If you are old enough to have listened to an album, then you may have participated in this form of entertainment: Album Slinging.
I’ve done my share; more than my share. My friends and I had it down to an art. Wait, maybe I should explain first exactly what an album is for Gen-XBoxers YouTubers.
God came up with albums when He was in the third grade. Albums are how the Beatles and Rolling Stones came to America. Albums were black vinyl, round and spun our lives full of Hendrix, Joplin, Hank Williams and Frank Sinatra. They spread the psychedelic revolution like a staticky virus. Front and back, albums filled our lives with music when the radio stations shut down at night.
American music was born in the grooves of those old plastic plates.They were a teenager’s most prized possession from the 1950s until 8-tracks and cassettes beat them down. If you cracked that plastic wrap on a Led Zepplin album, it smelled like sex and sounded like pure evil.
And they were capable of flying through the air like a striped tailed ape greased with WD-40.
It was a touchy sport, this album slinging. People would look at us like we were mowing the heads off of kittens, or something equally bad.
I slung my first from a pile of old gospel albums somebody had tossed in their trash can. It just seemed natural. But if you slung one, you had to keep slinging. And if you kept slinging, you developed a technique.
There was the standard Frisbee technique. Boring. There was the Sidearm Flyer (ehh); the Underarmer (for whimps) and the Behind- the-Backer (for show). Then there was Mr. Slicer.
Mr. Slicer was the addictive move. It required that the slinger pinch the plastic orb firmly between thumb and forefinger, rare back like a pitcher about to deliver a burner and bring the album down hard and vertical, releasing it about the same place a baseball would get turned loose on the air.
Mr. Slicer lived up to his name. This type of throw turned the album into a bounding, wafer-thin wheel that flew down the road and dipped to glance the pavement and fly some more until eventually becoming an explosion of vinyl shards, and with that final act was gone.
The old, thicker ones from the early 1960s made the best slingers. 45’s weren’t too aerodynamic for long distance. And of course, there was a hierarchy of what was allowed to be launched. Clearly, nobody with even a prune for a brain would ever throw a good album like “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The cover alone proved your manhood in the neighborhood. But if we got our hands on some old Captain & Tennille or Bobby Goldsboro, we went Nolan Ryan on those things until our shoulders hurt.
Before I wrote this, I tried to sling a CD. How pathetic. No weight, no size. Even if you throw down on a CD like Lumberjack Bob at a Paul Bunyon ax-off, it floats like Forrest Gump’s feather. Thirty years from now, nobody will be waxing nostalgic about CD slinging back in the day. But in 30 years, I guarantee, as I push my walker around Desperate Acres Retirement Home, I can find old album slingers around every corner. One catch though – none of us will likely remember it. So I’m writing it down here.
Tags: Famous People, Music, Personal Stories, Technology