The Zenith Portable Phonograph

So... I'm listening to one of my all time favorite albums, "Going Places" by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

I was always a big TJB fan. I bought all their albums (well, the first 10 anyway... but that's another story). Going Places was my favorite. It was so upbeat, so lively. My favorite track was "A Walk in the Black Forest", a song that had been a hit for Horst Jankowski. I played that tune so much that I still expect to hear the "pop" that was embedded in the vinyl in my copy.

It was 1965 when that album came out. Now, I have it on a beautifully remastered CD (no "pop" in the middle of A Walk in the Black Forest), and I have a nice stereo to play it on, with nice speakers, and I have it set up so I can listen to it in any room of the house.

So... Why as I'm listening to it do I have this tremendous nostalgia for my old Zenith portable phonograph?

This phonograph was a large monster, as you might imagine from the picture--after all, a 12" album had to fit inside the thing. It was wedge-shaped with the lid closed, and yawned like a cubist whale when open. Unlike the picture, mine was unrelentingly beige. The case was beige, the tonearm was beige, the turntable was beige, the knobs were beige, the stabilizer arm was beige. The only contrast was that black rectangle clipped to the speaker cloth in the back (the 45 record adapter). When you played a record, the tonearm would sing along--certain notes would make it resonate like a violin sounding board. The speaker was a little 3-inch affair mounted in the back of the case. It was about as far from high-fidelity as you could get and still recognize the music.

But I was a music freak and this was the phonograph I had during many of my formative years. I even added an audio jack to it so I could record my own compilation tapes (on my giant reel-to-reel tape recorder).

What can I say? I guess I played that phonograph so many hours over the years that it was as much a part of the music as the notes.

And listening to one of those 1960s albums now makes me feel nostalgic for that dumb old phonograph. If I had the space to keep it, I'd probably hunt one down and buy it.

It makes no sense in any reasonable terms, but there it is.

What is "Rosebud Syndrome"?

What is Rosebud Syndrome? In a sentence, it's extreme nostalgia for something that, by any reasonable standard, you should have put behind you long ago. The name comes from "Citizen Kane", in which the title character amasses all the wealth and power anyone could want, but he has nostalgia for the Rosebud Brand sled he had as a boy.

It's as simple as that, but it's about powerful feelings, a longing, and true nostalgia for something dumb, or silly, or obsolete and so irrelevant to your current life. It's not wrong to feel such feelings, but one does wonder why we harbor such longings.

Read a few posts and it should become clear what Rosebud Syndrome is all about. Then, send your own stories about your own Rosebud Syndrome!