For my birthday, I decided to give myself a present. Son got a turntable from his grandfather for Christmas. We installed it in the living room, where my “sound system” – state of the art two decades ago – hasn’t been used for a long time. Fiston was finally able to see all the breadth and richness of the French rap records he had been listening to in his room until then on a pickup.
I did not succumb to the call of vinyl 2.0. I couldn’t see myself buying back, at double the price, albums that I first owned on cassette, then on CD. I kept the first LP I bought with my pocket money, Thriller by Michael Jackson. But like most children of the 1980s, I immediately switched to the cassette, a medium that is inexplicably coming back into fashion.
On the other hand, throughout my adolescence, I explored my father’s collection of LPs: from Alice Cooper to Led Zeppelin and from Mike Oldfield to Harmonium, via Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Leonard Cohen, the holy trinity among Cassivi.
I happened to think back to David Crosby, the morning before he died, and the album Déjà vu of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which I listened to so much with my father as a teenager. Around the same time, a friend lent me his complete collection of Black Sabbath records, which I copied onto blank tapes.
It was just before we all switched to CDs and our trips to record stores, first to Sam The Record Man, then to HMV for up-to-date albums, if not to Dutchys and Cheap Thrills for pearls rare in imports, do not furnish our Saturday afternoons. I had tried, without success, to get a job as a record store at Discus, at the Fairview Pointe-Claire.
I finally have the age that my hair gave me for a long time, pointed out to me my friend Chantal. In our garage league game last Sunday, my brother and I were jokingly said that the two of us counted for a century of experience on the blue line.
The day of my 50e birthday, inspired by Sonny’s Christmas present, I wanted to treat myself to the album that had the most impact on my youth, in 33 rpm, OKComputer by Radiohead.
I went to the local record store and found three albums by the Oxford band, but not the one I was looking for. I fell back, in the section of discounted second-hand records, on the “blue album” of the Beatles, the one I probably listened to the most in my childhood.
I had barely left the store when Sonny called me. He had forgotten his key and was waiting for me outside the door. “I have a present for you,” he said when he saw me, a record under my arm. He went to get it and came back – you guessed it – with the LP ofOKComputer, which he had bought the day before, at the same record store. Synchronicity, as Gordon Sumner would say.
We sat side by side on the sofa in the living room and listened to the two records. Without saying a word, without consulting our telephones, without ignoring the slightest song, completely absorbed by the music. The increasingly rare pure happiness of attentive listening, with nothing to disturb it.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this: sit in the living room just to listen to a full album. As I would for a film or a series. I remembered that I used to do that once with my friend Simon. Today, he buys vinyl records at practically every show he attends… even though he doesn’t own a turntable.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had set foot in a record store. My CDs have been stored in the basement since the digital revolution. I had forgotten the simple pleasure of walking through the rows, letting my gaze linger on a cover, scrolling through the albums in the bins with my index finger, like a Rolodex. It’s an endangered practice, and with it institutions like the Archambault store on rue Berri.
“I have to remind my sons that we didn’t have everything at hand. You had to look and you couldn’t always find the album you wanted! said my friend Alex to me this week.
I told the story ofOKComputer to Alain Farah, whom I met by chance this week with Sonny. He immediately got carried away, professing his love of Radiohead with his usual verve, telling Sonny that he had collected rare CDs of the band over the years. He wrote to me two days later to tell me that he could send him pictures of the discs.
I had to admit to him that given his enthusiasm, Sonny hadn’t dared to tell him that he didn’t really know Radiohead and that he had mostly listened OKComputer with me to make me happy. “Oh! Fathers and sons! », answered Alain.
I thought of the song Father and Son by Cat Stevens, from the album Tea for The Tillerman that we used to listen to on repeat at home when I was young. This heartbreaking song that moves me every time, because it reminds me of my dad. Ah! Fathers and sons…