Led Zeppelin IV

I had the opportunity to visit my Parents in West Virginia and after a nice 16 hour drive I got to see them for the first time since I got married and my grandparents in a few years. Trips home are always significant because, living in Mississippi, I don’t have the opportunity to visit very often. Flying is too expensive and driving is too time intensive. I had some goals for my visit. Most of my goals have nothing to do with this blog, but there was one. I was going to raid my father’s Vinyl collection.

We bought our stereo from Sears when I was a child. At the time the best electronics came from either Radio Shack or Sears, my how things have changed. Our system was not a component system, it was all one piece, with two very large speakers. I remember sitting next to it as a child wearing our Koss headphones and singing with no shame knowing I was the only one who could hear the music.

Years later when I started collecting vinyl again my brother and I set forth a solemn accord dividing my father’s vinyl. My father was not present for this binding conversation, we did this so there would be no fight later (we did the same things with our toys, the GI Joes were his as they had always been and I took transformers.) Our accord was simple, he was not a vinyl collector like me but very much a music lover and a lover of Dad’s really “cool” albums. And though I may be the brother who screams the loudest about music, Aric has a lot more knowledge about Rock and Roll in all of its variants. In fact my taste in music grew out of my brother’s, and though I found my own identity later, Aric had a big part in it. That is why Aric asked only for Dad’s copy of Black Sabbath Paranoid while I asked for Led Zeppelin IV. Of course, after listing everything I brought home I may get an angry phone call from him.

Flashdance

As I said my brother had a big influence on my in Music but it was my mother and father’s influence that surprised me. My father loved classic rock and folk. We had one car with only an AM radio and one with a cassette and FM, and in that car was Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s So Far. Which I have two vinyl copies of.

Sadly many of my father’s records have been damaged beyond repair, and though I listen to Zeppelin IV now it will probably be retired after the reissue comes out next year. There is a scratch right at the end of Stairway. Some of the albums are not playable at all but that is ok. Many of them were in a large enough release that I can either find a good copy or a new copy. Many of these records will end up in frames hanging on my walls as reminders of where I came from.

Ray Stevens

Of course I haven’t yet mentioned the most important record. I was surprised to find it, and very excited and a little shocked that it is still playable. I remember as a kid, before I started school, I spent a lot of time with my mother she listened to the local AM country station WWVA out of Wheeling West Virginia. One day I was with my mother and I heard the most wonderful thing… I heard a song about a church and a squirrel and at the end I jumped to my feet screamed, “Lord have mercy on me!” I knew then I had found the best song, ever. For Christmas that year I received my first 45, Ray Stevens’ Mississippi Squirrel Revival.

I didn’t understand a lot of the words as a child of 4 like the phrase “In her Ante-bellum world,” that phrase had no meaning to me in West Virginia, but many years later after moving to Mississippi I learned that Pascagoula was a real place. I had to pull the car over when I finally realized that I lived in the state home to America’s most important revival.

So this is what I came home with:

• The Mississippi Squirrel Revival –Ray Stevens (Forty-five)
• Led Zeppelin IV
• Peter Paul and Mary – Self Titled
• Peter Paul and Mary –See what Tomorrow Brings
• Flashdance – Soundtrack
• Fiddler on the Roof –Movie Soundtrack
• Jesus Christ Superstar –Movie Soundtrack
• ET the Extra-Terrestrial –Narrated By Michael Jackson Music By John Williams
• Led Zeppelin IV
• Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House – Walt Disney Studios