Many years ago, a friend of mine carelessly left some of his record albums stacked atop a radiator. His mother–she must have been too busy to notice–laid a pile of clothes on top of them. By and by the heat came on: and melted the records into a kind of U-shape.
“Oh, no!” he cried, when he discovered the error. “Mom, you’ve ruined by favorite record albums!”
Ah! But I was there, and I had an idea.
We put one of the damaged albums onto a large skillet with a burn-proof surface, put it into the stove, and turned on the oven. “This’ll work!” I said. “The heat will soften the album, and gravity will pull it back into shape.”
And that’s what happened. Soon the album was nice and flat again. It was The Hurdy-Gurdy Man, by Donovan. We rushed it to the record-player to hear how well it had been restored.
Almost! The only problem was, Donovan now sounded like he was singing at the bottom of a deep well. Most of us laughed ourselves silly, hearing it.
But I’m afraid my friend was not amused. So much for his record albums.
Why does the phrase “good enough for government work” occur to me? — and you weren’t even in the government at the time. 🙂
I won’t be around much this weekend. My young cousin (daughter of a deceased and much beloved first cousin) and her Significant Other have been in town since yesterday, and I’m spending most of the weekend with them. I’m very fond of them.
I was the envy of all my high school having my own car and record player inside under the dash. I also had one of the best collections of 45 rpms around, many of which I kept in my car until someone broke in a stole them all.
Vinyl was great, but even without an incident such as this, they definitely could be warped, and then it’s game over.