SIXTY ALBUMS

 

 

SIXTY ALBUMS

By Charles Kraus

 

1980 -- We were living in LA at the time and meeting our expenses felt more like a theoretical exercise than a probability.  It often involved borrowing funds. Upon occasion, it meant selling possessions.  Even, if absolutely necessary, portions of my record collection.

Our existence was middle-class bohemia interwoven with the prospect, or at least desire of ‘making it’ in the entertainment industry. Being young, and therefore equating our circumstances with the dues-paying portion of life that one goes through at the beginning of a journey, we had the energy, optimism and fortitude to experience all this as an adventure. Still, parting with 60 albums was a big deal.

            I owned several thousand, but thought of them as components forming a single thing, a collection. A collection is what you get after you’ve sifted through the prospects, rejected undesirable candidates, sought out and filled in key elements so you owned Oscar Peterson’s first album as well as his latest album. Plus, the original cast recordings of every Broadway show you’d been taken to as a New York child, but not the scratched copies, those had been replaced by pristine pressings as they were discovered in various swap meets and second hand shops.  A collection included Ella’s Decca, Verve and Pablo sides.

Did you know that Del-Fi records and its sibling, Keene Records, originated in a basement in Van Nuys, California, pretty much around the block from where we lived when I sold my early Sam Cooke (Keene) and Richie Valens (Del-Fi), part of the 60, to raise the $800 we needed to pay our rent?

The dealer perused the stacks I’d designated as expendable, selecting just the albums I would have chosen, the cream, the best of the best, had I been at the purchasing end of this transaction.  Mostly he pulled from the $25 piles. A few from the $15.  Each time he claimed a record, my exasperation grew.  How could I allow this fellow to dismantle my collection?

Then came the trick.  To the fifty or so sides he’d selected, he made a show of adding a number of less desirable titles from my $2 offering -- Mel Carter, Cher, Mantovani -

albums I couldn’t actually explain or justify owning.   Finally, he reached into the  “PRICELESS – MAKE ME AN OFFER’ display, plucked a gem, in this case, the VJ No. 1001, sealed, never played, album, the El Dorados “Crazy Little Mama,” thrust it into the center of his stack trying to make the selection look like an afterthought.  It was, of course, the one album he truly desired, and to some theoretical upscale collector, worth more than the combined value of the other 59 records.

“I’ll give you $800, 60 albums, take it or leave it.”

Contrary to the prices in the Record Album Price Guide, the true value of a record is what someone is willing to pay for it.  This was easily the best offer I would be getting prior to our potential eviction notice.  It honored the music and the artists, if not the collector.  Me, the dealer dismissed as naïve.  Didn’t I didn’t know that VJ 1001 was worth a fortune?  Yep, but only to buyers offering a fortune, and they didn’t happen to be in the room

Then again, I’d paid a dollar fifty for the VJ.   I was not exactly getting a poor return on my investment.  Yea, ok, all right, you win, give me the cash and leave as quickly as possible.

We finished our transaction.   My buyer took a moment to browse through the remainder of my collect, the albums laying neatly against a neutral wall, the ones with the sign affixed reading, NOT FOR SALE. 

And then came what amounted to my real payoff.  More than the $800.  More than the comfort taken in having raised the rent by selling 60 albums that cost me about $50 to a guy who would probably pass them along to wealthy collectors for prices I didn’t want to know about.  The record dealer looked up from my NOT FOR SALE albums and said, ‘wow.’  

Wow is not a multisyllabic word.  It is not complex.

This particular ‘wow’ meant that finally, someone -- not my wife, not my neighbors, not my friends, none of whom took a particular interest in record collecting, could ever offer.  It meant finally, someone understood that the vinyl disks resting against the neutral wall were not just refugees from Goodwill stores; they formed a genuine representation of the jazz and pop essentials, a virtual history of recorded music, so far.  Wow meant I knew what I was doing.

His smile contained a certain respect.  

You could not pay the rent with a smile, but you could live on this one for a long long time.  I’m still getting residuals.