Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the
World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records
Amanda Petrusich
2014
Scribner
New York
Balance is the key here, in the best non-fiction I’ve read
this year.
“Do Not Sell at Any Price” is an exemplary work that demonstrates
that a non-fiction narrative can be just as compelling as any fictional one. By
virtue of solid research and investigation, coupled with good writing, author
Amanda Petrusich creates, rather than glib feature writing, authentic insights
into far more than the specific topic at hand.
“Do Not Sell” delves into the cloistered and idiosyncratic
world of music collectors – seekers of vintage music on 78 rpm records. Between
1925 and 1948, these brittle shellac discs were the way music was recorded,
vended, and preserved, produced by a profusion of companies large and small. In
those days of cultural and communication isolation, vast amounts of marginal,
eccentric, and original performers were captured. The savants that collect
these sonic rarities are obsessed figures, some possessed with a quasi-messianic
sense of mission to rescue these lost voices from oblivion.
Petrusich brings the scene to life with an impeccably
balanced approach equal parts research, interviews, profiles, and critical
analysis, ensconced in a first-person framework as she goes along on the quest
with some of her subjects, sometimes hilariously. She goes so far as to learn
how to scuba-dive so that she can search the muddy bottom of the Milwaukee
River for some of the fabled lost Paramount recordings. (Save the receipts; I
believe those lessons ae tax-deductible.)
Most important of all, Petrusich is wise to herself. She
states early on, “I wanted collectors to reveal their desires and methodologies
so I could dissect their work and devise grand statements about our cultural
moment. In response, collectors sneered, chortled, or told me to fuck off.”
From the get-go, Petrusich simultaneously acknowledges and lets go of her
preconceptions – then gets on the ground and saturates herself in the details.
Petrusich’s voice is here, but it’s not cloying or cute,
pompous or sententious. As one should, she asks good questions, listens well,
and pulls her conclusions from the evidence and her experience. She brings to
life the characters that inhabit this alternate universe and gives them space
to express themselves – and they are quite eloquent.
Remember, these fanatics aren’t academics but hobbyists – living
outside the mainstream of cultural dialogue, creating their own canons and
alternative histories, sometimes sharing their thoughts with others, sometimes
remaining clapt in near-complete isolation, inhabiting what seems to be a
self-constructed dream world, addicted to control over their basement-level
kingdoms. “. . . collecting had clearly become . . . a functional way of
rebelling against mainstream culture. . . . rejecting a society that felt
homogenized and unforgiving,” Petrusich writes.
Says collector Ian Nagoski of his ilk, “’ ‘Zwigoff and Crumb
and innumerable others, these guys are definitely discontents in a Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents kind of
way. They’re looking at the world and seeing it as untenable. The world is
sick. And yet here is this thing that affirms that there’s something about it
that’s beautiful. But it’s forgotten, or lost, or separate from day-to-day
reality. But if you could just put it back together, then you could reconstruct
this gone world, this kind of life that was once worth living, and make that
into your own life, and then it would be okay or tolerable for you.’”
One of the most interesting considerations Petrusich brings out
is the concept that the historical narrative is always in flux, subjective,
squishy – determined by accidents, destruction, bias, prejudice, and the sheer
inability to deal. Cultural worth fluctuates like stock prices. The vital
expression of the culture lies first here, and then there, and over there where
you never expected it to manifest (that my childhood comic-book heroes are now
seen as the foundation of a world-beloved secular mythology seems to me ridiculous
and awesome, simultaneously).
She quotes another collector, Nathan Salsburg, “’Another
danger of the canon being having been engineered – accidentally or on purpose –
by collectors is that scads of things were excluded, either because they didn’t
conform to a collector’s taste of because there just wasn’t enough time or
space for anyone to properly process them.’”
The paradigm of the
curator-as-impositioner-of-significance-meaning-and-context is, of course,
Harry Everett Smith, the legendary compiler of The Anthology of American Folk Music, quite accurately described by
Greil Marcus as “an occult document disguised as an academic treatise on
stylistic shifts within an archaic musicology.” This 1952 creation helped spark
the folk revival and blues renaissance, both of which folded into rock – and still
surfaces in genres as diverse as grunge and Americana. Smith’s achievement was
to select and assemble an intuitive masterpiece – a narrative of outcast voices
summoning raw feeling and captivating sounds. Since then, supplemental and
alternative compilations have emerged. Companies such as Revenant,
Dust-to-Disc, and Yazoo and individual efforts such as Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Good Time, and End Time Music and People Take Warning! Murder Ballads &
Disaster Songs make the case that there is much material to be processed
yet.
Petrusich is not an ironic observer. She can hear what the
enthusiasts share with her, describing the raw, unmediated sound of the turn of
last century, before media surrounded us. “And I understood, for a moment, what
collectors meant when they moaned about what was lacking in contemporary music:
that pure communion, that unself-consciousness, that sense that art could still
save us, absolve us of our sins. We know better than to expect that now.”
There is something to be said about the parallel I pick up here
between collecting and the act of creating itself – another lonely occupation populated
by shall-we-say-unique-types who dredge for signs of significance, and reveal
their insights . . . or don’t. The nature of obsession drives most creative
types inward, and the shelter of eccentricity often protects the fragile. What
is an artist but one who, unsatisfied with things as they are, crafts their own
worlds? What do you call someone who discovers a new set of meanings – a visionary
or a nutjob?
But I digress. “Do Not Sell” does more – it makes the reader
come to terms with his or her own acquisitive tendencies (confession: I have
stacks of 78s, and 45s, and LPs, and cassettes . . . it was difficult for me to
throw out my 8-track tapes). Most importantly, it inspires us to seek out the
sounds that are the basis of all this fuss. Few of us have the wherewithal to
match Petrusich’s subjects, but the digital revolution means that nearly all
the musics of the world can be enjoyed, absorbed, passed on. This book ties it
all together.
.jpg)
