If we put all the vinyl records that Julián Ruiz has, one after the other, the line would leave Spain. And it is that a million is said soon, but it is reached only after a lifetime. A life not like anyone’s, of course. It has to be a life dedicated to music and, why not say it, to collecting as obsessive as it is healthy for the ears. “The first was ‘Let’s twist again’ by Chubby Checker in 1961, when he was still a kid,” says the journalist and producer, who has gone to the trouble of reviewing no less than six hundred thousand copies of his shelves to make a a selection as brutal as it is exquisite, with the aim of offering us a spectacular exhibition with 867 vinyl records from all eras divided into different categories.
And how do you accumulate a million vinyls?, the reader will ask. You might think that in a lifetime there is almost no time to buy them, but there is the story of this famous journalist and producer to prove it. «It all started when my father bought a record player in 1955. For me, life began to revolve with a record player. For a child, at that time, listening to the music that you placed on that device was something magical. Almost like ‘streaming’”, jokes Ruiz. “My father told me not to play it, but as soon as he saw that he wasn’t there, he was going to put on a record for me.” Later, a neighbor who had contact with residents of the ‘Costa Fleming’ – the Chamartín area where thousands of US Marines from the Torrejón de Ardoz base stayed – helped him exponentially increase his collection with the best albums from abroad. . His father, who traveled a lot for his job as a journalist, also supplied him with the big releases that were made outside our borders, and when at the age of nineteen he followed in his footsteps exercising the same profession, hundreds and hundreds of promotional albums began to arrive … And so to this day.
Almost a thousand of the most iconic, beautiful and coveted LPs from his Alí Babá cave make up ‘The vinyls of Plastics and Decibels’, which is how the show that opens today at Conde Duque has been baptized, and which includes jewels such as the ‘ Yesterday and today’ by the Beatles, valued at more than twenty thousand euros (the cover, in which they appear surrounded by headless dolls and pieces of meat, was censored and there are very few copies of that edition), the curious Soviet editions of ‘ Sgt Peppers’ and ‘Revolver’, the mythical ‘Sticky Fingers’ by the Rolling Stones designed by Andy Warhol (who is also present with other Velvet Underground LPs, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin and even Miguel Bosé), the Miró of the records by Raimon and María del Mar Bonet and an impressive etcetera that will make lovers of the physical format drool.
The exhibition also exhibits more than sixty vinyl records classified as ‘erotic’, such as the famous ones by John Lennon and Yoko Uno, Jimi Hendrix or Blind Faith, and there are also sections dedicated to soundtracks with Walt Disney and Hollywood classics, to which picture-discs and of course, the great Spanish works of pop and rock. «In addition to the records by Raimon and María del Mar Bonet, there are jewels from Pic-Nic -Jeanette’s group-, rarities from Miguel Ríos, from Los Burros… a lot of delicatessen!», exclaims Ruiz, who during his loquacious speech has to say from time to time that of ‘this do not put it’ because he has lived so many anecdotes in half a century of profession, that many stars have told him their most unspeakable secrets. And it is that in addition to having pop and rock masterpieces at home, in his memory he keeps something even better: countless memories with his authors. Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, Lou Reed, Bowie…
