Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

This year’s State Fair theme was “The Soundtrack of Summer”, by which they mean “The Year of Music”. Summer is a time to listen to music while on vacation and/or while frolicking in the sun! Music is often written about summer! If music and summer were a couple, their celebrity name would be “Mummer”! I’m not sure if that should rhyme with either “bummer” or “boomer”!

The most noticeable expression of this theme was the fairground P.A. system, which they turned into an ’80s radio station (alas, no DJ) that was a pleasant addition to our surroundings whenever it wasn’t drowned out by the growls of the shuttle tractors riding their circular routes. Also supporting this theme, the Harvest Pavilion was devoted to one large exhibition called “Vinyl Revival: The Art of Music Experience”, filled with tributes to the art of album covers curated in partnership with Indy CD & Vinyl, that stalwart record shop in Broad Ripple that I’ve visited maybe once ever, because I’m only in their neighborhood once every five years or so.

I understand album covers used to be one of the perks of buying 12-inch records back in the late 20th century. Those covers aren’t quite the same objet d’art at the size of a cassette, CD, iPod menu, or music-app thumbnail. They mean even less in a culture where the music-consuming majority seems to have swung their support more toward individual singles they can toss into a 5,000-file digital folder than to full-length albums containing eight to twenty songs by the same artist and taking up shelves and crates in their home. I hate vinyl and vinyl hates me (long story), but I can recall times spent in my youth rifling through the bins at the major department stores that used to carry them, and just staring at the art that could sometimes be cooler than the tunes inside. I appreciated the chance to dive into the joy of physical media and its package design, which had to serve the dual purpose of buyer aesthetics and product advertising, as one placard acknowledged in a conscious effort to “keep it real”, as we used to say, though sometimes we Gen-X-ers were just being ironic.

In addition to those collections, the exhibit featured super-sized tributes to certain covers, accompanied by commentary. Some were blown-up copies, but many were painted reproductions, either of the entire covers or of excerpted images. I’m not sure if the latter idea was to forestall copyright issues or some fans with painting skills simply thought it’d be fun. It took a few minutes for me to realize this was why some images were a bit “off” compared to my memories. I made a game of seeing how many I recognized on sight without reading the credits. The honored albums skewed toward rock and reflected the curators’ preferences rather than any given Billboard list (e.g., three different albums by X), but a shocking number of them were in my musical wheelhouse. No one I know ever enters my wheelhouse.

From the Department of Albums I Own:

Next up is the Department of Albums I Don’t Currently Own But Used to Have or Listened To Years Ago. Rather than selecting each artist’s bestselling work, quite a few of the featured picks throughout the Pavilion could’ve been subtitled “(The Disappointing Follow-Up)“.

From the Department of Albums I’ve Never Listened To, But Photographed Anyway:

…and more, more, more. We didn’t photograph everything, but we still have a few dozen outtakes.

Among the exhibit’s interactive sections, my favorite let visitors display their own Top Ten lists for all the world to see. A four-row record bin contained copies of over 100 covers (no actual LPs) that they could insert into one of ten slots on a wall display, apparently sponsored by Ranker.com. You could also choose from a number of listicle titles to throw above them.

Obviously I had to take a turn. I flipped through the bins and pulled out ones I own and really liked, then handed them to Anne and told her, “Here, just put these up in random order.” I left the listicle title up that was already in place, which Anne couldn’t reach to replace with another one anyway.

Last stop before we exited the pavilion: Indy CD & Vinyl hosted a pop-up store where attendees could browse hundreds of vinyl records, a modest shelf filled with used CDs, and various kinds of music merchandise. I grabbed a store sticker, a Blink-182 button for my comic-con bag, and an old Patton Oswalt CD/DVD concert album. I refused to tote a vinyl record around in the 90-degree heat for the next several hours, so I waited till the end of the day to return and, against my better judgment, repurchase my third-favorite CD of 2012 in a different format, still in the original plastic. I knew deep down this would be a mistake and will not be joining the vinyl-collecting legions, but at least I’ll have a cool-looking State Fair souvenir for the shelf.

To be continued! To be continued! Other chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour
Part 3: The Year in Food, “Look But Don’t Taste” Division
Part 4: The Year in Lego
Part 5: The Year in Art
Part 6: The Year in Antiques
Part 7: Outtakes and More!