This book is dangerous to read. I feel myself tipping on the precipice of collecting vinyl when they describe the gatefolds, the smell, the physical act of putting the needle on the record (which uh....I don't find Freudian, Brett.)
Here's his description from chapter one of the first vinyl recording that blew him away, Prokofiev's The Scythian Suite, listened to in a collector's home:
So now it's time to pull out the heavy artillery, as they prepare to give me the Scythian....but not just any copy. This is the 1957 recording by Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra on the Mercury label-one of the first stereo recordings ever issued. The legend "Mercury Living Presence" blazes proudly across the cover; the same design is still there on the current compact-disc edition. But we're looking to get close to the master tape and deep into the music, and the preferred path is that original 1957 pressing, made while the master tape was likely still throbbing.
According to one collector:
"My trip is about using the music," he explains. "I don't believe in the idea of ownership-hey, we're all gonna die someday so you don't own that record, you just get to use it for a while. There is no joy in ownership, the joy comes when you play the record."
Of course, for some collectors, the joy really really is in ownership. If a mint record is played, it's no longer "mint" and the physical act of playing it can damage it-the big downside of vinyl.
Record collecting itself has changed shape in recent decades. During the '70's, it was necessary for any serious music fan to be something of a collector, since so many important albums-by the likes of John Coltrane, the Velvet Underground, and even the Beach Boys-were either out of print or available in truncated, shoddily packaged or badly mastered editions (the Beach Boys albums with songs taken off them, or the first Velvets with the banana skin permanently pressed on, rank with the dregs of the era.)
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"A record is that object that you can hold and watch and learn from," notes Miriam Linna, who's made a few of those objects herself....."Look at the label, it's got all that information that somebody wanted to give you. There's the names of the people who wrote the song, the names of who published it, and maybe where the record comes from-if you don't find that one, it's just another mystery to solve."
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From Roger Manning, formerly of the band Jellyfish:
"What really got me was the smell of the records I grew up with-maybe it was the pressing plant they used, for some reason records on the Casablanca label had a smell that blew our minds-when you smell that, it brings you right back to childhood. So we wanted to find a way to make our records smell that way, but of course nobody at our label knew what the hell we were talking about."
I haven't thought of this in many years but I can remember sniffing the 45 of "I was Made for Loving You" and thinking it smelled intriguing and that's not a Kiss does disco joke.
Here's the sciencey part, from a guy who's the director of the Washington Psychiatric Center:
The need to collect stems from a serotonin deficiency. Serotonin is the enzyme that controls worries; with too little of the former you get too much of the latter. "It's a form of addiction, if you want to call it that. The current thinking in neuroscience is that people with serotonin deficiencies are much more driven to compulsions, including the compulsion to collect. Various life events may disturb you and prompt that compulsion."
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