During the past week I ran an informal poll among collectors of 78 RPM records which thoroughly mystified many of them. A few did guess the reason for the poll and now I will let everybody in on it. Hang on though, because this will be a bumpy ride. You are not eligible to be considered a “78 Collector” UNLESS you do NOT own a copy of “Yes! We Have No Bananas”, and would consider it to be a personal affront that someone would even offer to give you a copy for your collection. Thus sayeth a new book that has been widely publicized and excerpted “Do Not Sell At Any Price: the Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records” by Amanda Petrusich, published by Scribner. I’ve been reading excerpts, articles, and interviews about this book for many months, and I even read some of them on my radio program on YesterdayUsa , and I was looking forward to this book. But when it arrived several days after publication and I thumbed thru it I realized that the excerpts had been the tone of the whole book. Her world had been shrunken to just a minute portion of “78 Collectors”. My reaction was: my goodness, look at all the wonderful people and sounds she has missed. I felt that I should send her a copy of my daughter Leah’s video documentary “For the Record” which through interviews with about the same quantity of individuals, opens a whole world of different, exciting, important, and fascinating people and sounds that the small clique she had fallen into ignores and disdains. How could two girls from Brooklyn look at this so differently? Amanda Petrusich is not a novice to music. She has been researching and writing about music and culture for many years, but she IS new to 78s – had never even touched one. Early in the book she describes asking the director of the WFMU Record Fair for an introduction to some 78 collectors. He warned her “These 78 guys are on a different LEVEL”. Well, the ones she met might be – and right away I could see the fault. “Ironically, I would learn most 78 collectors ARE minimalists. Theyre far more persnickety about what records they allow into their homes and on their shelves than Ive ever been.” “Approach a 78 collector,” she continues “with some mundane or particularly commonplace 78 – Yes! We Have No Bananas, say – and request to store it amid his collection, and he will glower at you as if you have announced you intend to slowly disfigure his face with a fork.” In this short section of the book where she describes “78 collectors” she uses the descriptor “78 collector” a multitude of times. Over the past few days I have gotten responses from my poll about this remark from over 100 people who consider themselves to be “78 collectors.” Over half of them HAVE a copy – or several – of this song in their 78 collection. Except for a very few of these who said they have enough of them, all would gladly accept another. Of those who, like Ms. Petrusichs acquaintances, do not have a copy of this song in their 78 collection, only five said they would refuse one. Most said they would LOVE to have one, and some wondered what kind of a person would have such a visceral reaction against having a copy of this song. The clique of 78 collectors she fell in with are collectors of pre-war rural blues, records that were so far out of the mainstream when they were issued that they sold in very small quantities to the extent that some performances have not survived in even one copy. They ARE an important part of our countrys music history and our culture, and the quest for these records is a worthy one. Record collectors of all genre are genuinely interested and intrigued when a formerly “lost” recording gets discovered, but to be frank many of them shake their heads in wonder when they hear it. “Some records DESERVED to be rare!” is occasionally muttered. Pre-war rural blues can be an acquired taste, but that it has become exclusionary to all other types of music is the biggest surprise that this book might disclose. As you travel through this book traveling through the world of what should really have been called the”The Expensive Pre-War Rural Blues 78 Collector” – not the world of “The 78 Collector” – you find that Ms. Petrusich has found that the life of the pre-war rural blues musician – usually poor and Black -- has injected itself into the veins of the collector – usually White and occasionally rich. There is something about the music that infects some people. She contends that there is something about the music WHEN IT IS HEARD DIRECTLY FROM THE ORIGINAL 78 that has infected at least her. She is an extremely personal writer. Her experience upon listening to an original 78 of a recording that she already has heard on an expertly transferred CD that she already owns is illuminating to the visceral change in her life that hearing that record made. “That afternoon, sitting upright on Heneghans couch, I was playing it real cool. But fifty seconds into Big Leg Blues – right around the time John Hurt coos I asked you, baby, to come and hold my head in his soft honeyed voice – I felt like every single one of my internal organs had liquefied and was bubbling up into my esophagus. Even now, I am not sure theres a way to accurately recount the experience without sounding dumb and hammy. I wanted to curl up inside that record; I wanted to inhabit it. Then I wanted it to inhabit me. I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones. I wanted it to keep playing forever, from somewhere deep inside my skull. That is how it often begins for collectors: with a feeling that music is suddenly opening up to you. That youre getting closer to it -- the blues feeling – than youve ever gotten before.” The Blues Feeling. She had fallen in love with The Blues Feeling. In ORGASMIC LUST with the 78 playing The Blues Feeling. “Id heard Big Leg Blues before; in 1990, Yazoo Records had issued a CD of the thirteen tracks Hurt recorded for the Okeh Electric Record Company in 1928, and Id picked up a used copy at a local record store a few years earlier. Not only was I familiar with the song, Id experienced an expert digital rendering of an actual 78. My reaction to hearing the 78 itself played four feet in front of me felt wild and disproportionate even as it was happening. I like to think I was reacting to the song, that the record was just a conduit, a vehicle of presentation. But I suspect I was also seduced by the ritual – by the sense of being made privy to something exclusive, something rare.” Welcome to the world of Rare Exclusive 78s. Rare Exclusive Pre-War Rural Blues 78s. No others need apply. In one sentence she dismisses EVERYTHING ELSE: “Right now there are 78 collectors working to gather and preserve all other forms of pre-war music – jazz, opera, classical, gospel, country, dance, pop – but theres something seductive about the way blues music played on an acoustic guitar between 1925 and 1939 – the so-called country blues – sounds on shellac.” Thats it, there aint no more. No rock, be-bop, show music, comedy, spoken word, etc. With a short excursion over to indigenous music of 3rd world countries, no other music is appreciated here. I think the appeal for this type of ethnic music is that it also is “primitive”. Even when she travels to Germany to meet Richard Weize of Bear Family Records, it is only rural blues, not the rock he issues, the huge box sets of political protest songs, the Jewish recordings made in Germany during the Hitler years, and other far more important stuff. She gets a tour with the curator Johnathan Haim of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (which she calls the “Performing Arts Library” to avoid having to mention the Broadway composers) and the only thing mentioned is the quest for Harry Smiths archive. She tells of her visit to the Jazz Record Bash in New Jersey, but she has come on Saturday after the excitement has gone. She finds an ethnic Croatian tamburitza record on Elliott Jacksons table so he is the only person she seems to have spoken to. He once had bought some records from (he thinks) John Fahey, so we have a two-page digression to Fahey. Then after she gets Elliott to admit that some collectors are “fairly strange” (Elliott, how COULD you!), she “spent another hour milling around, until the existential stress of spending a bright summer morning inside a New Jersey Hilton started to trouble my stomach and I retreated to the elevator. I carted my 78 home and spent some time staring at it. I admired the way it looked on my shelf. I played it relentlessly. I thought, a lot, about getting another one.” Elliott sells all his records at $4 or 3 for $10. I cant believe that while relieving her of her 78 virginity that he couldnt get her to buy two more like he does everyone else!!
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:09:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015