Dispossessed, or, How I Lost Most of My Music Collection—and Nearly My Mind

T his past August, I moved back to Seattle from Orange County. An
ordeal for anyone, moving for me means shipping about 2,500 pieces of
vinyl and thrice as many CDs, which took about a week of long days to pack.
For this trip, I arranged for the Los Angeles moving company Eagle
Express to haul my belongings up from Costa Mesa, a decision that ranks
as my biggest regret of this—or maybe any—year.

Eagle Express’s supervisor, David Gomez, assured me that the
delivery would take two weeks max. In fact, it took almost a month, and
when the slack mothertruckers finally arrived at my Capitol Hill
storage facility, it was clear something had gone horribly awry:
Expecting around 60 boxes full of my music collection, there were
instead only 15.

One of the movers, Adam—who, I later discovered, was actually
an employee of West Coast Van Lines—initially expressed confusion
about the missing boxes. After much agitated questioning, he said he’d
had to unload some of his cargo due to weight issues. Incredulous, I
demanded he call Eagle Express to find out where my goods were. He made
a call, speaking to Gomez in Spanish; during the short conversation,
Adam became increasingly angry and then he hung up. Adam said something
vague about a warehouse in the L.A. area. I called Gomez but couldn’t
get a straight answer from him. Their stories weren’t jibing, and my
records were gone. I cursed Gomez in a vicious tone I hadn’t used since
George W. Bush became president in 2001.

I felt as if I’d gone in for a routine chiropractic visit and left
the office with three of my limbs amputated.

T hat’s the thing about collectors, according to Seattle
psychotherapist Gaelen Billingsley: “Many collectors feel synonymous
with the objects they collect and use them to derive or define a sense
of self. Though they may not have any objective value, objects
collected are seen as uniquely interesting or valuable to the
individual collector. Thus as collectors accumulate large numbers of
valuable items, they construct the sense that they, too, are valuable
by association, i.e., ‘The more of this great stuff I accumulate, the
more I matter.'”

Obsessive collecting, she explains, “tends to arise out of one (or a
combination) of the following three basic human needs: the need for a
personal self-
definition of worth, the need for a sense of life
purpose (or meaning), and the
desire for immortality.”

Damn, Ms. Billingsley. It’s like you peered directly into my
mind.

I’m as guilty of this dubious behavior as anyone. It’s neurotic. But
my excuses go far beyond the identity aggrandizing, the phallic
substitution and surrogate dick-waving. I actually do have legitimate
reasons for accumulating so many records: One is for DJing, which I’ve
done with some frequency on radio and in clubs since 1996 (and I will
always prefer to spin vinyl for such gigs). In fact, I had to turn down
a juicy DJ opportunity soon after I returned to Seattle because I
lacked the crucial weapons from my vinyl arsenal.

Another reason is research/reference. As a music journalist, I
regularly relied on my extensive library to help me to write reviews
and features. My collection also served as a resource for friends
looking to expand their knowledge. As I’ve told my friends many times,
my collection and my knowledge are here to be used. So, like Bill
Withers sang, use me. (Sadly, a huge music collection does not always
work as an aphrodisiac.) Fourthly, a megalomaniacal urge to know almost

everything about almost every worthwhile musician can be a
dangerous thing, I’ve discovered—especially when it comes time to
move. Fifthly, almost every record and CD has a complicated network of
memories and associations attached to it. Losing as many items as I did
feels like having several key scenes excised from my autobiography.

A s the weeks passed with no sighting of my precious cargo, I
became increasingly ill with anger and toxic vengefulness every time I
pondered Eagle Express’s botched job. For a while, I was phoning Gomez
every day, furious over my enormous loss (fuck a 401[k]; those records
were my pension!). When he did pick up, Gomez would profusely apologize
in heavily accented English and vow to try to find out what happened to
my stuff. Rinse, repeat, rage.

Over the next four months and dozens of (mostly unanswered) calls
and many empty promises later, I still can’t get a satisfactory
response from Gomez. At one point, Gomez said that Adam had tried to
escape into Canada to avoid the law on some charge, and that a truck
with my boxes was somewhere near the border. My calls to West Coast Van
Lines went unreturned.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to never seeing those lost records
and CDs (and the dresser I’d owned since I was 9 and some other less
important items) again. Now I just want monetary compensation—and
Gomez’s head on a pike. Trouble is, I don’t know any lawyers in L.A.,
and even if I did, I have no stomach for dealing with them. And,
foolishly, I didn’t insure my belongings—after moving five times
in as many years without incident, I’d become complacent. (This, too,
ranks in the top five of my Regrets Hall of Shame.)

Y ou should have seen my friends’—especially fellow
collectors’—responses to my situation. Their faces would slacken
with a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and they’d gasp for a bit
until they could utter words of pity and consolation. It felt like I
was witnessing my own funeral every time I broke the news to
somebody.

After I told Jason Pettigrew, an ex–
Alternative
Press magazine coworker and fellow music obsessive, about my
travails, he said, “I would be getting background checks on the
individual movers and start brutally murdering their family members at
random.”

Obviously, a loss of this magnitude prompts much reflection (and
many nights spent dreaming of flying to L.A. to seek revenge). After
the shock, disbelief, and the barely suppressible rage had (mostly)
subsided, I began to ponder the significance of music—and its
physical manifestations—in my life. Maybe my obsession with it
wasn’t that healthy. Certainly, even after my moving disaster, I still
possess more recorded music than, oh, 97 percent of the population. I
am definitely not wanting for things to listen to. By any “normal”
standard, I owned way too many CDs and LPs.

And yet the knowledge of all those rare records (how will I
ever find those Bernard Parmegiani and M. Frog Labat LPs?) and
obscure, limited-edition CDs and boxed sets that I’d gathered over the
last 29 years and that are now dispersed to who knows where continues
to gnaw at me—every hour, every day. “Normal” is boring and
mediocre. I didn’t get where I am today—for better or
worse—through sensible moderation in my listening/collecting
habits. When music is your religion, as it is mine, losing reliquaries
of it can damage your soul and threaten your sanity.

Among the items missing from my collection: my entire stash of
hiphop vinyl and two-thirds of my hiphop CDs; all of my world-music CDs
(including 16 Fela Kuti and all of my Sublime Frequencies discs); all
of my highbrow, 20th-century composer stuff; my cherished Soul Jazz
Records CDs; my soundtracks; rare psych-rock LPs by Friendsound (the
LSD-inspired side project by some Paul Revere and the Raiders members);
little-known Kraut-rock classics by Exmagma and Et Cetera; Bernard
Szajner’s imaginary soundtrack to Dune done under the moniker
Zed; Kraftwerk’s first three amazing albums, all of which they
stubbornly, foolishly refuse to officially reissue; TONTO’s Expanding
Head Band’s Zero Time, with two separate covers; that sweet 100
Proof (Aged in Soul) LP on the Motown composers
Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Hot Wax label…. Someone could open a decent
music shop with those fugitive goods—and then promptly go out of
business.

Yes, I can get back a lot of the AWOL titles, provided I devote
considerable time and money to the endeavor. Hell, I’ve already begun
to replenish my collection as thriftily as possible. I’ve been rifling
through the used bins at Jive Time, Everyday Music, Wall of Sound,
Sonic Boom, and Easy Street with the kind of diligence that would
impress DJ Premier. Also, friends have come through with loans, burns,
MP3s, gifts, condolences, and sympathy.

Y ou’d think this would be the opportune time to switch to a
more digital approach to music consumption. It should be, but my analog
por vida attitude dies hard. I can’t help thinking that vinyl is
the ultimate musical format, with CDs second, and MP3s a distant third.
Daily, hourly, megabytes of great, obscure audio get uploaded to
YouTube, the torrent sites, and blogs like Mutant Sounds (mutant-sounds.blogspot.com).
And that’s great for everyone, except maybe for copyright holders. But
I’m not clever enough to DJ with a YouTube video, and torrent sites
often misidentify releases (which often sound shitty, anyway), and,
honestly, I don’t want to rip off musicians. That and the whole
physical-artifact factor: I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the
gatefold double-LP version of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew will
always hold more allure and aesthetic value than that album reduced to
1s and 0s in an iPod.

That being said, I now have over 2,500 songs on my iTunes at work,
but they don’t seem like they’re mine so much as my
computer’s. And that somehow bothers me. Were some benefactor to
replace all of my missing songs on the planet’s biggest hard drive, I
would be grateful, but still would not feel as fulfilled as if I could
regain the actual releases. I’m firmly in the rearguard with regard to
Serato/iPod “upgrading,” and my tragedy hasn’t nudged me into the 21st
century. Not yet, anyway.

Besides, I’ve become addicted to the thrill of the hunt for music.
So much of my life’s been spent in record stores, digging through bins,
swapping info with clerks and fellow music nerds; to stop now would be
as hard as a lifelong smoker ditching his cigs in middle age.

So I continue to obsess over musical products, compulsively. While
most people in my circle scheme about getting drunk, high, laid, or by
with the least amount of effort, I spend my idle moments figuring out
the most efficient way to rebuild my shelves-full of Acid Mothers
Temple and Muslimgauze releases—and hundreds of other treasures
without which my life seems terribly diminished. Most (straight) guys
in my circle try to score pussy; I strive to re-score Pussy Galore’s
Sugarshit Sharp 12-inch (okay, and some pussy; I may be a geek,
but I have other needs, too).

If anything, my obsession with record collecting has only
intensified following this catastrophe. It’s as if I need to be
physically immersed not only in the sounds, but also in the vessels
from which they emanate. I crave the totems that announce to my
visitors (and the world) that my taste is impeccable. Sorry, but your
thousands of MP3s on your hard drive can’t compete with an entire room
jammed floor to ceiling with wax. Anybody can say he digs Nurse with
Wound; but if you show me a shelf in your pad groaning with their
releases, you’ve earned more respect in my eyes.

S cott Giampino—who books shows at Seattle supper club
the Triple Door and DJs soul, funk, and R&B under the name
Self-
Administered Beatdown—also recently lost the bulk of
his long-accruing collection. In 2004, his house burned to the ground,
and he and his family lost almost everything they owned. Giampino
estimates 2,500 out of 3,000 records were damaged in the blaze.
(Although he notes, “Oddly, virtually all the CDs in the house
survived. Irony!”)

Eventually, Giampino’s sense of loss diminished, so maybe there’s
hope for me. “I tried and still try to be rather ‘Zen’ about the entire
owning-objects thing now,” he says. I dunno: It’s hard to be Zen when I
want to get all Bruce Lee on the mugs responsible for decimating my
collection.

“My attitude has changed in the fact that I am much easier to let
things go,” Giampino observes. “I sell way more records now than I used
to. I used to hoard stuff, like any compulsive collector, but now I
have a much mellower attitude toward it. It’s twofold, with one part
being, ‘Hey, it’s just stuff, easy come easy go,’ and the other part
is, ‘Hey, if I really need this copy of “insert album title here,” I
can pony up the dough and buy it.’ I’ll find it again, the philosophy
being: Sure, I have to pay more, but it’s (usually) obtainable,
somewhere.”

I f anything positive has resulted from my tragic loss, it’s
that I’ve become more appreciative of what I do have now. While
I will agonize for years over several vanished gems, others will not be
mourned, as my memory’s not flawless. Hell, I’ve forgotten about
more music than most people have heard or will hear. That’s not
braggadocio, but simply factual reportage of an obsessive-compulsive
music critic’s life. It’s a curse wrapped up in a blessing.

Like many of my ilk, maybe I do view my collection as a bulwark
against mortality—or at least a tangible legacy of my existence
on earth. Forget leaving a good-looking corpse; I want my survivors to
gape in awe at shelf upon shelf, crate upon crate of my music
stash—a monument to monomania. It would be nice if they listened
to the things, too.