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VINYLMANIACS

Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg, Mayor

drgizmo@meta-gizmo.com

Because my goal is to convince everyone in America to listen to vinyl I created Vinylville, USA as place to travel to if you want to learn more about vinyl and expand your enjoyment of it. Every serious music lover should own a vinyl playback system and it shouldn’t require a life of crime to acquire it. This is a great time to buy vinyl and start building your library. Vinyl was and still is the primal fun of the audio arts...it is the only place where witch craft and the audio arts play well together. Being Mayor of Vinylville is a big responsibility right on top of my awesome responsibility as Guildmeister of The Triode Guild...but national service is calling me....including more and more focus on the upcoming presidential race.

If and when I am elected President I intend to revive the vinyl industry by immediately funding the reopening of all of the vinyl mines located on federal property, as a way of supporting the renaissance of ancient holey ones.

This is a worthwhile commitment because it is a universal truth that there is a unique music beauty in the vinyl medium, and this process should not be approached from question of "IS VINYL BETTER THAN DIGITAL?". This vinylmania is about having the maximum number of different forms of musical stimulation, or said from another point of view...having the maximum number of options in creating your unique home aural matrix.

Yet, I think on the most fundamental level vinyl is all about ritual, playing and having fun; exploring the physicality of the audio arts. When we do vinyl we are doing the roots thing. We are dealing with the primal gooey matter of our passion. Everything we know about the audio arts is rooted in the vinyl medium, and there is treasure encoded within its blackness, that will never been available in any digital format. If we don’t listen to vinyl an entire cosmos of music is invisible to us.

Does it matter that great vinyl can be bought for one dollar or two dollars each...or even twenty five cents? Does it matter that for the price of two new CDs you can buy forty records? How do I know? I know because I do exactly what thousands of others are doing. It is a no brainer......vinyl is a bargain.

I grew up on vinyl. I discovered the mystery of a women’s body the first time while some Frank Sinatra vinyl melted away my girlfriend Honey’s defenses. And listening to old records (like very early Roy Orbason) that have the great old time sound is the same kind of thrill of riding a perfectly restored 1956 Hawg Electro Glide in turquoise and white, with white leather saddle bags and white wall tires....if you know what I am mean about being transported to a higher dimension of being.

WARNING: I am not now going to address one of the hottest topics on the world wide web..."Are UFO’s nothing more than records from outerspace looking for a playback deck? Meaning that the reason we haven’t made contact with all of those alien music intelligence’s is because we haven’t developed the playback technology yet. Am I not going to reveal information given to me by these extra-terrestrial music aliens about since 1947 they have been putting a secret code in all vinyl.

So let’s lock that almost dead brainy white audio professor who can’t dance in the cellar and let’s have some fun with the grooviest tribe of the audio arts.

WELCOME TO VINYLVILLE

Vinylville was once the most famous music resort in America, and everyone who was anyone vacationed here almost everyday, but things changed and like all facets of American life, most of the folks who came here on vacation started to go to Digitalville for vacation, and things started to get very shabby in Vinylville. But a strange thing started to happen a couple of years ago...just like South Beach in Florida. All of a sudden Vinylville started to become, once again, the really cool place for those "in the know" to hang out...away from the crass digital masses...and Vinylville started to come back so strong that.....

Well, your Mayor is having a lot of problems because the infrastructure, after years of neglect, just can’t handle the influx of tourists. I recently attended a conference with the Mayors of Aspen, Colorado, and Butte, Montana to get their advice on how to handle explosive growth. The traffic has become overbearing. Every street in Vinylville is now clogged with perfectly restored 1920-1960 cars, motorcycles, trucks, and motorhomes. All of these vehicles, especially the Studerbakers, Ford Woodies and Edsels, are playing their radios very loud, but the town folks aren’t complaining because the radios are tube units playing music broadcast from Vinylville’s all tube radio station WVBC, which is playing mostly 1950s mono vinyl.

It is easy to understand the congestion on the streets which are packed with the new sheik breed of vinylmaniacs wearing their Arm-mani outfits (some are pivoted and many are straight tracking). Just check out what is happening downtown in Vinylville. There are hundreds of charming retro-designed shops devoted to the vinyl arts. There is a shops called The Knights of the Round Table devoted just to British cartridges, turntables and records. One shop Vinyl Crooners is devoted to the Post World War II crooners..Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Nat King Cole. Do I have to tell you what the Elvis shop, Blue Suede Vinyltorium, looks like and how the sales help is dressed? Did you notice that Gino’s Vinyl Pizzeria makes pies with a hole in the middle?

Did you look into the window of the Hole-istic Vinyl Care Clinic with all of those record cleaning machines and vinyl buffers? What about all of those vinyl doctors in their black coats treating the scratches and bruises in those rare records?

What is the line of people doing in front of Vinylmaniac’s Anonymous/33 Step Programs of Recovery?

Did you read the latest edition of The Vinylville Gazette, the world’s only newspaper that has white letters printed on black paper?

You are right to ask the most obvious question: Where are all of these shops getting their new mono 78, 45, and 33.3333 vinyl from? All of those big factories you noticed while you cruised along in your 1938 Cord, are vinyl factories, vinyl mastering facilities, and that big new building at the edge of Vinylville is the brand new all tube recording studio VINYL TONE STUDIO where new artists can record, and capture yesterday’s classic tone. VINYL TONE STUDIOS is the place that the new rock sound Le Nouvelle Vogue Mono sound was created.

Need a turntable to play your 78s? Why not drop in at 301 SHOP which has refurbished Garrards art of the past, as well as new updated versions of those classics including the Loricraft 301. Or the Thorens Shop. That shop with the man in the kilts playing the bagpipe is Clan Mc Linn. Or stop into one of those shops were the turntable artisan will make your custom turntable dream come true, even if it weighs more than an elephant. There are shops whose only business is turntable set-up. To say that the implosion of audio nerds gawking at these audio gems is stressing the Vinylville’s infrastructure is an understatment.

There are no movie theaters in Vinylville, but there are hundreds of vinyl listening rooms. If you want you can pay the fee and have the whole listening room to yourself, or you can do the group thing. These listening rooms are profit centers, and the successful ones put on the best show. You can tell which are the best rooms because that is where the bus loads of tourists are gathered. American Express is a big player in the Japanese tourist market and delivers, every three days, a new batch of music lovers from Japan. The Japanese love the listening rooms that look just like Ozzie and Harriet’s living room with their classic audio gear from that period. One of the most profitable listening room has all Western Electric Theater equipment.

And where is that great smell of hot fresh apple pie coming from? There is even an exact copy of a 1950s style diner, JOE’S JAVA, created just for the Japanese visitors, and it is the only place on earth where you can order both Spam fritters with grits and biscuits and pickled octopus in squid sauce on rice.

But, the biggest problem is the roller-blade skaters from California. Hundreds of thousands of sun tanned hard bodied bikini clad roller bladers have invaded Vinylville because the skating is world class. Contrary to rumors Vinylville is NOT anti-skating, because skating, with the new patented STYLI SKATE manufactured by the GROOVY SKATE COMPANY which employs the new Van Dan Hul fine line blade is big business. With all of the streets of Vinylville paved in deep grooved vinyl it makes perfect sense to move around on Styli Skates, which let you skate and track deep in the street grooves. In other words, while you skate on the STYLI SKATES your whole body shakes to the music in the groove, just like a stylus in the record. What could feel better than that? Isn’t that Bob Carver skating down the street with a stylus pressure of about 180 pounds?

And the crowds of vinylmaniacs are creating crowds of crowd-watchers. The streets are packed with the eccentric; punk and rap musicians, the musicians and audio designers from Mongolia, South Africa, and other strange places, all wanting to experience America’s Golden Age of Vinyl. Want to talk about cool? Check out the single’s bars, music clubs, live entertainment spots....all the music is covered in vinyl cream, which is why...

On the outskirts of town is the Vinyl Dairy that has the finest pedigree herd of all black cows that produce a special vinyl cream that is mixed into the pure virgin vinyl from the Vinylville Vinyl Mines, which explains why all of the vinyl records produced in Vinylville are so creamy.

Don’t be confused by those streets that have the same shops on both sides of the street...this is Stereo Boulevard.

AN INVITATION FROM THE MAYOR

If you are a vinylmaniac, or of thinking of becoming one, or if you are in the business of serving the needs of vinylmaniacs, and especially if you are designing analogue gear, Vinylville is the place for you to hang out. Why not rent an apartment, or a store on one of our streets, so vinylmaniacs will know where to buy your stuff?

Perhaps you would like to deliver a speech in our town circle about some radical point a view about vinylmania. Just take the pulpit in our soon to be opened bulletin board.

 

 

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