All The Day-Glo Freaks Who Used To Paint Their Face Have Joined The Human Race

We recently spent a few nights at a hotel in my “hometown”—a concept which first seemed weird to me, because I grew up there but I have absolutely no actual home there. Our stay there coincided with a “Record and CD Fair” being held in the hotel ballroom. Record fairs are where fifty-somethings go to find 45 rpm vinyl discs with large holes in the middle. It’s kind of like a horse and buggy festival, except horses and buggies are perpetually useful.

At first I thought, “Oh, boy! Record and CD fair! Record and CD fair!” but after a couple deep breaths, I realized I had all the music I wanted, plus I’m going to India so I can’t carry anything anyway. But it occurred to me that any Record and CD Fair in my hometown would likely attract some of my old record-collecting music freak friends.

I poked my nose into the Fair early Sunday morning, after the hotel’s treadmill started spewing smoke while I was walking on it. The ballroom was filled with folding tables covered with boxes of old, musty vinyl albums and singles. A selection of t-shirts with vintage-looking old record labels printed on them (such as “Sinful Women” by Elmore James) caught my eye. At each booth was a fiftysomething guy with gray hair, either reading a newspaper or talking very animatedly to a potential customer about the latest Roger Waters tour.

Around the maze paced a horde of fifty-and-sixty somethings in leather jackets—die-hard rock and rollers frantically looking for That Special Limited Edition Release They Couldn’t Afford To Pay Eleven Dollars For Thirty Years Ago But For Which Now Will Pay Two Hundred. At one end of the Fair was a PA system blaring some vague, twangy rockabilly music. Occasionally a D.J. would make some announcements about some Exclusive or Rare Find available at Booth X.

I scanned the room, looking for faces that matched my age-progressed description of anyone I might have known thirty years ago. I noticed one codger with long white hair and a beard in a leather jacket, going through a bin of $2 LPs, and recognized the manager of the record store where I myself used to sell records twenty-four years ago. The last time I saw him, his long hair and beard were brown. Many walls of his house were dedicated to floor-to-ceiling record shelving units.

I held out my hand and introduced myself. He had a lot to say about the state of the music business. He gave up on retail when he saw everything going digital and online, and he got into the landscaping business. “There’s no record stores anymore. Any seventeen year old girl these days can go on Google and instantly find out anything about any song off album by any band that it took me thirty-two years to find out the hard way, and buy it online.”

The Record Fair DJ interrupted our conversation, “If anyone finds a walking cane, please bring it to the DJ area. Again, someone has dropped their walking cane, so if anyone finds it, please bring it to the DJ area.”