Rags to Rufus

I think it was the year 2014 when I started thinking seriously about getting a little portable record player. That’s the year when a friend of mine had some of us over to his new apartment, where he showed off his newly-acquired portable player. I think we listened to a Beach Boys album. His large-for-a-studio apartment was in a newly constructed condo building that was struggling to become fully occupied, even as people with no homes at all walked the sidewalks out front. Inside, the apartment was uncluttered, leaving plenty of space for that cute little record player.

In 2014, the whole 21st-century vinyl record craze was just beginning to take off. I did a little research, and apparently vinyl record sales in 2014 were up 50% over the previous year. In the intervening years, those sales have gone up another 400%. I could write a whole Metaforia around that in itself: the allure of something finite and tactile in an overwhelmingly on-demand and frustratingly intangible world of entertainment; the slow and unexpected return of something declared “dead” long ago.

But this one is about my new record player.

For a few years now, I’ve been saving up the occasional bit of cash in a little box on my bookshelf labeled “record player." Truth is, there’s been more than enough in there for a long time now. But I never could bite the bullet.  I kept talking myself out of it. It seemed like an indulgence — the expense was one thing, but I also had nowhere to put it. If you can make a space for it, you can buy it, I’d promise myself, as if a new horizontal surface was going to magically free up in my crowded and stubbornly concrete bedroom.¹

There’s also the hipster factor. The word “hipster” gets thrown around a lot as a pejorative, but, to me, hipster-esque behavior is only deserving of disdain when one is doing something to seem cool, as opposed to just doing it because you like it. If I roast my own coffee beans in an old popcorn popper on my porch because I want to lord it over people, then yes, I’m the asshole. If I do it for the love of fresh coffee (and, you know, because I found some well-priced green beans on my trip to Portland), that’s just me being me. If people want to call it “cool,” so be it. And sure, I live in Silver Lake, which is kind of the L.A. Mecca of hipsterdom (or, like, it USED to be). But does that alone mean that buying myself a portable record player is leaning into some kind of cliche? And, on top of that, what if the only place selling the portable record players is Urban Fucking Outfitters? Is that a choice that I can live with? Apparently, on some level, the answer was always no.

My intentions were ever so pure. What I wanted was to own a collection of primarily (or perhaps even exclusively!) R&B and funk records from the 1960s and ‘70s. That way, my record player would be kind of like a time machine. I could close my door, pop on some Four Tops or Parliament, and pretend I was somewhere I’d never been before. Somewhen. This fantasy sprung from the fact that I already owned one record — a Rufus LP, Rags to Rufus, the one that has “Tell Me Something Good” on it — purchased from the Brown Elephant, a huge thrift shop in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.

Come to think of it, that Rufus record is evidence that I actually dreamed of having a record player of my own long before 2014.² For over a decade now, Rags to Rufus has been a kind of totemic decoration. I even added some glitter to the cover in certain places. My weird little work of art. All this time, though, the record went unplayed. I’m not sure I’d even checked to see if it was in its sleeve.

I’m not sure what made me buy that record in the first place, let alone keep it all these years. I guess it was the same impulse that led me to buy a set of glasses from a vintage shop in West Town³ while I still lived with my dad after college. My cousin’s friends had opened a vintage shop, and at the grand opening I spotted a set of beautiful silver-rimmed Collins glasses, a letter “F” in ornate silver script on each glass. They lived in a paper bag under my rusty futon for years, waiting for a home of their own. Put simply, I didn’t know when the glasses would have that home, but I knew they’d have it someday.

Last week, I was taking a midday sanity walk around my neighborhood. On my way back to my place, I spotted a red and white box on the stoop of the building next door. I walked, the drove, past this object couple more times before finally deciding to grab it for a closer look. Sure enough, it was a portable record player. I didn’t know why it had been cast off, but if it still worked, I knew I’d really hit the jackpot. Saving money and saving something from becoming trash? Now that’s some real hipster shit. I plugged in the player. I got out the Rufus record. I dusted both off.

They worked. They both worked.

The issue of where to put the thing has resolved itself, in a sense. It’s sitting on the floor of my bedroom. Casual, sure, but even that fits perfectly into the time-travel fantasy. This? Oh, this is just my little bedroom record player. The hi-fi is out by the conversation pit.

The turntable doesn’t have any branding on it. My internet research suggested that the closest match out there was a “remarkably cheap” record player once sold in British ALDI stores for Mother’s Day. But even that isn’t an exact match. And how would a remarkably cheap British record player from 2017 make it to the give-away zone out front at the apartment building next to mine? It’s not impossible, but if someone was going to toss a perfectly good record player, you’d think they’d do it BEFORE making a transatlantic move.

I love this added layer of mystery. It lends the record player a kind of heaven-sent, miraculous quality.  Some people (especially here in California) might say that I “manifested” the record player. But if I’m manifesting, I’m doing it VERY slowly. Just like I slowly manifested my move to California by keeping those vintage glasses under my bed in Chicago.

No, what we have here is a lethal mix of patience, stubbornness, big-picture thinking, ambition, and hope. At the time I purchased Rags to Rufus, I had even less space of my own than I do now. I hadn’t been anywhere near a record player since I was a child who occasionally got to listen to a recording of Burl Ives or Peter and the Wolf . I didn’t know how the record would fit into who I was or who I’d become. I just felt like somehow, someday, it would.

And that was enough.

1. this is also the reason I haven’t bought a sewing machine, even though I think about how I’d like to have one several times a week

2. And that’s not even my oldest record. When I graduated from high school, my beloved German teacher gave me a Marlene Dietrich LP. I’m not sure where exactly it is, but I’m pretty certain that I’ve held onto it these past couple decades.

3. Another Chicago neighborhood