Flashback: Vinyl Soundtracks

   I first started collecting and listening to movie music in my early teens. It made me a musical oddity. While most of our Madison classmates tuned into top-40 rock & roll, my colleague Dr. Sporgersi and I would ride the bus up to Wolff Kubly & Hirsig, a sort of general merchandise store on the Square, and browse through the soundtrack albums. 
    Wolff Kubly was one of those places in the early 1960s where you could actually take a new record out of its cover, put it on a turntable and listen to it right there in the store. You didn't have to buy it, or anything. Dr. Sporgersi and I took advantage of that. A lot.
    As I remember it, his favorite Wolff Kubly album was the soundtrack to "Spartacus" with music by Alex North. I liked Ernest Gold's score from "Exodus". We listened to them over and over, and I'm sure the underpaid clerks at Wolff Kubly weren't too crazy about us doing that, but I don't remember ever being told not to. 
    And I suppose it paid off. Dr. Sporgersi eventually bought the "Spartacus" soundtrack. And I bought the music from "Exodus" on what at the time was the equivalent of an EP: an abbreviated version of a long-playing album, two cuts on each side of a 33-rpm disc the size of a 45. Not much music was released that way back then, and I wish now that I'd kept that record, but of course, it's long gone. I think I wore it out playing it. It was the first recorded music I ever owned. 
    Relative poverty kept my purchases in check in the years that followed. Mostly I shopped the sales. I remember finding a copy of Elmer Bernstein's score from "The Buccaneer" for 50 cents at Ward Brodt Music. But the best place to buy bargain-priced movie music in Madison was a discount department store on Milwaukee Street called Arlan's.
    The Arlan's record department had a massive cutout bin, and the cutout soundtracks there went three for a dollar. Which meant that if I had two bucks in my pocket (and a few cents for the sales tax), I could take home six albums. A lot of it was music I'd never heard, from movies I'd never seen. But if even one or two of those albums turned out to be any good at all, I hadn't wasted my money. It was a worthwhile risk. 
    So I bought a lot of vinyl, and came to recognize the different composers and their signature sounds. Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry, Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rozsa, Maurice Jarre: They were the great ones. It was a golden age for movie music, and I was listening in. 
    I've still got most of those records. Some friends are storing them for me. It's been years since I've listened to them, or had anything to play them on. But I can't seem to get rid of them, either. I keep thinking that maybe they'll be worth something someday. Or maybe someday I'll get another turntable. I don't know.
    I guess it's just kind of nice to know they're there, relics from my movie-going, music-listening past. Mancini's score from "Charade". Bernstein's "To Kill a Mockingbird". Barry's James Bond music. Goldsmith's title theme from "The Chairman". Jarre's "Behold a Pale Horse". 
    For now, they're doing time in somebody's basement, records in boxes, gathering dust and waiting. Waiting for the needle to drop into the groove once more. Waiting to bring a memory of some flickering image to life. Waiting for a moment that might never come. Waiting to be heard again.