When I think about my 16 years spent as a music journalist, I think of all the free media I was sent for review and how I once had an entire basement office to store it all in. That can save for another post in the immediate future.

Over the course of the past few years with new changes and integrating my life with my future bride’s, we have both had to scale back, purge and lock away in storage until we feel right with locking down a permanent nest to call our own.

While it’s been a breath of fresh air on our recent move having only 5 boxes of media to haul versus 26 in moves from years past, what aches me more than anything I’ve let go is eliminating my hard copy CDs and vinyl records to a couple rows of the crucial essentials. I stored all the music on a USB hard drive, so it’s not a full loss, though a portion of who I am and was just doesn’t feel the same when I think about how much time was spent covering music and dropping a fortune at music shops that were my second homes.

I once had nearly 4,000 CDs and 300 pieces of vinyl, nearly half of it free. What you see here is what remains of my vinyl, with the addition of a gifted vinyl platter from former Voivod bassist Jean-Yves “Blacky” Theriault for his side project, Twin Adventure.

The Ramones saved my soul and my life in my late teens, and nothing makes me smile more than knowing I’d saved them in return, hypothetically-speaking. Blitzkrieg ’76 is one of my biggest music treasures, a rare, live bootleg recording done on my sixth birthday in 1976. It’s a brisk-moving time capsule of the Ramones at their beginning, in their fastest and rawest three chord measures.

Keeping in the theme of birthdays, an old friend of mine, Bob, once gave me a UK pressing of British hardcore punk legends The Exploited’s Troops of Tomorrow. I’d always pick this slab up in one of our old music store haunts, Music Machine, always wanting it, but never shelling out for it. I’d come home to find this album on my parents’ doorstep, the scrawled birthday message over top a second plastic jacket sleeve. I think it was my 18th or 19th birthday.

I doubt my son will see the significance in either of these gems whenever I pass, but I do hope he can see the value I place on them as remnants of a painful purging process.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.