Vinyl treasures

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/03/2018 (3060 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Feb. 24, Alice MacKenzie was where she usually is the last Saturday of the month: in the basement of the six-storey Power Building, 428 Portage Ave., volunteering her time at the Vinyl Vault, a monthly, used-record sale in support of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.

MacKenzie, a longtime MCO board member, was performing her regular duty, bagging purchases, when a person she pegged as 15 years old asked her to play an album he was interested in, on a Philips turntable reserved strictly for that purpose. Because MacKenzie half-expected it to be something by the Beatles or the Doors, acts that are “huge with kids that age,” she was gobsmacked when the LP-in-question turned out to be one comprised entirely of— Choo! Choo! — train sounds.

“He listened to it for about a minute before announcing he loved it and was going to buy it, for sure,” says MacKenzie, seated near a stacked-to-the-hilt, plywood shelf labelled “Broadway Compilations.”

“I think that’s one of the things that makes helping out here so much fun, being constantly surprised what people are drawn to,” pipes in fellow volunteer Lindsay Butt, one of a handful of people responsible for going through boxes of donations on a weekly basis, before sorting them into a dozen or so categories, among them rock, disco, female vocalists and spoken word. (Hey, if you’re having trouble getting Rover to sit and stay, the vault’s “Weird and Wonderful” section has a pristine copy of Train Your Dog with Barbara Woodhouse. Better yet, if you have fond childhood memories of Petite, Marvin Mouse and Robbie the Robot, there is an Archie and His Friends Christmas album waiting for you in a box stamped “Canadiana.”)

“Whenever somebody comes up to me on sale day with a stack of records, the first thing I say is, ‘So, what treasures did you find this time?’” Butt continues, cuing up a copy of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s 1969 live release, Happy Trails. “More often than not, what they’ve picked is very eclectic or something I never thought would sell in a million years. That’s when you realize not everybody is going to like what you like, necessarily.”

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In 1985, 13 years after the MCO was founded in 1972, board vice-president Ted Harland suggested putting on a used record sale to raise funds for the acclaimed orchestra, which has performed with the likes of Liona Boyd, Marc-André Hamelin and k.d. lang.

After soliciting the general public for donations, the inaugural event was staged over a six-day period at Eaton Place, now City Place, where it netted close to $7,000 in revenue. In subsequent years, biannual sales were held at Grant Park, Portage Place and Polo Park malls. But in the late 1990s, when board members began thinking they couldn’t expect volunteers to schlep hundreds of boxes of records back and forth to malls forever, they opted to open a stand-alone store on Vaughan Street, across from The Bay, that operated a few days a week, instead.

That venture closed within 12 months for a pair of reasons, MacKenzie says. First, the person-in-charge stocked the shelves primarily with classical records, limiting its appeal to the music-buying public. Second, by then CDs had supplanted vinyl records as audiophiles’ playback format of choice, meaning fewer and fewer people were poking their head inside the door. That’s when the decision was made to stage periodic sales in the bowels of the Power Building, where the majority of the MCO’s collection had been stored all along, until such time as people stopped showing up.

Well, here we are, close to 20 years later, and thanks in large part to a new generation of music lovers that holds vinyl records in high esteem, the Vinyl Vault is more popular than ever, says Conrad Sweatman, the MCO’s marketing and communications manager.

When asked why, in a day and age when anybody can walk around with a gazillion songs stored on their mobile device, people routinely line up 30 minutes early the day of a sale to peruse the 15,000 or so titles on the vault’s shelves, Sweatman says it’s the same reason he collects books versus transferring his home library onto an e-reader.

“Regrettably I parted ways with most of my record collection when I moved out of my mom’s house but I can’t give up my books because, in my opinion, there’s still something to be said for having a physical copy of something,” he says. “That and hipsters, though I hate to use that term, seem to have a real nostalgia for certain analog and retro things. It’s almost a reaction against technology and the internet when you see these young people waxing nostalgic for the past. Not only is that reflected in the type of music they’re listening to, whether it’s the Stones, Zeppelin or whatever, but also by the type of technology they’re turning to, to listen to that music.”

Take for example Min Dalbacka, a 20-year-old university student who first visited the Vinyl Vault 12 months ago, not long after she moved to Winnipeg from Duluth, Minn., to continue her studies.

“My parents had a turntable when I was growing up and after I turned 18, I bought (a turntable) for myself,” she says, seconds after paying for her most recent finds: two albums by violinist Itzhak Perlman and a third by Miriam Makeba, a South African singer she was unaware of “going in.” “For sure I love the feel of listening to records more than I do CDs, plus shopping (for records) is very esthetic; I look mostly for cover art because if you don’t know the titles or the artists, why not follow your heart?”

Another draw is the cost, Dalbacka says. Because almost all records are priced at $3, except for ones volunteers have deemed as “collectibles,” she doesn’t worry whether something she buys blindly will turn out to be “some bomb album.”

“Record collecting is a horrible addiction,” she says with a laugh. “I swear, one time I spent a fifth of my actual, earthly wealth here.”

The Vinyl Vault’s next sale is March 31, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. While Sweatman figures an article in the Free Press will undoubtedly result in some new faces showing up next weekend, he can think of a few people who probably wish he’d kept his big yap shut.

“Though I’m sure they’re happy to see us have success, and grow in popularity, at the same time they’re going to go, ‘Dang, there goes the best-kept secret in town.’”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca