Of all the ways teens could express themselves in the 1960s — and there were many — one of the most personal and revealing was the stack of vinyl that sat beside the record player.

Your hair might have been long or short; your closet might have contained tie-dye T-shirts, dickies or button-down collars; your accessories might have included love beads or a Timex watch.

But the record collection told all. It was the most direct path to discovering how its owner was plugged into the zeitgeist.

If you had a driver’s licence and the family car, you may have spent weekend evenings during the summer cruising between drive-throughs, soda shops and ice-cream joints, windows rolled down, letting the tunes from your favourite radio station do the talking for you and declaring your youthful emancipation. Those five presets on the AM car radio said as much about you as your vinyl collection.

If you didn’t drive, the place to be on the weekend was either in the music section of the local department store or the basement bedroom of a friend’s house. They had at least one thing in common: a collection of vinyl recordings.

The record aisles at the local Woolworth’s were the go-to sources for the music that disc jockeys had been pumping out all week, through tabletop, car and transistor radios. LPs were kept in bins and sorted either alphabetically or by genre; 45s were sold from behind a counter, next to that week’s Top-10 list.

The act of buying an album, like the process of listening to it, was often a kind of personal declaration and a shared experience. Teens would hover over the bins to talk about the merits of each band or artist before the purchase, then take the record home to critique it with friends. Popular music was a communal and aural experience. There was no impersonal downloads or personal listening through earbuds; only the monaural rendition of a pop idol’s latest hit through a five-inch speaker and ceramic needle inside a small record player atop a crowded desk.

Eventually, improved recording and playback technologies led to high fidelity recordings and the successor to home-based gramophones and tabletop record players, the living-room hi-fi.

An album cover’s art, inserts and liners often said as much about the artist — and, hence, the buyer — as the music inside the shrink-wrapped cardboard. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band broke the mould when it came to cover art. The psychedelia of Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull, The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold as Love, and The Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa spoke to some buyers in more ways than one. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Sonny Rollins, The Band, Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane were among those that used their covers, as much as their music, to communicate creativity, politics and ethos.

Over the decades, we boomers have adapted to a series of disruptive technologies. The compact disc did away with the pops and scratches of vinyl recordings, but brought a more sterile experience in terms of both the music and it packaging. Portable music players, whether analogue (the Walkman) or digital (the iPod), removed the communal aspect of music from our midst, delivering the product directly to the listener’s inner ear. Satellite radio, streaming audio, Internet radio and cloud computing services that store the music we “own” have fundamentally changed the business and the music-lover’s experience.

The children of the ’60s are easing their way toward retirement now, like an old hippie easing himself into a warm bath. Along the way, we’ve modified our musical tastes and adapted to rapid-fire changes in the way music is collected, stored, played and shared. Our hearing is no longer acute; our eyesight no longer good enough to read some of the liner notes, even on vinyl album covers, without the use of bifocals. And some of us have long since dumped our old music collections into the landfill or the bins of second-hand record stores.

But for many of us, the dusty, slightly warped and invariably scratched LPs and 45s, still wrapped in their fading and musty jackets, are nonetheless sitting in a dank corner of the basement. They are the most revealing parts of the archives of our early lives — mute testament to who we once were, what we once believed, and what we once aspired to become.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist and educator. cornies@gmail.com