St. Pius X Band Director Chad Paetznick with the classics.
Tanner Moore picked up a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s album “Rumours.” He admired the black-and-white photos on the back. This might be a good one. He’d heard some of their songs before.
Plastic shrink wrap still encased the record. A yellow-and-green sticker from Turtles, a long-gone Atlanta record store, still advertised this copy’s sales price of $6.88.
Tanner set the record aside for later. There were scores more to check out as he and a few dozen other members of the MP3 generation leafed through crates of vinyl albums displayed in the band room at St. Pius X Catholic High School during the school’s first record swap meet.
Songs by Led Zeppelin filled the room as St. Pius students examined recordings made decades before they were born. If they could find a record player that still worked, they had a chance to hear musical icons from the ‘60s and ‘70s the same way their parents had. On vinyl records.
“Records are great,” said student Ross Democko, who was listening to his iPod – he said it was Flemish metal music – as he admired the scores of records for sale on this Friday afternoon. “They have an amazing quality. They were made how many years ago, and they’re still playing.”
The sound of music from old records was a big part of the point of this gathering. “It’s got a vibe to it,” Tanner said. “It raises nostalgic feelings. When you’re only 17. Which is odd.”
Chad Paetznick gets it. He’s the school band director and organized the record swap. He’s a record collector himself. He goes for old jazz recordings and he likes to use records in his music appreciation classes. He says they sound different, better.
Paetznick said the record swap gave his students a chance for some first-hand experience with record albums, which some now may consider collecting as much for their cover’s decorative values as the music in the grooves. “They used to be considered art,” he said.
He asked parents to drop off records they didn’t want and added stacks of albums he and others offered for sale. (Money raised through sales of donated records would go to the school’s arts programs, he said.)
Sophomore Christina Kourieh browses the stacks.
Records of all types appeared. Before the swap meet, a room next to his office was packed with albums ranging from the Bee Gee’s “Saturday Night Fever” to Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballads of Green Berets” to works by The Monkees.
Band parent Marcia Watt figured she contributed a couple of hundred records herself. Most were classical music, so there was no telling whether the students would want them, but she brought rock records, too. She’d been hanging on to them for years. She finally decided to get rid of them because the family’s record player no longer worked. Besides, “we have at least that many CDs,” she said.
Nearby, St. Pius X sophomore Christina Kourieh clutched a stack of records. One featured songs by the Four Seasons. “My grandpa really likes them,” she said.
Christina said she’d recently gotten a record player and had just started collecting records. She usually listens to new bands such as MGMT and the Arctic Monkeys, she said, but at the St. Pius X swap, she’d loaded up with oldies: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and works by Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra and Pink Floyd.
Then she found a brightly colored copy of a collection of recordings by avant garde rocker and bandleader Frank Zappa.
“I don’t know who this is,” she said, “but it looks pretty cool.”
Article source: http://www.reporternewspapers.net/2012/01/28/vinyl-records-still-rock-across-generations/