MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Summer 2019

54 words :: Ned Morgan photos :: Nolan Dubeau Much has changed since I acquired my first long-playing (LP) record in 1977. That year, my uncle gave me Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell for Christmas, and the cover art—a sketchy guy reclined on a motorcycle blasting up out of a cemetery, a giant bat in the background screeching in encouragement—was unsettling to say the least. Looking back on it (and on LP sleeves in general) I’m struck by the commanding 12”x12” canvas—you can’t just glance. For better or worse, it demands close examination. Today, such an impact is difficult to recall. In today’s streaming music apps, cover art is a small emblem for a collection of otherwise invisible digital audio files. While streaming music I can match impulse to fulfillment, clicking any song into my consciousness as if telekinetically. When I signed up for Spotify a few years ago I mostly turned my back on my longstanding collection of hard-goods music: LPs, compact discs, and a few cassettes. Who needs them? Lots of people, judging by the traffic in and out of Randy’s Records in Owen Sound, Ontario, when I dropped in recently. Installed on 8 th Street East since the mid-1980s, Randy’s is one of the few remaining old-fashioned record stores I know of, apart from the hipster- mandated specialty boutique still hanging on in big cities. Proprietor Randy Poste has not visibly changed much since I first started frequenting his shop when I was in high school in the late Eighties. He appears somewhat ageless—at a glance he could be a skinny, shaggy-haired teenager—but certain objects in the shop date him. Namely, the concert T-shirt hanging on the wall behind the cash register, from the Rolling Stones 1975 tour—Randy himself bought the shirt at the Maple Leaf Gardens show. He is a classic rock superfan in for the long haul. He carries DVDs, CDs and video games near the front of the store but 15 feet in and you have to walk sideways between the sturdy wooden cases dense with old LPs. While I browse—marvelling at all the sleeve art, much of it new to me and lost to history—a man in his sixties walks in and asks Randy for country and western cassette tapes. He’s just bought a used pick-up truck outfitted with a tape deck, he explains. As Randy eagerly directs him to the overcrowded cassette shelves, I ponder: Here is the customer Randy Why the long-playing record store endures MUSIC