Office by Alex Penny
I'M GOING TO LISTEN TO IT ALL.
Rock n' Roll frontman/music industry dude starts dating music-loving chick who thought she knew it all. She was wrong. So each day they pick a record from his (ever growing) collection to review. HE writes about it, SHE writes about it (no sharing before posting) and then it's onto the next.
Note: Posts are best read when listening to the choice song (http://songza.com/listen/my-boyfriend-s-record-collection-EmilyNewman/)
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Artist: Santana
Album: Abraxas
Released: 1970
Label: Columbia
Choice Song: Samba Pa Ti
HIS: When I was a kid I used to steal away to my father’s record collection, quietly pulling out certain albums and slowly going over and mesmerizing every inch of the artwork. I was far too young to operate the old man’s hi fi so this would have to be my only connection to his massive stacks of LPs when he wasn’t around to drop the needle for me. I’d sit there for hours, pulling out record by record, remembering exactly where to return it so as to not disturb the alphabetic rigidity of my father’s collection. Some covers made me think of the greater universe (Boston’s Boston, ELO’s Out Of The Blue), some gave me nightmares (Emerson, Lake And Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery, Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love) and still some made me wonder what each band member on the cover was thinking (The Who’s Who’s Next).
But then there were a few others which forced me to stare in befuddled amazement. The most important one of these was Santana’s Abraxas. I had no idea what the fuck was going on here. Of course, I had yet to hit my hallucinogen phase, so of course I couldn’t fully appreciate the psychedelic bazaar that was the Abraxas cover. All I knew was that it was exotic and wild and scary and engaging and that as soon as my dad came home we were going to put on this record.
HERS: The boyfriend and I recently moved in together. Typically when a girlfriend moves in with a boyfriend, the mixing of their stuff usually involves at least one couch getting thrown out, her filling up his closet with shoes and their bathroom overflowing with buckets of test-sized cosmetics. This isn’t exactly the case here. I mean, mostly anyway. Sure, the Irish Spring soap has been replaced with a fragrant “stress-relieving” body wash** and a purple loofah (What is a loofah??) and the bed has doubled in pillows. But there’s no ManCave with a leather couch and no garage filled with phallic toolbox toys. There are, however, right next to my vanity, no less than 6 guitars. While other women move into garages of sports cars, I’ve moved into a makeshift music studio. It could be worse. Guitars stack up nicely in their cases and amps sit handsomely while doubling as great laptop desks. Though all are heavy. Very, very heavy. I was watching him play the guitar just yesterday, actually. When he’s on stage rocking out and the amp is turn-it-up-to-11 loud, it’s hard to really appreciate the intricacy this instrument requires. But when he’s messing around quietly and manipulating the thing, it’s a different story all together. Sometimes he hands me a guitar and says, “you do it.” I’m useless. My hands feel too small, the guitar itself is heavy and I can’t seem to reach my fingers far enough even though I can hit a full octave easily on the piano. No wonder he idolizes icons like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. In all my boyfriend’s 6’4” glory, his guitars look like finger puppets in his hands. Carlos stands about 5’10” Google tells me, but still the guitars look like putty in his. He plays the guitar like it’s a piano with countless keys making it do whatever he wants in any which way. I wonder how many guitars Carlos had in his first apartment he shared with a girl.
