“My Vinyl Addiction & Liberace”
(a random pagemonkey rant)

I have a feeling in my gut, Gentle Reader, that most of you will begin scratching your heads when you figure out that this is about an old Reader’s Digest boxed set of vinyl albums containing some of Liberace’s greatest movements.

Others will pigeonhole me as a tired old queen with too much time on her hands, which isn’t true. I’m quite manly, and my days are, if anything, too short.

Before we get too far down the road, let me explain that my love for Liberace’s piano scandals was a taste I developed from my Mom, who was a conserative Republican of the Goldwater sort - she didn’t care one iota about whom was fucking who, so long as they were all putting in quality time at work, paying their taxes, not spitting on sidewalks, and driving sanely in their cars.

She and I, we collected records, and our Liberace collection was equaled only by our Elton John collection.

(You prolly don’t care, but my Dad was also a conservative Republican but of the “from Hell” sort who discovered one day in 1978 that Liberace was suspected of being fruity, and took our Liberace collection to the dump that evening, lock, stock and barrel. Mom and I put Elton’s works in the witness protection program while he was out dumping “that piano queer,” which later saved them when Dad found out that Elton, too, was a bit fruity.)

It’s worth noting that I was a late scamp in adopting the digital craze of compact discs. I maintained an awe-inspiring turntable and record collection up to 1993, which I sold to purchase an awe-inspiring CD player and the buds from which a CD collection could grow.

And the first thing I noticed from my $2,000 dollar investment was that the magic of some music apparently can’t be digitized.

I’ve been on a quest for the “musical grail” ever since, and just recently I decided to finally scratch my sonic itch.

I’m a thrift-store junkie of the first water, because I think it’s the best way to recycle stuff, and little more than a year ago I happened across a boxed album collection of Liberace’s greatest hits published by Reader’s Digest many moons past - in fact, a twin brother of something my Dad hauled to the dump one fateful evening.

I simply couldn’t leave with out it, so I bought it and about 35lbs of other vinyl along with it.

Last month, I bought a vintage turntable, a cartridge and stylus which had been stored for about 25 years but was manufactured during the vinyl boom days, a vintage preamp, and a new sound card for my computer - and then realized that these items were just a starter kit. I also added a 15 year old stereo receiver and a 30 year old dbx II expander, along with a pair of 30 year old speakers.

And then the chemistry of playing a 25 year old album begins…

Whoever owned the Reader’s Digest set was obviously fond of it and took extremely good care of it - no fingerprints, no scratches, no evidence of anything but loving play. But an album that old has dust and grit you just cannot brush off.

So it took a thorough washing and the only thing I could think of to do the job was something I used in high school and college, when I was heavily into photography of the darkroom sort.

Kodak’s Photo-Flo solution is a superb concoction, having most of the properties of dish soap without the caustic surfactants - it will dry spotless, and it’s also slippery as ice.

And the first time I played those Liberace albums was incredible - but I wanted to record them to avoid fucking with the turntable everytime I wanted to play those tunes, and decided to go an extra step in my recording process.

To do that, I revived a 1970s technique used to salvage 1930s albums - the process of wet play, where the album is played with literally a “lake” of emulsion on its surface - in this case, Kodak Photo-Flo and olive oil. This technique reduces surface noise dramatically, and brings to life performance the album’s engineers worked so hard to bring to the fan.

Here’s a video of the recording process, and when you watch, you can actually see the water/Kodak/olive oil at work - and if you watch behind the cartridge in some views, you can see how perilously the emulsion overflows, eventually running down onto the turntable platter and eventually off. (We all know Flash isn’t great for sound, so here’s a 55-second play in 16-bit WinMedia audio format for you to enjoy, cheerfully hosted by Real Amateurs Project.)

When you’re done watching and listening, take a moment and visit www.liberace.org and navigate to the Liberace Foundation - and then lean left a little so you can get your wallet out of your right hand back pocket, fetch a credit card and donate.

One of Lib’s legacies is his foundation, which collects donations, and spends the proceeds on scholarships for budding musicians - real ones, not the tripe seen on those “Idol” shows - and the foundation has a very high bang for the buck. The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas pays most of the expenses for the Fund, so almost all of your donation actually puts money into the hands of a future entertainer.

If we don’t support real entertainment, at some point in the future we’ll have nothing to look back upon and remember fondly.

~ pagemonkey