Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel Page A

shut me the hell up.
    At the time, it seemed inconceivable that my future son or daughter wouldn’t share my musical obsessions. I didn’t care if they looked nothing like me, if their physical features made us look like strangers. But obviously, my child and I would cry at the same records. Why would you even have a kid if this wasn’t something that happened? Sure, I never had that connection with my dad. But that was his fault. He just listened to the wrong music. If his record collection had been a little more eclectic than Willie Nelson and Cat Stevens and Jim Croce, we might’ve had a chance.
    Age brings at least a little wisdom. As I held my son and at last sang the gibberish lyrics from “Sugar Free Jazz” to him, as I always knew I would, I could feel in my gut that the gesture was fleeting. By the time he’s old enough to have a musical point of view, our personaltastes will be so incompatible that I’ll start to doubt whether we actually share DNA. I could fill his baby head with as many of my songs as I wanted, but it won’t make a damn bit of difference in the long run. When he’s sixteen, he’ll be listening to acid robot hip-hop, or whatever the fuck is popular among teens in the future, and he’ll roll his eyes when I remind him of the songs I used to sing to him as a baby.
    It doesn’t matter. The lullabies are for me.
    When Charlie was born, I felt love like I’ve never experienced before in my life. But by day two, I was in free-fall panic mode. What chance did I have of raising this tiny, fragile human being without fucking him up? Some people are born to be parents. They can change a diaper with the precision of a sushi chef, or carry the numerous baby apparatuses on their backs like Sherpas. I still think getting day drunk on a weekday and waiting for a “final notice” bill from the electric company sound like good ideas.
    When the baby anxiety gripped me, I would sing to him. I don’t know if it calmed him, but it definitely calmed me. It was the same reason why I sang along to the Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” as a teenager until I got hoarse. Because it made me feel, at least temporarily, that I had life in any way figured out.
    It’s also the reason why Kelly and I put so much thought into the labor soundtrack for our son’s delivery. We spent weeks arguing about it, bouncing song ideas back and forth. We devoted more time to creating and fine-tuning playlists than reading baby books. We once wasted an entire evening debating whether Ani DiFranco’s “Dilate” should be included, despite having nothing to do with cervixes, and ended up missing a birthing class. The only song we actually agreed on was the Foo Fighters’ “Razor,” which was lyrically perfect without being too explicit. “Wake up it’s time / We need to find a better place to hide.” Maybe Dave Grohl wasn’t talking about a stubborn womb-squatting baby, but he might as well have been.
    A few verses and my son was gurgling happily.
    Fossilize apostle and I comb it with a rake
    You can’t escape
    And I swear to you, right around the lyric about bombing schools, little, innocent, pink-faced Charlie smiled up at me. I know it was probably just a fart, but to me, it felt like a victory.

    I was at the Chicagoland Record Collectors Show in Hillside, a western suburb of Chicago. The gathering of record sellers, held every other month at a Best Western hotel off the Eisenhower Expressway, has been called the “largest vinyl show in the Midwest.” I don’t know if that’s in any way impressive. It could be like saying, “We’ve got the best shrimp in Michigan!”
    Within a few minutes of walking inside, I’d uncovered treasure. In a booth near the front entrance, I’d found a copy of the Soul Coughing “Sugar Free Jazz” twelve-inch—with the four useless remixes