Free Old Records Never Die by Eric Spitznagel

Piccadilly Records on Oldham Street. But then I talked to some guys with thick British accents who were really, really into Liz Phair, and they made a convincing case that Liz Phair was the most important artist in our lifetime, certainly the most important artist making songs about being a blow job queen. So I bought
Exile in Guyville
instead. I essentially traveled thirty-eight hundred miles to pay three times the amount for an album that was recorded in a Chicago studio located six miles from my apartment.
    Let It Bleed , the Rolling Stones. The cover sleeve contains the radio station call letters WBCR written in big black Sharpie. Also, a muddy boot print. Doc Martens, I’m pretty sure. The boot print was not accidental, but a very earnest attempt by a college radio station manager to destroy the record. It was unsuccessful.
    Alive II , KISS . In ballpoint pen, written across the band’s name, it reads: “HANDS OFF!!!” A warning from Mark, my younger brother by two years—when he was approximately seven and I was nine—that any further attempts to lay claim to his vinyl property would result in swift and merciless vengeance. I remember very explicitly that there were three exclamation points. Because one would not be enough to convey the full force of his threat. This was no joke.
    I don’t know if my brother even remembers this—not just writing a cryptic warning on a KISS record, but owning a KISS record at all. He’s a very different person than he was when we were kids. For one thing, he’s filthy rich.
    Mark wasn’t born rich. If he was, I’d be rich too. He got that way because he’s very good at making bad bets. He’s what some people have called a “doomsday investor.” He bets on market calamity, the financial disasters that nobody expects to happen. Every time you turn on the news and the stock market has taken another hit and the federal debt ceiling is on the verge of caving in, Mark just made another million.
    Mark and I aren’t just in different tax brackets—we’re in different universes.
    When I tell people that my brother is rich, their first question is usually: “So you guys probably don’t get along anymore, right?” Which is a weird thing to assume, especially the “anymore” part.
    If I’m being honest, okay sure, my brother and I aren’t as close as we were when we were kids. But that’s inevitable. You’ll never be as emotionally connected to somebody as you were when you lived across the hall from them, and his unfairly bogarting the KISS record seemed like the only thing in the universe that mattered. He wasn’t just my brother, he was my nemesis, somebody I thought about constantly, mostly about how he was a dick and was always hogging the cool records.
    The last time I visited my brother, I had dinner with him in his gigantic backyard, and we stayed up far too late drinking Scotch that cost more than my electricity bill for a year. We talked about the recent happenings in our life, and pretended our lives weren’t different in every fundamental way.
    KISS
Alive II
isn’t a good record. It’s a pretty shitty one, if memory serves. You realize that almost immediately, before the first song even begins, when a tour crew member opens the record by screaming at the audience, like a toddler having a meltdown: “You wanted the best and you got the best! The hottest band in the world! KIIIIIISS!!” But I remember weekends spent just staring at the cover, listening to every song in chronological order, and being utterly hypnotized. I’m not sure if I ever made the conscious decision “This is music that aesthetically appeals to me.” But it felt important somehow. The same way it felt important to stare at the hot girl in chemistry class in high school, the one with the amazing black hair that she’d twirl around her pinkie finger in an absentminded sort