We went to a nostalgia show last weekend in Komoka. We love those things. Old people poking around old stuff owned by other old people. I only bought one thing.
This:
It’s an item specific to one era – mine – and it set me back fifty cents. I likely had dozens of them back in the day because I had dozens of 45s and in order to play them, they needed centres. But I don’t remember buying them and I have no idea what happened to them. Now they’re hardly seen.
Someone said it’s called a spider but I think that’s revisionist history because I never heard anyone refer to them by that name when they were in use. If I went through my entire childhood and adolescence not knowing their proper name, I’d be happy to accept the proof! And looking back, one wonders why 45s weren’t just made with small centres, the same as LPs. But that’s revisionist thinking, too. At the time we just knew that if we wanted to play a stack of singles, we needed a bunch of those little plastic doodads.
Today is Record Store Day. Several bands have released vinyl records to commemorate it. Some of us remember when every day was record store day and I honestly can’t remember the last time I was in an actual record store. Maybe today’s a good day to drop into one and see what’s old.
Apparently someone at RCA invented them and named them `spiders’ but I don’t ever remember calling them that. It seems to me we used to just call them `middles’.