Big Brother's Records

My earliest experiences with long-playing records are down to my brother. He was a teenager in the 1960s so I remember a Beach Boys LP in our bedroom, and at least one of Bill Cosby’s LPs. He still has some of his original stereo equipment, but few of the LPs. He owned a mono Sgt. Pepper, and his stereo Magical Mystery Tour was one of the early copies shipped with the leftover Pepper inner sleeve designed by The Fool. I remember borrowing Are You Experienced? and the Buffalo Springfield compilation album and Greatest Hits Volume 2 (he didn’t have the first volume). He may still have the US edition of Relics on Harvest with the made-up bottle-opener cover. I know he had a copy of the first Frijid Pink album but I can’t remember listening to it. He would have had a copy of the vinyl All Things Must Pass set if one of the discs hadn’t skipped. When he returned it, the clerk—I think this was in a department store like Sears, back in the days when department stores had music departments—tested the disc on the store’s high-end equipment to argue that the vinyl wasn’t defective but eventually capitulated and gave him the refund. At some point it was replaced with a pirated cassette that did not include the contents of the third disc.