Author Eric Spitznagel's Quest For His Old Records Brings Him To Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- We all have memories that we have discarded.
Maybe it's that birthday card with the handwritten note that you trashed to make room. Perhaps it's the yearbooks that took up too much real estate on the bookshelf. It could even be the Beanie Babies that you sold in a failed attempt to put a dent in your student loan debt. Whatever it is, there's a piece of all of us we've collected along the way that has been bartered away in the interest of money or space.
For Eric Spitznagel, it was his record collection.
Years after selling his vinyl collection, Spitznagel became determined to get back his records. Not just a copy of KISS Alive II or Slippery When Wet, but his actual copy of those records and all the records that he once owned.
To Spitznagel those tattered sleeves contain more than just the worn wax he grew up listening to, but they also carried with them the memories of a life spent with music.
"The exact one. Something that just kind of looked like it or was from the same era, to me that would have been cheating" Eric explains. "What I really wanted was the copy of my old Bon Jovi record with my first girlfriend's phone number scrolled on it."
This journey to reclaim his lost collection - along with all the notes and smells that accompany it - is detailed in his latest book "Old Records Never Die". It's a quest that has taken him from the neighborhood record stores of Illinois to foreign basements and beyond. It also has produced its fair share of skeptics.
"The majority of the people I talk to, kind of made it very clear to me that they thought I was insane" Eric describes. "It's trying to find a needle in a haystack, and you just flip and flip and flip and kind of deduce things."
Insanity aside, Spitznagel's search did actually lead him to at least one of his original albums. "There's one record that without a shadow of the doubt, I know is mine. There's a couple others that I think are mine because the scratch is in the right place or it's covered in a footprint that I kind of vaguely remember or it smells the way I think that it does" he laughs. "There's one, where it's like 'holy smokes, I actually found this record'. And it's not even a good record, that's the thing. It's just what the object represented about a certain time in my life and how your ego develops back in your youth."
Eric Spitznagel will be appearing at Repo Records on South St. on Tuesday April 12th to share stories about his musical mission with fellow fans, and maybe even continue his search through their stacks of LPs. "It's amazing to me whenever you bring up a topic like this, everyone has a story about an old record or cassette or even CD that they used to listen to insistently, and there was something about that object that meant something to them. Literally everyone I talk to, cab drivers to Starbucks baristas."
"Old Records Never Die" is available everywhere on April 12th. To hear much more from Eric Spitznagel, check out the full interview below.
