Record collecting isn’t only about scarcity and obsolescence; it’s also about space and time. Shellac and vinyl records –
as both objects and music formats - have provided means for transportation. The
sounds that records emit can carry listeners from their own confines to the
location of the artists, whether that be the Metropolitan Opera or the
Mississippi Delta. It can also bring the artists to them. The records themselves
are both temporally and spatially marked. Their designs show evidence of where
and when they were made; their analogue nature means that they wither in time,
just as their owners do.
Record
collecting was originally focused on space but it has become more interested in
time. The playing of records was once marketed as a means of geographical
transplantation. In the early 1900s the advertising of companies such as Victor
and the Gramophone Company was focused on the idea that, by purchasing records,
you were inviting the artists who had made them into your home. It was
suggested that, if you played the finest records, it was the equivalent of
entertaining elite guests. Consequently, their marketing was focused on the
output of operatic ‘celebrities’, such as the early recording star Enrico
Caruso. These records were demarcated with special ‘Red Seal’ labels so that
your more quotidian visitors could, at a glance, see the standard of musical
company that you had been keeping. It has been suggested that the displaying of
these records took on more importance than the playing of them. Louis Barfe has stated, ‘Later collectors noted
the preponderance of mint single-sided Red Seals and were led to conclude that
they were rarely if ever played’.
Consumers
weren’t necessarily encouraged to keep hold of their records, however. Prior to the
First World War the attention among gramophone enthusiasts was as much on the
advancement of sound recording technology as it was on the musical contents of
the cylinders and discs: this was an era of upgrades. Neither producers nor
purchasers believed that record collecting would be a worthwhile practice. Why
hoard records if they were only going to degrade or if a new one would sound
better? As late as 1923, the classical music journal Gramophone was
noting that there is ‘no need to be too careful of the life of records, you can
wear them out and get the latest’.
This neglect of
records nevertheless helped to make them collectable. They became scarce and
valuable, something to hunt down. Time was also waiting in the wings. In their
search for older records, collectors were able to transport themselves (or the
people who had made the original discs) temporally as well as spatially. Both
factors were of importance to early jazz record collectors. Melody
Maker reported in 1933:
It is apparent that quite a number of
dance-music students jealously guard their collections of early ‘hot-jazz’
records as much as they do their more contemporaneous ‘New Rhythm’ styles, and,
as a fellow fanatic, I can well understand their hobby … The
collection of old-time records is a fascinating one; I personally get as much
thrill from the capture of an original ‘Dixieland’ disc as a philatelist does
from some scarce foreign stamp – and I might say that there are so many like me
that the price is soaring, and even a very worn-out affair costs more than the
latest Ellington. (Butterworth 1933: 183)
Many of these ‘hot
jazz’ records were being re-issued, often with more accurate label information
than on the first issue, but collectors still went in search of the original
releases, even if scratched and worn. Stephen W. Smith commented on the practice
of some of the earliest American jazz collectors: ‘There are those who will
have nothing but the original label, and who will turn down a clean copy of a
record in preference to one in bad condition because the latter has what is
known to be an earlier label’ (1939: 289–90).
There were acoustic justifications for such behaviour: Smith argued that
in the dubbing of jazz reissues the high and low frequencies of the original
recordings were usually lost. There were also extramusical reasons for
searching out the first issue: it could locate the purchaser there, at the point of origin. In
response to the mass reproduction of records there was a desire amongst some
collectors to escape the ‘commercial’ and find the ‘authentic’. The record
posed the problem, but it also provided the solution. What better than if non-commercial
music – rendered so by both its origins and its age – was housed on a ‘non-commercial’
disc? Forget the major-label reissue (which came out when everyone was buying
this music) find the original release on the obscure label, whose original
audience was the 'race' or country market (transporting you back to
the record’s pre-mainstream days).
According to Smith, America’s first collectors of jazz records came from
the Princeton and Yale universities. Similarly, in England, Melody Maker could point out ‘How the
Varsities Pioneered Jazz’. These enthusiasts wished to travel cross-culturally
in space as well as time. Smith states that:
Many of the collectors’ items were originally
issued purely for Negro consumption and consequently were sold only in sections
of the country which had a demand for them. Copies which found their way into
private homes were usually not given the best of care since many of the
Negroes, for their own reasons, did not care to change the needle frequently
enough to save the record surface.
Here we witness one of
the stereotypes of the record collector. The white, middle-class male who is
immersing himself in music that another culture has neglected, both physically
and temporally. It remains to be asked: why this class and why this gender?
From the jovial sexism of Afflatus writing in Sound Wave in the 1920s (‘has the gramophone enthusiast any room or
time in his life for a wife?’) to the gloom of High Fidelity (‘men, always young men’), record collecting has
consistently been portrayed as being a male activity. This has been backed by
empirical research. At least 95 per cent of those who volunteered to take part
in the film Vinyl, Alan Zwieg’s 2000 study of record collecting, were men. The
respondents to Roy Shuker’s 2004 survey were also largely male. He discovered
that both males and females viewed record collecting as being primarily a
masculine hobby:
Most [64 out of 67] of my respondents,
especially the males, drawing on personal observation, argued that record
collecting is largely a male activity. Conversely, the majority of women
collectors [7 out of 11] are conscious of being a visible minority.
And yet, when it comes
to collecting in general, Frederick Baekeland has argued that ‘Girls are more
likely than boys to collect at all ages’. In his study of the gendered aspects
of record collecting, Will Straw indicated that ‘were one presented with
statistical evidence that the typical record collector was female, one could
easily invoke a set of stereotypically feminine attributes to explain why this
was the case’. Straw, therefore, struggles to find an explanation for the
gender bias. His own conclusion is that it reflects a masculine need to order
the world: ‘the most satisfying (albeit under-theorised) explanation of the
masculine collector’s urge is that it lays a template of symbolic
differentiation over a potentially infinite range of object domains’. In
Straw’s opinion the male collector is a ‘nerd’: his expertise fails the ideal
of masculinity because it is ‘acquired
through deliberate labour of a bookish or archival variety’. However, he can
counter this behaviour with ‘hipness’ if his collection is cultivated with ‘the air of instinctuality’.
Straw argues that another way in which the record collector can attain
hipness is through a desire to ‘refuse the mainstream’. Elsewhere Matthew
Bannister argues that ‘To resist the passive consumer/fan tag, male record
collectors often adopt a bohemian, anti-commercial stance, typically by “valorising
the obscure” and transgressive’. This chimes with the jazz collectors, introduced
by Smith above. For those middle-class enthusiasts, black American jazz was
both obscure and transgressive. Smith’s text indicates that the origin of at
least one strand of record collecting lies in cross-cultural immersion, in the
need for an ‘other’. This helps to explain its gender bias: such immersion
allows the nerd to unveil the hipster within. This is largely a male
preoccupation, as Simon Frith has pointed out:
To understand why and how the worlds of jazz
(and rock) are young men’s worlds, we have to understand what it means to grow
up male and middle-class; to understand the urge to ‘authenticity’ we have to
understand the strange fear of being ‘inauthentic’. In this world, American
music – black American music – stands for a simple idea: that everything real is happening elsewhere.
I would add that,
equally pertinent, is the idea that everything real has happened elsewhere. Music can provide a link to this past. The
original record can go further still: it is an artefact that has been retrieved
from this domain. As the cartoonist and collector Robert Crumb pointed out:
‘Somebody of that era bought it and listened to it, and that record carries
that aura from whoever else had handled and appreciated that object’. It is the record label that offers proof. It is no
coincidence that many American independent labels have retained strong regional
associations (Sun in Memphis; Chess in Chicago; Philadelphia International – a label
name that neatly combines localism and globalism – in Philadelphia). Through
these labels elsewhere can enter the home.
Vinyl
continues to be one of the totems of authenticity. There are modern collectors who focus on the music of particular regions and from particular times. It is
the case, however, that vinyl now more broadly now symbolizes the past. It is a
relic from a time when people did things differently. The past, as everyone
knows, is a foreign country. It is also one whose vast spread tends to blot out
any other regional boundaries.
This
is the source of John Harris’s complaints about Record Store Day. He argues
that the event is a ‘benefit for a struggling musical genre’, one that uses
vinyl as its appropriate emblem. The format, in his reckoning, is a rallying
point for those who wish to keep faith with outdated, guitar-driven rock music.
He also suggests that:
Record Store Day may be a collective rejection of
what technology has done to music, but it is not immune from its effects:
indeed, in the panoply of specially reissued records that puts the Sex Pistols
next to the Grateful Dead, there is a very modern sense of music being
completely uprooted from its original context.
He
depicts old and new record collectors and old and new vinyl records all lost in
a haze of nostalgia. The contemporary record collector doesn’t care where their
vinyl records have come from, what’s important is that they have come from the
past. In this scenario, space is no longer the place. Ladies and gentlemen, we
are floating in time.
