There’s a fellow who buys old records and travels around from university and college campus to campus selling them. He used to deal in CDs (and he still does) but these days much of his market is in LPs. Old LPs. He has boxes of them. And people are hungry to get ‘em. Before he even gets his stock unloaded he has requests for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. These records were made in the millions, unlike the rarest 78s. They were produced in small batches, and sold in hardware stores, and other odd spots. You find them in peoples’ attics, under their porches, maybe at the back of a closet in an old suitcase. Amanda Petrusich goes to all these places. She talks to collectors, expresses interest, shows enthusiasm, and even catches a bit of the bug. She goes on a couple different odysseys to hunt for these items herself. The best one, I think, is when she takes up scuba diving in order to dive in the Milwaukee River and root around in the muck to search for detritus from the Paramount Records factory in Grafton, Wisconsin.
Petrusich is a sympathetic ear to the collectors she meets. At first, they greet her with suspicion. Most of these collectors are men. Would a woman understand their obsession? She admits early on, “I missed pining for things. I missed the ecstasy of acquisition. (In 1993, it took me seven weeks to sniff out a copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s 'Where You Been,' and I spent the next seven memorizing every last crooked riff.) I missed making literal investments in music, of funnelling all the time and cash and heart I could manage into the chase. I had free CDs and illegally obtained MP3s and lawfully purchased LPs, but unless I was being paid to professionally render my opinion, I listened to everything for three or seven or nine minutes and moved on. I was overwhelmed and underinvested. Some days music seemed like a nasty post-modern experiment in which public discussion eclipsed everything else, and art was measured only by the amount of chatter it incited.” Then she met John Heneghan after Mike Lupica gave her his phone number and said, “These 78 guys are on another level.” Wow, that’s the truth. They’re on the search for things that might only exist in one or two copies, buried under water, in an attic, or elsewhere. And when they find one, if they ever do, it may not be playable. The grooves may have disappeared, and scratches have overtaken the music. But the label is still readable, so they soldier on, happy to add an unplayable copy to their collection, and hopeful that somewhere out there is a better copy.
I’ve spent years looking for a record. It’s easier now than it used to be. The Internet and e-mail made it possible to expand your search with friends and acquaintances around the world. However the world of the 78s collector is not quite so vast. Sure, there may be a rare copy of a South African pressing of a Beatles’ record with a different picture sleeve, and you might even see it on eBay, but Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”? It’s available on LP, but the original recording was supplied to the label by one of these collectors. It was cleaned up, to get the best possible sound, and added to this or that anthology. The collector still would rather hear it on his turntable, gently removing the black shellac from its paper sleeve, and dropping the needle into the groove. Aah! Listen.
The story Petrusich tells is wild, and definitely obsessive. She describes her own thrill at finding a grail object, of wrapping it in bubblewrap and hoping it survives transporting it. She gets the mindset of these collectors and in no way demeans them or questions their quest. Her website includes mp3s of some of the songs she talks about. It’s worth a visit. You may never hear the songs any other way. She does meet up with one other woman along the way, Sarah Bryan “…the only other female 78 collector I’d managed to locate and meet. I knew there was at least one other—in 2010, a woman named Sherry Mayrent donated her collection of nearly seven thousand Yiddish and Hebrew 78s to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mills Music Library—but record collecting in general is a predominantly male enterprise, and 78 collecting almost exclusively so.” We can imagine them, they look like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, or even like Robert Crumb. They sit in their dusty living room surrounded by yesterday’s music. It’s not even yesterday’s, or last year’s, it’s the music of the 1930s…the music of the spheres. Petrusich says this, “If you want to make someone’s day, play them 'Skokiaan.' If they’ve never heard it before, they will never forget you. Musarugwa’s wobbly saxophone carries the melody, and its particular tone is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. His performance isn’t frantic or even drunk—it’s sweet and effortlessly joyful, a slipped guffaw, a good long laugh. It’s one of the most human sounds ever committed to record.”
That’s the kind of music the world needs—and Amanda Petrusich points us in the right direction.
 |
| author Amanda Petrusich |
Petrusich is a sympathetic ear to the collectors she meets. At first, they greet her with suspicion. Most of these collectors are men. Would a woman understand their obsession? She admits early on, “I missed pining for things. I missed the ecstasy of acquisition. (In 1993, it took me seven weeks to sniff out a copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s 'Where You Been,' and I spent the next seven memorizing every last crooked riff.) I missed making literal investments in music, of funnelling all the time and cash and heart I could manage into the chase. I had free CDs and illegally obtained MP3s and lawfully purchased LPs, but unless I was being paid to professionally render my opinion, I listened to everything for three or seven or nine minutes and moved on. I was overwhelmed and underinvested. Some days music seemed like a nasty post-modern experiment in which public discussion eclipsed everything else, and art was measured only by the amount of chatter it incited.” Then she met John Heneghan after Mike Lupica gave her his phone number and said, “These 78 guys are on another level.” Wow, that’s the truth. They’re on the search for things that might only exist in one or two copies, buried under water, in an attic, or elsewhere. And when they find one, if they ever do, it may not be playable. The grooves may have disappeared, and scratches have overtaken the music. But the label is still readable, so they soldier on, happy to add an unplayable copy to their collection, and hopeful that somewhere out there is a better copy.
I’ve spent years looking for a record. It’s easier now than it used to be. The Internet and e-mail made it possible to expand your search with friends and acquaintances around the world. However the world of the 78s collector is not quite so vast. Sure, there may be a rare copy of a South African pressing of a Beatles’ record with a different picture sleeve, and you might even see it on eBay, but Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”? It’s available on LP, but the original recording was supplied to the label by one of these collectors. It was cleaned up, to get the best possible sound, and added to this or that anthology. The collector still would rather hear it on his turntable, gently removing the black shellac from its paper sleeve, and dropping the needle into the groove. Aah! Listen.
The story Petrusich tells is wild, and definitely obsessive. She describes her own thrill at finding a grail object, of wrapping it in bubblewrap and hoping it survives transporting it. She gets the mindset of these collectors and in no way demeans them or questions their quest. Her website includes mp3s of some of the songs she talks about. It’s worth a visit. You may never hear the songs any other way. She does meet up with one other woman along the way, Sarah Bryan “…the only other female 78 collector I’d managed to locate and meet. I knew there was at least one other—in 2010, a woman named Sherry Mayrent donated her collection of nearly seven thousand Yiddish and Hebrew 78s to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mills Music Library—but record collecting in general is a predominantly male enterprise, and 78 collecting almost exclusively so.” We can imagine them, they look like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World, or even like Robert Crumb. They sit in their dusty living room surrounded by yesterday’s music. It’s not even yesterday’s, or last year’s, it’s the music of the 1930s…the music of the spheres. Petrusich says this, “If you want to make someone’s day, play them 'Skokiaan.' If they’ve never heard it before, they will never forget you. Musarugwa’s wobbly saxophone carries the melody, and its particular tone is unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. His performance isn’t frantic or even drunk—it’s sweet and effortlessly joyful, a slipped guffaw, a good long laugh. It’s one of the most human sounds ever committed to record.”
That’s the kind of music the world needs—and Amanda Petrusich points us in the right direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment