, it often is AudioQuest’s $900 interconnect cables and $150-per-foot speaker wires that link the components. Low has 18 titles on the AudioQuest Label, including blues artists Ronnie Earl, Sam McLain and Robert Lucas, and 20% of their sales are on vinyl.

According to Low, “CDs are a lifestyle advantage to most people--they’re convenient and you can play them in your car--but on an absolute basis, CDs are still noticeably inferior to vinyl. With the right system vinyl comes closest to capturing the sound of the original master recording.”

Aerospace engineer Bill Firebaugh of Laguna Hills built his own turntable six years ago. The design has since been made commercially available as the $900 and $2,500 Well Tempered Labs turntable. He says compact disc systems are “very coarse compared to what vinyl can resolve. With a good phonograph cartridge you can detect excursions on the order of X-ray dimensions.”

Put in layman’s terms, that means Firebaugh didn’t at all mind spending a Thanksgiving in his living room listening to records of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, getting up and conducting along when the music moves him.