Let us consider a maligned sound. The skipping record. A piece of vinyl with a needle trapped in its groove.
 
Before there were MP3 players, before CDs - ever since 1888 - wherever there were records, there was a potential for skips.
 
Technically, what’s happening is the progress of the stylus has been impeded, whether due to damage, dirt or dust. Back when phonograph records were the prevailing way to hear music, skips were regarded as an annoyance. If they happened on the radio, disc jockeys considered them an embarrassment. But I love skipping records. Yes, love them. They've long held a fascination for me, back to the time my mom's Bobby Goldsboro 45 of Honey skipped incessantly on the phrase "…she planted it…" locking me in a synapse-altering thrall.
 
I’d even argue skipping records are the  Granddaddy of scratching and sampling. But am I alone in deriving secret pleasure from these spontaneous realignments of space and time? Am I alone in having been massively entertained by these unforeseen encounters? Am I alone in seeing an absurd sense of humor at work in what is essentially a defect?
 
AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS GONE BACK AND LISTENED TO A PARTICULARLY GOOD SKIP AGAIN?
 
A DJ I know told me about this skip that really got to him. It was a Carl Reiner/Mel Brooks record and the skip fell on the words “echo cave”. He let the skip go for ten or twelve minutes until it “fixed” itself. Wanting to preserve the moment and use it in some future project, he made a futile attempt at recreating magic, which, of course, failed.
 
Another DJ friend told me about her terror of  Once More, It's Christmas when that tune skipped on a high crescendo of violins. She says the effect was not unlike Herman Bloch’s shower-scene music from Psycho. After that, she couldn't be in the same room with a skipping record or she’d break into a cold sweat if it wasn't stopped right away.
 
Best of all was the guy I know who was running a little after-hours place in New York City. On the jukebox was a 45 of a song that included the chorus, “Make my day”, the Clint Eastwood phrase.
 
One night the record started skipping real bad on that line, it kept repeating over and over "Make my day, make my day, make my day…"
 
Everyone in the bar was transfixed for a moment. And then this drunk went up and punched someone named Rich in the eye, breaking his eyesocket.
 
My favorite skip? Well, the Bobby Goldsboro one was IT until some years back. I never thought a CD skip – which is a whole different process (zeroes and ones misaligning) and usually just irritating – could ever captivate me in quite the same way as good old vinyl. Then I was recording the Jimi Hendrix album Axis: Bold as Love from CD and halfway through the song Let the Good Times Roll the disc started stuttering with such alarming Mel Tillis precision I was sure an inanimate object had at last revealed a sense of humor.
 
I let the tape run and eventually played it on my Aerial View. Four or five people called to say what a great skip it was. The next week, I got a note from a listener who said his toddler began dancing violently, bobbing up and down, when the skip came on.
 
The father said it was the first time he'd seen his son act that way.