Inside Yale's Vinyl Dungeon

• How I Found Myself Here
• Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd (10/6/25)
  • Pre-Listening
  • Listening
  • Post-Listening
• J50: Evolution of The Joker - Steve Miller Band (10/13/25)
  • Pre-Listening
  • Listening
  • Post-Listening
• Abbey Road- Beatles - Beatles (10/21/25)
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - Beatles (10/21/25)
• What’s Next

In Fall semester 2025, I’m on a research visit at Yale visiting the Quantum Systems Lab working on error correction techniques for quantum computers. A new university brings with it new adventures, and I wanted to share this one which I’d bet many Yale students probably don’t know about.

How I Found Myself Here

My vinyl story begins back in high school when my good friend Wayne got a Victrola turntable for his birthday. Luckily, Wayne and I had pretty much the same music taste (classic 80s metal – Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, etc.), so from then on the default birthday/Christmas gift was always a record. Since we left for college though, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten to listen to albums on his Victrola.

The story picks up a couple years later when my friend Aaditya at Stanford gifted me a vinyl of Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden for my birthday. Aaditya just thought the album jacket looked cool and could be a nice piece of wall art, which it definitely is:

But using one of my favorite albums just as decor seemed like a shame – I had to figure out a way to listen to it. I took a trip to the music library at Stanford and asked the reference desk if they had a record player, and lo and behold, they pointed me to the next room over where they had a turntable with a pair of headphones.

I returned the next day. I put on the headphones, put the record on the turntable, and placed the needle on. I first heard the static and excitedly awaited the experience to listen to this album. It was amazing – after listening almost exclusively to MP3s for the past couple of years, I had forgotten the difference in sound quality.

However, just after Be Quick or Be Dead (the first song on the album), I got a tap on my shoulder. The librarian told me that I had the volume up too high and the people in the otherwise quiet library could hear my Iron Maiden album loud and clear. After this, I decided to sit and listen more stoically; headbanging in a library on a Tuesday afternoon perhaps wasn’t the best idea. Alas, I left with a taste but not the full vinyl experience, as heavy metal is not meant to be listened to on 10% volume.

The story picks back up at my place in New Haven, CT on Sunday, September 28th when I noticed my housemate had a record player. I flipped through his record collection but couldn’t find anything I was too excited about. Then, the idea popped into my head – why don’t I take a look and see if the Yale music library has any records I could borrow? I opened up the catalog and the first record I searched up was Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd, which they had!¹

I placed my request and was instructed to wait a couple of business days. I hadn’t heard anything by Wednesday afternoon, so I decided to pop into the Gilmore music library and ask if I had placed the request correctly. The student at the reference desk couldn’t even find my request in her system, and they called in their supervisor. When I showed them my phone, that’s when they realized – Dark Side of the Moon is classified as a “historical record,” so it was handled by a completely different department.

They walked me over to the Manuscripts and Archives reading room, the place you’d go if you were trying to read Yale’s Gutenberg bible (yes, they have one!). Looks like I won’t be able to take this record home… The librarian here referred me to make an appointment to listen to the record with Mark, the head of Historical Sound Recordings, who was back at the Gilmore music library. So, back I went, just to find that Mark wasn’t in the office and I took down his email instead. After that whole rigamarole, I made an appointment with Mark over email for Monday at 3pm, and they placed the request for the record on my behalf.²

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd (10/6/25)

Pre-Listening

Dark Side of the Moon is probably my favorite album of all time (though perhaps this will change over the course of the semester!). On my first listen many years ago, the cacophonous sounds (the ringing clocks of “Time”, the clinking of the cash registers of Money, everything coming together in “Brain Damage/Eclipse”) jarred me and had me reflecting for days about the banal reality we live in. On subsequent listens I paid closer attention to the lyrics, and understood more deeply that the words are trying to represent the trials of life. The lyrics talk about that which separates us – greed, tribalism (“Us and Them”), jealousy. The beautiful part about this album, though, is that you can feel it through the music.

I make my way back to the Gilmore music library and the front desk instructs me to head down into the basement and make a right. Descending into the basement really gives me the dungeon-y feel. I find Mark sitting alone in a big room with sound insulating walls. Prominently featured in this room are a handful of broken records, a plethora of music players, and some huge speakers. I know this is going to be good.

Mark offers me the album cover to take a look at and I notice that on the back the copyright is from 1973. He informs me that we’re about to listen to an original pressing from the first releases of the album. I then ask Mark if it was okay that I didn’t have an academic reason for being here, to which he replied, “personal enjoyment is a perfectly legitimate reason to use the collections.” He tells me that the listening sessions are pretty much only used by music students and people taking classes for which it’s required, but the collection is available for any music enjoyer. To be completely clear, I fall into the latter category – just an “average dude” who enjoys classic rock.

Listening

Mark pulls out the dusty record, and puts it on the turntable. He proceeds to carefully brush off the dust and clean the needle to preserve the record. He says the records are cleaned every time they’re played, but nobody has listened to this one in the 14 years that he’s been the head of Historical Sound Recordings at Yale.

The sound system was absolutely amazing. There are four speakers and I was able to individually resolve every overlapping instrument while also hearing them together. Mark told me afterwards that this sound system is worth about $30,000, and he laments that people these days are just listening to MP3s on their phones instead of investing in their own quality sound systems.

My observations from this listen of Dark Side of the Moon –

• The beating heart throughout the album was absolutely chilling. On vinyl, “silence” is much more staticky than it is on digital, and I felt like the background static makes the heartbeats even more otherworldly.
• The songs really ran together so seamlessly that I had to look them up afterwards in order to reference them in this section. Listening to this album on shuffle would be an absolute crime.
• The rapid drumming in “On the Run” provided an amazing, suspense-building segue after Breathe In the Air that gets cut by the alarm clocks of “Time.” I underappreciated this song in the past and never fully noticed just how fast and crisp the drums are.
• The first side of the record ended at “Great Gig in the Sky” (before “Money”). This was a great place to have “pure silence” as it gives you a moment to sit and bask in the amazing vocals of “Great Gig in the Sky”, but not too long, as the shuffling of the coins of “Money” interrupts you. With this sound system, I felt like I could hear every individual coin clinking together, and it sparked a vision of somebody actually doing this with a cash register. “Money” is such a nice, pop-y song that feels like you’re temporarily back to real life after the insanity of “Great Gig in the Sky.”

Sometime around here, I was blankly staring across the table and I noticed Mark had a plain CD on his side of the table. On the CD I noticed the most vivid rainbow pattern from the diffraction grating. It genuinely looked exactly like the album jacket (which was also still sitting on the table) and I could resolve every color from red to purple. At this point I started to reflect on the fact that the back cover of the album connects to the front cover and refocuses the light, like in this photo I found online:

I was staring mesmerised at the mysterious CD and the album cover pondering over all this throughout the second side of the album. If the prism depicts the human things that separate us, the reunification perhaps represents that these human things could be what bring us back together. Despite this distracting me a bit, my musical observations from the second half –

• While the saxophone in “Money” and “Us and Them” is incredible, I was really able to hear the synthesizers behind the saxophone for the first time and appreciate how everything meshes together. Speaking of which, the buildup in Us and Them was absolutely amazing.
• By the time I got to “Brain Damage,” I was already totally tripping out and immersed in Pink Floyd’s world. I could see myself as a lunatic on the grass. Or maybe, the lunatic was in my head all along… I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
• The entire album came together beautifully in “Eclipse.” I had never noticed before that the lady from “Great Gig in the Sky” comes back and contributes to the cacophony. The record static and beating heart returns to close out the album, reminding me to deeply breathe in the air once more. By this point, I felt like my heart was beating in sync with the record.

Post-Listening

“So, how do you feel?,” Mark asks.

“Different.”

Mark chuckles and tells me that when he first listened to Dark Side of the Moon, he didn’t talk to anyone for days after. He proceeds to tell me about how the concept album was a new thing in the early 70s, and we started discussing some other famous concept albums - Rumours (Fleetwood Mac), The Wall (Pink Floyd), 2112 (Rush), and next week’s artist.

After leaving the studio, I basically just stared at a wall for half an hour, mesmerised by how music can take you to a different place. I got the inspiration to write about my thoughts, hence this blog post. The feeling stayed with me throughout the evening, the prism from the CD burned into my brain. When I was walking home at about 11pm, the moon was unbelievably full and it was an out of body experience bringing back riffs from the album into my head. Looking back at it now, apparently it was a harvest moon (closest orbit between the moon and Earth), which meant it really was especially bright.

“There is no dark side of the moon… as a matter of fact it’s all dark.” - Pink Floyd (Eclipse)

J50: Evolution of The Joker - Steve Miller Band (10/13/25)

Pre-Listening

As we discussed concept albums last week, Steve Miller Band came up. I mentioned that I love Steve Miller Band but have never heard them on vinyl, to which Mark replied that he is actually friends with Steve Miller! Apparently Steve Miller has helped to support and make use of much of Yale’s blues collection. He recently sent Mark a record which Mark hadn’t had a chance to listen to yet. Mark offered to bring it in so we could listen to it together, which I happily accepted.

I do know Steve Miller Band’s hits – I have their Greatest Hits 1974-1978 album on MP3, and I saw them live on tour at Citi Field last summer (which was so great!).

This being said, I don’t know exactly what Steve Miller had gifted to Mark, so I come back to the vinyl dungeon ready for a surprise. I sit down to a copy of The Joker, but it’s one of those images that changes depending on the angle you look at it (TIL this is called “lenticular printing”).

The box set is pretty heavy, so I know this isn’t any old copy of The Joker. I open the box set to find three LPs and a booklet explaining the history of The Joker, inside of which was a “tiny record” that had on it only two songs per side. I had never seen one of these before, so I ask Mark what it is. He told me it’s a 7-inch 45rpm vinyl, which was used for single releases. He pulls out a little yellow adapter that you’d use to play these 7-inch vinyls on your standard record players, since the hole in the middle is too big otherwise.

We decided not to play the single and instead listen to one of the LPs. Looking at the tracklist for the three LPs, I’ve barely heard any of the songs (except for “The Joker”). So, I looked back at the booklet, and it turns out this box set contains unreleased and workshopped tracks for each of the tracks on the final Joker album. Pretty exciting, and no wonder I hadn’t heard of any of the songs! I decide to listen to LP 2, since it contains the workshopped versions of the song “The Joker” itself.

Listening

The record opened with Steve Miller giving a preview of the LP. This side is about the creation of the song “Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma.” It started with a few instrumental songs which served as inspiration, all of which were very drum-centric. I noticed an especially strong cymbal presence in each of these. It sounded like I was listening in on a jam sesh in Steve Miller’s basement or something.

The next track began with a pleasantly surprising harmonica and an acoustic guitar track that sounded nothing like the previous three tracks to me. This being said, I quite liked it! Turns out it was an early tape of “Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma” from a hotel room. The final track on this side was the album version of “Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma,” and I could hear the drum bits from the earlier tracks on the album come together with the hotel recording into a fully formed song. Honestly, it was a little tough for me to see how the the earlier tracks inspired the final product, but I’m glad it made sense in Steve Miller’s head because the final product was quite nice. I guess that’s why I’m not a musician and he is 🙂

The second side began with a rehearsal version of “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash,” which I suspect was pretty late in the creative process since it was fairly similar to the album version which followed (though without all the after-effects of course!). Next came a previously unreleased song called “Lidi,” and the first version was a hotel recording which I really loved. This was my favorite track on the LP as it’s simple, raw, and beautiful. I loved seeing Steve Miller’s blues influence in this track. After this came the studio version of “Lidi.”

During the next two tracks we see “Lidi” evolve into a song called “Travelin’,” which Steve Miller mentioned in the commentary helped him find the chorus for “The Joker.” As the title suggests, “Travelin’” is indeed about the life of a free-wheeling traveler, and following it up with the album version of “The Joker” was amusing as the lyrics of “The Joker” have almost nothing to do with traveling. However, there’s still a very clear musical resemblance – the lyrics have a bigger effect on the mood of the song than one might think! In the commentary, Steve Miller mentioned that he didn’t finalize the lyrics until the night before the final recording of “The Joker,” when the perfect words just came to him in a vision.

Post-Listening

Listening to this LP made me reflect on everything that goes into making an album. Before, I thought that artists had it easy, and they’d just record the first thing that comes into their head and hope it lands well. Clearly this isn’t the case! I couldn’t imagine where the inspiration comes from to take the early versions of the songs and transform them into the final versions. “Lidi” and “Travelin’” were both great songs; I’d imagine it’s pretty difficult to have the motivation to keep tinkering around until it becomes “The Joker.” To be a successful artist, you need to know when you can do better than “pretty good” and push for a “great” song, and know that the world is only going to see the finished products rather than all the effort that you put into the LP. Seems like a pretty tall order when you put it that way!

I’m glad I got to listen to this album – it’s definitely not something I would have listened to on my own, but hearing the behind-the-scenes of a hit album gave me a greater appreciation for the process of making music. I’m excited to continue discovering new music with Mark for the rest of the semester!

Abbey Road- Beatles - Beatles (10/21/25)

To be continued…

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - Beatles (10/21/25)

To be continued…

What’s Next

I’m extremely grateful that I stumbled upon Yale’s vinyl dungeon almost completely by chance. I’m looking forward to tapping into Yale’s classic rock collection throughout my research visit, listening to about an album per week. As I listen to new albums, I’ll keep this page updated with my thoughts and reflections. Let me know if you have any recommendations for what album I should listen to next week!³ I’m open both to listening to the classics and discovering new albums on vinyl.