Deep in the bowels of the unfinished area of our basement is a group of six huge plastic containers. They contain the 500-plus record albums that I purchased from 1970-1984, while I was in my formative teenage and young adult years, listening to music regularly on my turntable and speakers.

I purchased my first stereo system in 1970, using some of my bar mitzvah money to buy a Technics turntable and KLH speakers, which I kept in my bedroom. And then I began accumulating albums of my favorite bands.

I remember that each week E.J. Korvette would have a sale on about a dozen popular albums for $1.99 each, and I would eagerly look for the Sunday ad in The New York Times to see if any albums I wanted were on sale. I’d convince my mom to take me there after school to purchase new albums to add to my growing collection.

I also signed up for Columbia Record Club’s mail order deal – 12 records for a penny (plus shipping and handling, of course!), with the promise of purchasing six more albums at full price over the next year. Remember those ads? I did the math and I figured that I came out ahead if I averaged out the cost of all 18 albums that I eventually received.

Those who are under 50 will never appreciate the joy of cracking open a new album, taking the wrapping off, opening the album cover to look at the lyrics and liner notes inside, then placing the album on the turntable and carefully moving the needle to the first song. The grand finale was lying in bed and listening to the music of your favorite band or singer while following the lyrics printed on the album.

Often I would want to play a particular song in the middle of an album side or skip a song, and that required particular dexterity in placing the stylus exactly before the start of the desired track. I became pretty good at this!

Of course, after multiple plays, many of my albums experienced skips and scratches – an unfortunate but common occurrence if you weren’t careful with your vinyl records. I still remember certain songs on certain albums that had skips and scratches; in fact, I could anticipate exactly when they would come while listening to a record album!

I owe most of my knowledge of rock ‘n roll music to the wonderful disc jockeys on WNEW-FM, 102.7 on the dial, who introduced me to many singers and bands that I learned to love. Pete Fornatale, Scott Muni, Jonathan Schwartz, and Alison Steele—the folks who spun the records at the station (and they literally did spin the records!)—were very much a part of my teenage years. By the time I started accumulating records, I already knew about a few of the major bands of the 1970s, such as the Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin, but it was the radio disc jockeys who introduced me to other rock ‘n roll artists, such as Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Pink Floyd, the Eagles and other lesser known but wonderful artists.

Of course, there were also a few individuals who were responsible for initially recommending that I listen to certain artists, whom I have since grown to love. Russell Mannis was a big Jethro Tull fan; we listened to Aqualung and Thick as a Brick together when I slept over at his home. In the early 1970s, my friend David Blumenthal introduced me to a then-unknown singer named Bruce Springsteen. (The rest, as they say, is history.) Adele Benisti Wexler turned me on to Joni Mitchell. We listened to her music together, while contemplating what our lives would be like in the future. Naomi Jaffe told me about Jane Olivor, a wonderful singer who never got the credit she deserves. And my wife Sharon got me to like Bette Midler, a singer I ordinarily would not have listened to.

I was lucky to have grown up during the greatest era of rock music in history. My younger friends are extremely jealous when I tell them I saw the Rolling Stones, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, James Taylor, the Eagles, Elton John, Steely Dan, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt, Paul McCartney, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Chicago, the Doobie Brothers, Jackson Browne, as well as Paul Simon in concert. I never realized how lucky I was until I began listening closely to the music of the last two decades, which in my opinion doesn’t come close to the grandeur of the music from the 1970s.

But back to those cartons that have been sitting in my basement. When CDs were first introduced in the United States in the early 1980s, I quickly gravitated to that product – and replaced most of my favorite albums with an equivalent CD. (I never did like cassette tapes.) I carefully stored all my albums in large plastic containers, where they have resided for 40 years. I haven’t opened those cartons since packing them away in 1984.

So, it was with a lot of curiosity (and a bit of trepidation) that I recently decided to open those containers and take a trip down memory lane. And boy, did it bring back strong emotions!

The first thing I noticed was how the artwork on many of the covers immediately evoked memories: Carole King’s Tapestry, which included a photo of Carole with her cat; Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which depicted Elton walking along the yellow brick road in ruby red heels; Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which shows the iconic image of a light entering a prism and coming out a rainbow; The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which incorporated a zipper as part of the album cover; Boston’s debut album, which if flipped upside-down depicts a guitar; the Ramones debut album, with the four band members clad in leather.

Incredibly, for many of the more popular albums that I used to listen to, I was able to run through all the tracks in my head simply by looking at the covers!

Some folks tell me that I should get a new turntable and listen to my old albums because the sound is much richer than CDs or streaming music. Frankly, I love the convenience of streaming music, and once I got used to being able to start a track exactly at the beginning with CDs, the idea of putting an album on a turntable and locating a particular song is not very appealing.

But it was fun to rummage through my old albums. I can’t imagine parting with these albums, even though I will likely never listen to them again. I leave it to my heirs to decide what to do with these musical treasures. Meanwhile, they will remain in my basement, a wonderful relic of musical days gone by.

Michael Feldstein, who lives in Stamford, is the author of “Meet Me in the Middle” (meet-me-in-the-middle-book.com), a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish life. He can be reached at [email protected].