Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett

Author:John Corbett [Corbett, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-05-12T07:00:00+00:00

TRACK FOUR

Brand New Secondhand: Record Collector Subcultures

In a way, it doesn’t really matter what it is. Any material object that can be collected, it seems, will gather together a subculture to celebrate, venerate, and debate it. If the subculture is big enough, there will be stores. Even shopless objects, if beloved fervently enough, provide occasion for conventions and fairs, little pagan rituals of commercial worship at which panels are sometimes convened and booths are erected and people sit waiting for the right devotee to walk in, strike up a conversation, and buy something. These are places where freaks go to be with other freaks.

The truth of this statement was brought home to me once at a convention in rural Illinois dedicated to shellac records. My friend Hal Rammel, himself a collector and scholar of odd and unusual musical objects, many old-timey in nature, and one of the few deejays specializing in the antiquated 78-rpm discs, discovered that the convention was convening, and we set out for a wee town in the northernmost part of the state. At the time, I had no 78s to speak of; like most of my generation, I was used to buying records in two possible speeds, 45 and 33⅓. They were no longer building machines to play 78s, and it seemed far-fetched to me that there would be a fan base for the derelict medium. Boy, was I wrong.

Walking the aisles in the convention’s big tent, I was filled with a sense of both disorientation and delirium. The former came from being in a context of collectors so similar to me but in another way so very different, like landing on a planet where everything is exactly the same, but the inhabitants wear their socks on the outside of their shoes. The delirious feeling came as a contact high from the intense aggregation of nerds, a species so myopically loyal to its object of adoration that nothing else, not even something quite close, suffices in satisfying the urge. Connoisseurs of seventy-year-old musty recordings of Hawaiian string music or early down-home blues, Bix Beiderbecke completists, aficionados of the Victrola, the phonograph, the gramophone, the phonogramophone.

I walked into a booth and promptly had a twenty-minute conversation with the dealer about types of needles for 78s. I’m sure, to him, it was like telling a child how to eat with a fork, but for me it was hilariously, wonderfully new. Hal and I ducked in and out of the various vendors, rifling through the awkwardly heavy, glass-like discs, looking for a way in. I bought a couple of Greek rembetika 78s, he found some Mound City Blue Blowers on Brunswick, and we were off to the races. I can’t say that I’ve joined the 78-rpm Collectors’ Community (a website and social network for this particularly splinter group of freak) or become a collector on the scale of the greats, like R. Crumb, Dick Spottswood, or Joe Bussard, folks who pose in front of acres of shellac in their

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