Do Not Sell At Any Price Read online

  In 1887, the German-born inventor Emile Berliner patented the gramophone, which worked similarly to Edison’s phonograph but played flat, grooved discs instead of stumpy cylinders. Berliner’s disc records—which were five to seven inches across, made of various materials (often rubber), and whirled, on hand-cranked players, at around seventy to seventy-eight revolutions per minute—were easier to produce and store than cylinders, and Edison’s tubes were nearly obsolete by 1929. Around the same time, the production of disc records became somewhat standardized, although there were still hundreds of rogue labels recording and manufacturing dozens of different kinds of records. Most were ten inches wide (which yielded about three minutes of sound per side) and crafted from a precarious jumble of shellac, a cotton compound, powdered slate, and wax lubricant. 78s would remain in relatively wide use until the 1960s, when they would be gradually replaced by seven-inch, two-song 45s and twelve-inch, long-playing 331/3 records—themselves ousted by cassettes, to be eventually supplanted by compact discs, which have now been succeeded almost entirely by digital audio files.

  The first day we met, John Heneghan was careful to establish a disconnect between 78 collectors and the folks who stockpile LPs or 45s—for Heneghan, the distinction is acute, comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds. But his own collection began with an LP—a reissue of a Charley Patton record, which he acquired when he was sixteen years old. Heneghan can still describe, in remarkable detail, the subsequent epiphany: picking up the record, feeling its heft in his hands, squinting at the photograph on the cover, flipping it over to read the date printed on the back, placing it on his turntable and releasing the needle into the groove, feeling transported, feeling changed.

  “I’m not even sure that I liked it at first,” he admitted. “I liked the idea of it. It was really hard to listen to. But I was a guitar player—I had played the guitar since I was a kid—and I thought, ‘What is this? What is he doing?’ It was only a matter of time before I started seeking out the original records, the 78s. I resisted it for a long time because I knew it would be nearly impossible, and I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.”

  The price of a 78 ranges from a few cents to a fair amount of cents—in some cases, up to $40,000—depending on the cachet of the artist, the condition of the record, the rarity of the pressing, and the fervency of a collector’s desire. Because 78s are objectively worthless and because collectors are so particular about what they want, a record’s archival value often trumps its monetary value. But that archival value can still be astonishing. Because they weren’t produced in huge quantities (although a CD or MP3 player is a fairly common accessory in most American homes now, gramophones were hardly standard in the early 1920s) and because for so long, so few people were interested in salvaging them, a good portion of the world’s remaining 78s—and it’s impossible to say how many are even left—were also singular representations. Often, no metal masters of these recording sessions survived, meaning that if the records themselves were to break, or be crammed into a flood-prone basement, or tossed into a Dumpster, then that particular song is gone, forever.

  Most of Heneghan’s collecting peers, including the famed illustrator Robert Crumb, are the types who went door-to-door in the 1960s, asking people if they had records in their attics and snatching up 78s for a quarter apiece. When I asked Heneghan where he scored the bulk of his collection, he looked at me as if I’d commanded him to disrobe. “You don’t expect me to answer that question, do you? I’m not sure I should answer any of these questions,” he guffawed, his voice incredulous. “Do you realize how limited . . . These aren’t LPs! All it takes is a dozen more people interested and . . .” He trailed off again. “It amazes me. It’s American musical history and it’s forgotten about, and there are only a handful of people out there preserving it.”

  Heneghan wasn’t being particularly hyperbolic. He and his pals are often uncovering and heralding artists who were previously unknown, and who would have remained that way had a collector not bothered to listen and share his finds. “The amazing thing about 78s is that so much of the music is one hundred percent undiscovered,” he said. “There are still so many records out there that are so rare there are only one or two copies, or no copies—you’ve never heard it. I’m still often discovering things. You find some weird band name, you don’t know what it is, and you take a chance on it, put it on, and it’s some incredible masterpiece.”

  John Heneghan was glib and, at times, aggressively self-deprecating about his fanaticism, but his collection was, independent of its personal worth, an extraordinary cultural document. Collectors of 78s, maybe more than any other curators of music or music memorabilia, are doing essential preservationist work, chasing after tiny bits of art that would otherwise be lost. Even though their pursuits are inherently selfish, fueled by the same untempered obsession that drives all collectors, without Heneghan and his peers a good slice of musical history would be absent from the contemporary canon. And while academics, anthropologists, archivists, and reissue labels all assume roles in the preservation and diffusion of early songbooks, the bulk of the material being released or reissued is still being sourced from the original 78s—which are found, almost exclusively, in the cramped basements and bedrooms of 78 collectors.

  Still, the historical heft of his effort didn’t mean Heneghan was free from the neuroses that characterize so many collectors: his collection was historically significant, but it was also deeply personal, even pathological. Collectors, like everyone, get seduced by the chase.

  “I have a recurring dream about finding Skip James’s ‘Devil Got My Woman,’ ” Heneghan said, leaning in, his voice low and solemn. “It’s so vivid, so clear—the first time it happened I woke up in the middle of the night certain that I had the record. I was like, This is amazing. So I got up to check, and it wasn’t there, and I was like, Fuck. So then I have the dream again, and it’s so vivid the second time, and I think maybe the part about not having it was the dream. So I get up to check. Then I have the dream the third time, and the fourth time . . .” He shook his head, leaned back in his chair, and scratched a craggy blond goatee. Heneghan is a formidable physical presence, and his narrow, slate-gray eyes betrayed an intolerance for certain strains of bullshit; he was exceedingly pleasant but uninterested in pleasantries, and it occurred to me that I wouldn’t ever want to be standing between him and a copy of “Devil Got My Woman.”

  “On a good day, you look at yourself like, I’m preserving American history: I’m an archaeologist. But the bottom line is that there’s seriously something wrong,” he continued, adjusting the black bowler hat he frequently sports. “The first time I bought a record, I remember thinking, I have to see if this band has any other records. And then when I got the other records, I thought, I need to figure out which one came first so I can put them in order. I remember going to friends’ houses and they just had their records anywhere, and it was like, ‘How can you do that? They have to be in order!’ I just spent so much time thinking about the perfect way to put everything in order.”

  Heneghan finally asked me what I’d like to listen to, and we huddled around his turntable, taking turns pulling 78s from his shelves. My hands shook. Unlike vinyl records, which are forgivingly pliable, 78s are thick, brittle, and heavy. Drop one on the wrong surface at the wrong angle, and it’ll shatter like a dinner plate.

  The bulk of Heneghan’s collection consists of early blues and hillbilly records, and they range in quality and tone. Up until about 1925, recordings were made acoustically, meaning the musicians would have to bellow and pluck directly into the phonograph’s diaphragm cone, where the resulting sound vibrations would nudge the cutting stylus and create a transcription, which could then be played back. There were considerable drawbacks to the technology: drums and bass were rarely recorded because the depth of their vibrations would knock the cutting stylus from its intended groove, and things like
cellos, violins, and even the human voice didn’t always resonate enough to be properly rendered. By 1927, engineers had figured out how to use a carbon microphone—another Edison gadget, from 1877—which could then be amplified with vacuum tubes and used to power an electromagnetic recording head, meaning a far wider range of frequencies could be picked up and reproduced, yielding a richer, more authentic sound. Still, if you are not prone to romance and nostalgia, the process can seem silly in the face of today’s error-free digital recording, where analog sound is converted into clean streams of binary code. To a modern sound technician, things like styluses and diaphragm cones are about as clunky and outmoded as the iron lung.

  But for traditional record collectors—ones who, like Heneghan, came of age in the late 1970s—the upsides of digital recording are largely irrelevant. Although he owns an iPod (he bought it for Eden, who said she rarely used it) and a few shelves of CDs (mostly from the reissue label Yazoo Records, which was founded in the late 1960s and is now run, in part, by his friend and fellow collector Richard Nevins, who works exclusively from original 78s), he was not particularly interested in consuming digitally produced music. I could see how Heneghan might find MP3s a bit unsettling (those intangible streams of zeros and ones are about as far from cumbersome shellac discs as possible), but even the CD, the MP3’s doofy, moonfaced older brother, was inherently unappealing to him. “If I find a great record, and a friend of mine says, ‘How about I keep that record and just make you a CD of it?’ it’s like, ‘Are you insane?’ ” he snorted.

  Heneghan pulled Mississippi John Hurt’s “Big Leg Blues,” the Cannon Jug Stompers’ “Walk Right In,” and a 1920s test pressing of Frankie Franko and His Louisianans’ “Somebody Stole My Gal” from his shelves. He laid the John Hurt record on his turntable, flipped a switch on a receiver, and dropped the stylus. The room filled with crackle. I held my breath.

  The thing is, I wasn’t exactly an analog rookie, even then. I owned plenty of LPs, and while my initial interest in vinyl was driven by mathematics (I could pay twenty-five cents for a Led Zeppelin III LP at my local Salvation Army, or slap down fourteen dollars for a plastic CD version at the record store), I secretly appreciated all the tender platitudes—Warmth! Texture! Authenticity!—spewed about analog sound. But because the bulk of my collection was lazily sourced from junk shops (I can still identify a three-LP set of Handel’s Messiah—that brown-and-yellow thrift-store staple—from approximately forty-five feet away), I was never captivated by rare records in particular. My expertise regarding coveted vinyl consisted mostly of ribbing my pal Clarke for his pristine copy of The Anal Staircase, a three-song, twelve-inch EP released by the British industrial band Coil in 1986 and worth around eighty dollars to the right customer. (There’s a photograph of a human anus on the cover.)

  So while I possessed a working understanding of what 78s were and when they were produced, I had never purchased or played a single one. Still, I loved scrappy, prewar country blues in the same way I loved punk rock—something about the tenuousness of the entire enterprise, the threat of spontaneous dissolution, the immediacy—and had always been more than content to listen to it via digital reissue. Prior to this moment, it had never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. That I might be chasing an approximation.

  Right now, there are 78 collectors working to gather and preserve all forms of prewar music—jazz, opera, classical, gospel, country, dance, pop—but there’s something particularly seductive about the way blues music played on an acoustic guitar between 1925 and 1939—the so-called country blues—sounds on shellac. While playing the country blues can require a staggering amount of technical prowess (no other genre, except maybe rap, is as routinely underestimated), the most important component of any country blues song is still the performer’s articulation of blues “feeling,” that amorphous, intangible, gut-borne thing that animates all music and gives it life.

  The necessity of emotion obviously isn’t unique to the country blues, but because most prewar blues songs were assembled rather than composed (performers were often working with the same old folk songs as bases, tinkering with and rewriting verses to suit their needs), and because many performances were barely captured, let alone manipulated, it’s often the only difference between a middling blues side and a transcendent one. Critics and scholars can pontificate at length about the technical dexterity of a country blues performer like Robert Johnson—the way his long fingers curled around the fret board, what his left foot was doing—but blues feeling is a lot trickier to dissect, in part because it runs counter to the very notion of analysis. It becomes the singular challenge of blues critics (of all critics, really) to articulate some sense of that bewildering force. It becomes the obligation of the fan to hear it.

  That afternoon, sitting upright on Heneghan’s couch, I was playing it real cool. But by 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’m not sure there’s 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. This is how it often begins for collectors: with a feeling that music is suddenly opening up to you. That you’re getting closer to it—to blues feeling—than you’ve ever gotten before.

  The aesthetic superiority of analog playback has been so thoroughly and aggressively trumpeted that it feels almost silly to talk about it now, but if you’re accustomed to low-quality MP3s, and if you primarily route them through your computer’s speakers or cheap headphones, listening to a vinyl record on a proper stereo is still something of a revelation. It’s luxurious rather than serviceable—like delicately consuming a fancy French chocolate when you’ve only ever gnawed on Hershey bars in the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly.

  Prewar 78s, though, are not particularly easy to relish, or at least not at first. Depending on the quality of the recording and the condition of the disc, there’s often a high and persistent background hiss. The melody might be fully obscured by a staticky sizzle that feels otherworldly and distant, like the song had been buried in the backyard and was now being broadcast from beneath six solid feet of dirt.

  I’d heard “Big Leg Blues” before; in 1990, Yazoo Records had released a CD of the thirteen tracks Hurt recorded for the Okeh Electric Records Company in 1928, and I’d picked up a used copy at a local record store a few years earlier. Not only was I familiar with the song, I’d 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 that I was reacting to the song, and 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.

  The record ended. Clutching my notebook to my chest, I tried to think of a professional-sounding thing to say. “Wow!” I yelled. Heneghan looked at me. I stared at my list of handwritten questions for a beat or two too long before finally asking him if he thought that, given technological advancements in the way music is disseminated and stored, record collecting was a dying art.

  “I think it’s funny that you even call it an art,” he answered. “I think it’s more of a disease. There has to be something really wrong with you to want to possess these objects in the first place. You have to have them, and it’s never enough, and you get that strange, tingly feeling when you get one. Anyone who collects anything is obsessive-compulsive and neurotic. The need to put things in order, to file by number, to alphabetize and label, to be constantly reassessing how you’ve ordered things—that’s neurotic behavior. I’ve always thought I was really crazy, that
there was something really wrong with me. Especially when I started collecting 78s, because I didn’t know anyone else who collected them, and I felt really isolated and weird,” he continued. “But then when I met guys like Crumb and Nevins, everyone was like, ‘Yeah, we’re all crazy.’ I’ve never met [another 78 collector] who wasn’t like, ‘This is sick, we’re all sick,’ ” he said. “When I finally gave in and started buying 78s, it was a conscious decision to embrace my sickness and do what I always wanted to do. It’s probably like when someone dabbles in drugs their whole life and finally decides to shoot heroin. There has to be something in your mind that says, ‘I give up.’

  “If I really wanted a big house in the suburbs, I wouldn’t be able to buy records as often, if ever,” he conceded. “But the thing is, I don’t really want a house in the suburbs. I’m happy, which is a little bit of a problem.”

  Heneghan and I kept in touch, and a few months later he invited me to a 78 listening party in his living room. On a gleaming afternoon in early May, I plodded down Second Avenue toward Heneghan’s apartment, toting a warm six-pack of Brooklyn Lager.

  I was the first to arrive. As Heneghan handed me back a beer, he pointed out a new acquisition: a small, weathered banjo, signed in fading pencil by the 1920s folksinger Chubby Parker. The banjo was hung above Heneghan’s computer, alongside a framed headshot of Parker. A tiny silver star, inlaid deep in the instrument’s head, shined. It reminded me of a Christmas tree.