Final Nails in the Coffins of Vinyl

Curiosity grabbed me on the métro yesterday as the iPod shuffled in “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and so I’m posing this $64,000 question: What was the very last album you ever bought on vinyl?

Those of us of a certain age grew up buying record albums: 33-1/3-revolutions-per-minute black circles of grooves with grooves that could get warped, scratched or straight-up cracked if mishandled, in sleeves of cover artwork that remain the biggest loss suffered in the music industry’s shift to CDs (and, eventually, completely artless MP3s). My last album is above: The Joshua Tree by U2. I bought mine in 1988, a year after it dropped. The Bronx choir of Truman High School (where I spent my school daze) performed in the U2 concert movie Rattle and Hum, which turned me on to U2 in a roundabout way. But by 1988, I’d copped my first CD boombox and was goin digital buying up my very first compact discs: Michael Jackson’s Bad, Prince’s Lovesexy, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick. And so the final nail in the coffin of my wax collection was this Grammy-winning U2 joint.

But what’s your story? Take as long or short as you like.