If you visit our
News Desk, you'll find my announcement of Michael Fremer's latest DVD,
It's A Vinyl World, After All. While Michael offers an entertaining look into the world of vinyl manufacturing and provides tons of valuable information on record collecting, handling, cleaning, and storage, I did have one minor criticism:
Mikey does ramble. Fortunately, the dude is charming as all get-out. While the scenes at the Pallas and RTI record-pressing plants are scripted, the scenes shot in Mikey's home are clearly off the cuff. He stutters, he stumbles, he makes mistakes (then cleverly corrects them), and makes fun of himself and of others, all in good fun. The result is part home movie, part PBS documentary, and all Mikey.
Michael offers one correction here. He insists that no scenes were scripted. This is hard to believe. At one point, I even thought I saw a cue card wander into the screen. Just kidding. I trust Mikey, but am left wondering why the scenes shot in his home are so bumpy compared to those shot on location. Perhaps there was a certain amount of pressure that helped him to nail those location scenes; a pressure that was, of course, missing from the scenes shot in his home.
It's a tough call. Had Mikey tightened up a bit, we may have been deprived of some of that charming "home movie" vibe. However, some editing of certain scenes could have been accomplished without sacrificing any of the fun. Mikey agrees with this, feeling that his discussion of cleaning fluids was a bit disjointed. While I still found Mikey's explanations helpful, the task of record cleaning may seem
unnecessarily daunting to the complete novice.
In fact, cleaning records is really fun and easy. And strangely satisfying!
In my piece on Mikey's DVD, I went on to write:
If you've ever wondered exactly how a record should be cleaned, It's a Vinyl World, After All will put your worries to rest. I wish I'd had this DVD a year ago! Early in my affair with vinyl, when I realized that I would, in fact, need to clean my records, I suffered many days of fear and frustration simply because I had no one to show me what to do. All I needed was to see a record being cleaned. It's a Vinyl World shows you that, and more.
Once you get the hang of cleaning your LPs, you'll almost certainly come up with a personalized method that utilizes your preferred brushes, fluids, and machine, and proves to be easy, efficient, and thorough. It'll become fun and almost addictive. You'll spend your day dreaming of cleaning your new Ornette Coleman LP, and when five o'clock rolls around, you'll rush home to do just that.
During a recent e-mail exchange with Music Direct's affable Josh Bizar, the topic turned to record cleaning. Josh shared with me his "
Secret Record Cleaning Method."
