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. recommended

Dave Segal is a journalist and DJ living in Seattle. He has been writing about music since 1983. His stuff has appeared in Gale Research’s literary criticism series of reference books, Creem (when...

115 replies on “Dispossessed, or, How I Lost Most of My Music Collection—and Nearly My Mind”

  1. What a truly fucked up situation. If what goes around comes around those bastards will be paying with several lifetimes of torture. Here’s hoping it comes around to rewarding you for your dedication to promoting unusually great music and perseverance in the maw of such a brutal blow.

    (On a side note, as much as I enjoy listening to my iPods on the noisy-ass buses, the line ” …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” rings entirely true. They’re not quite a bird in the hand, are they? I always thought it was just about the song, not the format, and you’re mature enough to defend that concept against collecting … but we know what we feel.

  8. “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.”

    I know a wounded nurse who hired a private dick and some thugs to try and find your vinyl and when that failed offered to try and replenish your collection. You sound very hurt on a lot of levels. I hope your friends and fans continue support and comfort you.
    With all my heart. L

  11. I shipped 6 boxes of CDs and DVDs – some 1200 – via USPS and I did insure them. Unfortunately, the boxes were packed for moving, not for shipping, so I didn’t have a list of all the contents in each box. Two boxes broke during shipment from LA to Seattle, and all I knew was most of A-F was missing and some of F-L. The post office hassled me about recouping the cost. I only got about 80% of value on one box. I hadn’t noticed a second broken and taped box until the time limitation for claiming had lapsed.

    Basically, a large portion of 30 years of rare and not-so-rare music collecting is gone (after dragging that shit around with me on many moves to many locations. Sad, but oddly liberating. I still miss my music, but I keep what’s left on hard drive (backed up, of course). I’m too old now to schlep that stuff around with everywhere life takes me.

    I’ve a feeling that Dave will come to that point, too, in a few years.

  12. dude, reading this makes my stomach hurt. i keep my vinyl collection down to the essentials now, but i’m still weirdly obsessed. i will be buying you a drink next time i see you for sure.

  13. Ah Dave that SUCKS. I am so, so sorry. My laptop was stolen out of my car in September and I lost a lot of my pictures, my writing, and my music- but that pales like Vanilla Ice in comparison with what you have experienced. I am so sorry.

    And yeah forget karma- GO AFTER THOSE BASTARDS. Seattle’s got your back.

  14. That is horrible. Music is like the photo album of one’s soul. how many epiphanies have been inspired in the atmosphere of a great album. i always hate losing something special but losing that many special things at once is traumatic.

  15. I like and respect you even more.good karma you deserve. I almost broke my back moving all my vinyl from n.c.here. People don’t understand my tape collection but its still the only way to get the cure standing on a beach with the b-sides.

  16. I sold Everyday Music hundreds of similar CDs and a couple of boxes of vinyl in Nov to pay rent. they paid me shit, but you can probably over pay for them there if you like.

    Or, wait until next May when all the rummage sales by all the cakensniffing hipster yuppies on CH are desperately trying to make their mortgages and rent. Good times for collectors ahead!

  17. My husband and I lost nearly all of our vinyl, CDs, and the vintage hi-fi on which the vinyl was played in the midwest flooding this past summer. 2000-ish records and 1500 or so CDs are just gone, and no, renter’s insurance does not cover flood damage.

    It hurts, especially when one considers how much cash one is out in replacing (if one can) all of those recordings, but it gets better with time. Especially considering that most anything is better than 8′ of water in your home.

  18. @Big Weirdo
    I’ve probably bought some of your stuff over the last few months. Thanks!

    Also, thanks to everyone who’s wished me well, offered sympathy, etc. It means a lot.

  19. ouch. i know the feeling man. you never really get over it, you just move on. i once got all my music/musical equipment stolen in the same week. i walked around like a lost empty shell for days. now i never let my music leave my sight/grasp.

  22. In 1979, I moved to Minnesota to Oregon when I was 20 with a friend. I didn’t know how long I’d be there and we only had her car for storage so I couldn’t bring much (though I brought my stereo system, minus the speakers). I only took the LPs I listened to the most. The rest I packed up in boxes and my friend’s family stored them and lots of my other stuff at their house. My mother also took some stuff and ironically, shortly before I was to leave, we discussed maybe my mom should store my LPs, which were probably my most important things I owned but it would have been a lot of trouble to move them again so we left with where they were.

    6 months later my mom died and I had to move back to the Twin Cities. I went to my friend’s house to pick up all my boxes. Naturally I had no idea how many boxes they had stored for me, I hadn’t kept inventory, but it didn’t take long to find out half my LP collection was gone. I contacted her family and her mother said I had picked up everything they had. Months later when I friend moved back and I contineud my questioning, it was discovered her younger brother had sold my LPs at record stores – back when there were so many stores which would buy them. Slowly, I replaced some of my collection and years later I was still doing that when CDs came out so I was replacing many items in the CD format. Of course many of the LPs had gone out of print. One LP I can remember is Greg Brown/DIck Pinney’s first album. I always remembered there was one song on that album I loved. It was never released on CD because Brown hated it and I don’t think the LP was in print long. I started looking for it on ebay but it was going for hundreds of dollars. I finally got one in poor condition at a cheap price and converted it to CD. A couple years later I sold it on ebay for a higher price and donated 100% of the profits to elephants.com.

    I’ve never let go of my anger and disappointment of thinking of that kid and him selling off box by box of my records. I wonder if he would have sold them all eventually. Now I can’t remember if there were any LPs I didn’t get replaced as my music taste changed a bit and also I couldn’t recall the LPs I had as there were so many and I didn’t have a list. I can’t think of that kid and his family with good thoughts. Nowadays I have suddenly become a recovering packrat and I have lost all my sentimentality, which means I’m giving away or throwing my LPs. If I have them on CD or convert them, away they go. LPs given to me which I never liked, gone. Others it’s harder to say goodbe to, especially to the wonderful cover graphics which the CDs lack, but my goal is to be rid of them all someday. I used to write my name on the LPs along with the date I bought them. So if anyone sees “Cindy Martin” written on an LP…

  23. Wow, I lost some important cassettes when I left a rack sitting outside my storage unit accidentally. An excellent live recording of michael hedges, one of the best concerts of my life was in there. I was on my way to burning man, I realized I’d left them out on the sidewalk thingy, but I was already late and decided I couldn’t go back. I called the storage office but they said they didn’t find anything.

    It’s a lesson in loss. It’s bad but also good. It lets me accept death a little bit–because something I’d wanted to hold on to has already escaped me. Nothing is permanent.

  24. You can probably sue them in Seattle because they entered our State to deliver your goods. You might be able to sue them in Federal Court. Check with a Seattle-area lawyer.

  26. I got screwed by a moving company too when I moved here. They held my shit ransom for months until I paid double. Its all because those mover fucks give you a price and then sub contact it out to another company and another, by the time you stuff shows up, if at all you have no idea who it is, and in my case they changed from cubic feet of cargo to weight! Incidentally if you file a lawsuit here in Seattle, They have to travel here to appear. If they no show you win. Also get the DOT involved because it has to do with interstate transit. I went buck fucking wild on Cross Country Van Lines, they actually closed up shop turned off the phone and I am assuming changed names to screw other people. I hope you get your music back.

  27. Beautiful article! I am a horrid collector of things as well. Books mostly and some other things. As I sit buried in stuff I think about downsizing, but I-Just-Can’t-Part-With-It! For the books I’ve considered a Kindle, but I love the printed page much like you love the physicality of those records. I feel your pain, and I guess we just have to remind ourselves that we can’t take it with us, right? I’m so sorry at any rate. Really sorry…

  28. hi dave, we share your pain. i will be 78 in june and have had many setbacks, but each setback gave me an opportunity to better my life. if i can help with a lawyer monetarily let us know. love always mom and dad

  29. Extreme condolences to you. When I decided to drive my record & CD collection (~60 or more boxes’ worth, like yours) cross-country from NYC to Seattle, it was cuz I didn’t trust a moving company not to damage them. But lose the bulk of them completely? I don’t think I even considered that possibility.

  31. Dave, my condolences. As someone who used to write for you at AP (and even swapped you some LPs, as I recall), I know something of your eclectic musical tastes and enthusiasms. Not being a DJ and now only a very sporadic music reviewer, I don’t even have the excuse you do for holding onto my motly collection of 5000-6000 CDs and a couple thousand LPs, but many are precious (both musically and as artifacts) and I would be in agony if I lost them. I’m considering a retirement move to Canada next year, and your experience and that of others in this Comments section has convinced me that I’m going to be renting my own personal uhaul truck to schlep my collection across the border, even if it means an extra trip. If you think I might have anything you’re looking for, let me know and I would be happy to rip copies for you — although I know that it’s not the same as having the originals.

    And who knows — all or part of your missing collection may yet show up, espeically if you can figure out a way to put some legal heat on the moving company.

    Cheers,

    Bill Tilland

  32. that happened to my book library when i moved to europe. i have less than 10% of it now, and about the same for my silver age comics collection. here’s the deal: p2p was made for situations like this. break the law and replace everything you can with digital versions off the net.

  33. Wow, I really hope you’re able to recover your lost music. That’s just awful.

    Music is one of the things that makes life worth living.

    My heart goes out to you.

    Good luck!

  34. “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 … 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.”

    First. Digital music does not need to be sampled the same way that CDs are.

    Second, to think of MP3s as the best digital format is simply stupid. WAV contains the actual sounds, FLAC (and others) are lossless. So nearly all of those uploads at the moment to the web are crap (at least Trent Reznor seems to have a clue).

    Third, if the record companies took digital seriously, you wouldn’t *have to* rip off the artists. If you’re not a 19-year-old dickhead, you prefer to pay *reasonable* sums for your unencumbered music.

    Finally, if you want to carry around a bit of cardboard that can disintegrate or go up in flames at any time, fine. I’d rather have the actual *music*. Not to mention the fact that the digital format is not being fully used at present – we’ve barely got album art and lyrics. How about a full multimedia schwag with images, lyrics, posters to print, bios…? It’s not as if the technology doesn’t exist.

  35. Damn, and I forgot point 4, which was that digitally-archived music would not go “out of print”. It drives me nuts that I can’t replace stuff from 5 years ago, let alone 50.

  37. Please check out http://www.mymoveclaim.com, and see if they can help. There should have been at least the minimum insurance based on a per pound lost provided by the moving company. I believe this is a federally mandated requirement for inter-state mover.

    There is also http://www.movingscam.com which may be able to help with advice.

    Also, see if Angieslist.com has a neighborhood in your area. If you are a member, they will act on your behalf to resolve service issues that you experience.

    Best wishes for a less negative outcome.

  38. I read your article with fascination and only a little bit of sympathy – let me explain.I went through a similar experience – moved out to Virginia in 1978 working for Peaches and when I moved back to Seattle in 1979 I kept waiting for the moving van to arrive. I found out a month later that the truck burned to the ground in the middle of Utah – my entire record collection of 10,000 pieces, which I started in 1970, had vanished, including everything I had gleaned from hours of rummaging through cut-out racks and several years working at record stores.It included 10 sealed copies of the skull cover Whitelight/Whiteheat,100s of original Psych LPs and sealed copies of every ESP and Limelight Avant-garde series I got at Tower for $1.50 each! It was heartbreaking and eventually very liberating. I thought I would never collect again! Then I found an original clear vinyl, hand silkscreened Albert Ayler Bells Lp in a junk shop in the Udistrict for $1 and took it as a sign. I started collecting again, which was easy working at the original Cellophane Square, and amassed an even larger collection! But it does go to show all the things that the psychotherapist points out – it was very interesting to no longer define myself by my record collection for a few years. And I used some of the insurance money to put out some of Seattle’s early punk rock records myself.Hell, I even ended up selling just my Sex Pistols collection in 1983 and using it for a down payment on a house!!.Interestingly, the insurance took the list price at the time – $7 – and cut it in half for depreciation, so only got $3.50 for each record – far below their actual worth, needless to say. Oh well, it is an odd feeling to know others have gone through the ordeal and soul searching I had to go through…

  39. Oh please. Easily tens of thousands of dollars of stuff goes missing, you know who took it (or who should have a paper trail), and you neither sue nor press charges?

    “But I don’t know any lawyers in Los Angeles”

    *THAT* is your excuse? What, did you secretly order a hit on them or something? I honestly doubt that with the amount of crap you’ve had to put up with, that you *really* just let it drop. Noone is that spineless.

  40. Ernie: I’m not dropping it. I recently discovered that I can hire a Seattle lawyer, which makes suing a much more likely proposition.

    And I just filed a complaint with FMCSA.

    Ultimately, it’s not a matter of spinelessness; it’s more of a financial issue.

  41. Oh, that is a horrible story. I’m so sorry for your loss. I was a complete nervous nelly when my mom drove across country with my 1500+ album collection in her mini-van. I’d been separated from my vinyl for over 15 years and knew if anything happened, I wouldn’t remember what I had. She couldn’t understand why I made her look into getting supplemental insurance. Hopefully, your sad experience will be helpful lesson learned for someone else to avoid.

  42. At the very least, invest in a ticket to CA and take them to small claims court. California has a maximum dollar limit of $7500. That’ll buy a lot of vinyl at those record stores you love to haunt.

  44. Movers are thieves by trade!
    The lowlifes that moved me stole audio equipment by opening the bottom of the boxes and resealing them, then brought them into the house empty and put the boxes in a pile…as if I wouldn’t find out!?! I ripped BEKINS a new one big time and got all I had lost back money wise and more.

    SHOW THEM NO MERCY!

  45. You have my most heartfelt condolences. Trust me if that was me they would not still be walking.
    You should get legal advice – sue them for every last penny.

  46. If it makes you feel any better, the summer after college, I enrolled in a Spanish college and backpacked across Europe, from Cefalu, Sicily, to the northern dunes of the Netherlands. It was in Amsterdam, days before I left, that my dorm-style hostel room was ransacked. The girls in the bunk next to me had their passports, money, Eurailpasses and electronics stolen. I had all my important stuff in my moneybelt, on me everywhere I went. But they took the small bag in which I kept my discman — not a big deal, except that they didn’t just take the discman out of the bag. They took the bag. Which also contained all my many rolls of shot film from school and travel. Zero street value for that stuff, and though it probably ended up in a trashcan, it wasn’t one of the ones I rummaged through for hours in the streets after that. The silver lining of your story? You could someday coming across every last one of those albums — perhaps painstakingly, one by one — in the future. That’s some hope, no matter how small.

  48. I don’t understand why this is important. You have the opportunity to reach a large number of readers and this is what you choose to write about? Where’s my venue for self absorbed whining? I could at least be less boring.

  49. I think everybody can agree that losing a bunch of shit you worked hard at collecting sucks real bad.

    However, all this “vinyl is the ultimate music format” & “I respect you more for owning things rather than actually appreciating the music” stuff is very shallow and silly. I know vinyl purism is almost a religion now, but come on…

  51. I can only imagine how much this sucks for you. Once upon a time, I lost a few hundred albums (cassettes, actually) in transit – along with a motorcycle – when the truck carrying my stuff caught on fire & burned up. Even if you can’t recover everything, I hope you can make the moving company’s existence less profitable by suing the assholes into oblivion.

  53. That illustration isn’t very winning.

    You really should be doing more about this. They have all the records (sorry) of who moved what. Just follow the chain of names and bear in mind that much of what they tell you will be a lie. Don’t stop until you get what you want.

    SHOW THEM NO MERCY!

  54. Dave, the enormity of your loss perhaps stunned you temporarily into inaction. And make no mistake, this is truly a profound loss that would strike deeply into anyone’s psyche. Of course the financial aspects of seeking a remedy could seem overwhelming as well. I am so glad to see you are now taking steps to recoup. Making the situation public was a good move.

    I urge you not to give up on this. Pursue those MFer’s to the ends of the earth! As you mention, it was not only your personal collection but a precious resource for the community and even posterity.

    How about a PayPal fund for Dave’s legal expenses? If every Stranger reader donated even $1….little enough payback for all the goodness the Stranger brings us each and every week. C’mon, ppl !

    (Written by one who is attempting to jettison as many material objects as possible to “lighten the journey”.)

  55. …even tho it’s “late” all authorities should be notified….. a lot of the work is already done…. you just email the article…

    ….police, border stations, FBI, all want any information they can get regarding crimes…. pieces are more likely to fall together if all involved have seen what you wrote…. you gotta do your part to assist the next victims….

    I’m not sure where to start, but authorities usually ask, “Have you contacted ….?” Cosa Mesa (or whoever) Police should probably be first.

  56. I don’t see this so much about records as moving companies, really…they’re horrible. In every way.

    Also: the local used bins have been going my way lately.

    Also also: let me know if you need a grip of boring ass 90s hiphop singles, any weak shit, and/or generally TEPID records…looking to lose half these thanks.

  57. This year, some selfish asshole broke into my house and stole a half rack of Miller Lite and my music. ALL of it. The only comfort I have is knowing that the thief also got a fair amount of crap, (I’ve been buying cds since I was 11, it was bound to happen). Like you, some was salvaged by iTunes, but it’s not the same, (my iPod went missing, too). There’s nothing sexy about music that comes from a computer. Days go by and I don’t think about my losses and then some days, I want to kick things.

    Thanks to some of my friends, I have started to rebuild my collection. Yes, there are precious, one of a kind discs that can never be replaced, but I’m trying to look at it with a fresh perspective. I’ve now been give the opportunity to create the ultimate, super collection. I will replace the blues, the punk, the classic rock and yes, I will replace Prince. I will replace Morrisey but not Alanis Morissette.

    Regardless of this new perspective, there are days when I still imagine that dick kicking back with a Miller Lite and sorting through the soundtrack of my life. And then I remember that karma is a bitch. Those bastards will pay for their incompetence. Maybe Adam’s plan to seek refuge in Canada will be foiled and he will be forced to listen to nothing but Celine Dion for the rest of his days.

    One can dream…

  58. companies pay people minimum wage to deliver our precious items. They make a mint and the employees get fucked and so do we. I live music and my collection too, I fell for you bro. I hope it all works out and you get yuour collection back whole.

  60. I was completely with you until you typed that evil phrase that denotes ignorant-fence-riding-internet-bloggers everywhere; you began a paragraph with “That being said.”

    oh well

  62. I’d have to say the only reason this hasn’t been pursued from a legal angle is because (with regret that I must say this), this article is fabricated. No one who lost this much music would wait so long to take legal action of some kind…

  63. Trix has the right idea. MP3’s may not be ideal but if you look past itunes there are sites out there that let you find what.cd you want in the digital format you want, including lossless formats like FLAC and ripped from vinyl. Sometimes even remastered so they are *better* quality than the original.
    If you are worried about 1’s and 0’s not having as “warm a sound” or some other bs you had better ditch your cd’s because they are all digital too.

  64. Jon: It happened.

    I’ve been giving the movers a chance to retrieve the lost goods (as they promised they would), but my patience has run out and I’m now seeking legal recourse.

  65. Aw, screw that, you can download everything you want, in whatever quality you want. Got 5000 lps and 5000 45s and I have barely touched them in 9 years since MP3 got big. Download FLAC if you dont want compression loss. Then backup your stuff to protect from ever losing stuff! Thanks for the tip on Friendsound! Had that Googled and downloaded before I got maybe two more paragraphs read!

  66. No one gives a fuck about your stupid music collection. No one ever cared about any of that music, or you. Get over your fucking self.

  67. Had to check this piece out b/c it’s displaced Savage Love at the top of the most comments list. No easy feat. So what’s all the talk ab? Dude. You still got your Willie Colon El Malo (w/ Hector Lavoe on vocals), right?! Those bastards are worse than looters after fall of Baghdad in ’03. Friendsound, no way?!

  68. “Fifthly, almost every record and CD has a complicated network of memories and associations attached to it.”

    This is the most pathetic thing I have ever read. Hipster materialism at its finest! Do you honestly expect anyone to care about you getting a bunch of stuff stolen? It happens all the time buddy.

  69. You’ve waited too long to get your stuff back. 5 months now? You think it’s still sitting in boxes waiting to be found? Unlikely.

    You needed to take savage, rip-roaring action immediately.

    You needed to make their lives hell until they would rather commit suicide than talk to you on the phone.

    You needed to make a barrage of calls and letters to all the people in their circle.

    Too late now.

    All you can hope for is $$$ compensation and you can be glad that you are freed from the burden of physical goods.

  73. i lost some of my rekkids moving back from nyc to seattle (note: all my sons moving in tukwilla – douchebags) and can feel the pain. email me and i will give you a record or two from my stuff. because i am feel the pain and loss.

    sorry.

  74. Dude………. I’ve had nightmares about this. Honestly. I had to move from Brisbane to Adelaide, and my first worry was all my vinyl warping in a hot shipping container. Luckily it was winter. My second bump came when I ticked the insurance option. I was told that I would have to itemise every single record, and they would “replace” them………. Obviously I advised them that if they would be able to find just 10% of my collection I would employ them full time to find the tracks I am looking for. In short, the message coming across as “they are irreplacable!”.
    So, I bite the bullet & say that at the very least, considering I had to move no matter what, that I would agree to insure them for an agreed value……….. “No, sorry we can’t do that, we will only try to replace them”………. *ROAAAAAR!!*

    In the 2 weeks it took for my records to make it back, I was waking up in a cold sweat panicing. It was a very stressfull & sleepless time for me to say the least.

    Now I don’t mean to rain on your progress, but, in my opinion, you are trying to trick yourself into “letting go”. Just like if you lose a girlfriend you really love, and you try to block it out and not deal with it. In reality, people like us can’t change out souls that have been built over, in your case, almost 30 years.

    It’s like they say, it takes half as long to get over someone, as the time you were together. In your case, 15 years…

    Quick question, have you thought of employing a private investigating firm to look into it for you? Or lodge it with the authorities? It does sound criminal to me.

  75. AntztA: I lodged a complaint with FMCSA. Somehow I’m not very optimistic this action will get my music back or even severely punish the movers. I’m also seeking a lawyer (if anyone reading this is a lawyer and wants to help, email me at dsegal@thestranger.com).

    Much of the moving industry appears to be as corrupt as the worst government you can imagine.

  76. Why would a lawyer want to help? You just “have no stomach for dealing” with lawyers. A moronic position if I’ve ever heard one. Even if all the money you manage to sue out of the movers ends up going to the lawyer, wouldn’t you rather give it to the lawyer than the people who stole your stuff. Jesus christ, after everything they’ve done to you, you’re siding with the thieves rather than heaven forbid a lawyer, who in this case is on your side. Thanks for continuing to make theft profitable.

  82. When I moved from Canada to the US, I had to get rid of EVERYTHING I OWNED. Everything.

    And I don’t really feel bad about it. I, too, collected vinyl. Not as a DJ. But I’d started feeling like I was chained by it. I couldn’t really go anywhere without wondering how I could get it to where I was. FInally, I said “fuck it.”

    I have enough crap now after 3 years. I will get rid of that stuff in a heartbeat. All I care about is my cat, my husband, and MAYBE a small yet valuable collection of antique Christmas ornaments.

    We can’t all be perfect.

  84. Reminds me a little, obliquely, of the traumatic life of fans of Doctor Who, whose entire beloved TV show was JUNKED by the BBC in the mid-70s. A lot of copies have turned up since but there are still hundreds of episodes that may not even exist any more because some douchebag sitting at a desk didn’t have the energy to care. At least with your music collection, the music itself is probably still out there somewhere. It’s a tiny bright side, but it’s something!

    What percentage of their record collections do people with Massive Record Collections return to, I wonder? A while back I realised that I was accumulating Stuff at an alarming rate and that I’d be better off without the physical trappings, taking advantage of modern rental models instead. (Certainly it seems insane to me that anyone would own shelves and shelves of popular DVDs, but I know people who do.) The John-Cusack-in-High-Fidelity living space crammed with physical music is very cool, but I think it’s superficially cool – in the long run I’d rather have the sum of human artistic endeavor stored in a database the size of Switzerland, available to anyone for download at the touch of a computer key.

  85. This is a terrible story about a terrible loss… oh wait. No it’s just another music snob douche asserting their superiority over the masses.

    “I crave the totems that announce to my visitors (and the world) that my taste is impeccable.”

    Fuck. You. You absolutely deserve what happened to you AND MORE because while you’re crying about your SUPER RARE AND REALLY REALLY AUTHENTIC records, people around the world were being gang-raped by soldiers in front of their families… Among other things.

    I truly hope worse things than this continue to happen to you until you gain some fucking perspective.

  86. Don’t let all the negative feed back get you down. Segal that story was frustrating but well written.
    I don’t know you but my sympathies are with you.

  88. dang. that’s shitty. i would cry if i lost all my vinyl. i did however, ironically lose my entire 10,000+ cd digital music collection last night. so i somewhat feel your pain.. keep collecting.

  89. The Bait and Switch movers happened to my husband and I when moving cross country. The moving company I’d scheduled were not who showed up. The ones that did were subcontracted, cost twice as much and didn’t even have the correct dates and times of the move. The new movers showed a bit to much interest in my husbands coffin and records (luckily they arrived). Then when trying to call the agent I set it up with I never got a call returned. This was 4 years ago and it’s still a very sore subject. It’s like a bait and switch scheme that goes unregulated.
    I feel for you Dave.

  90. Hi I have a vinyl collection and I’m going to talk about it everytime I can. I also wear my sisters pants cause I like the way they feel around my package. I think that people that don’t own a Iphone, or have 1200 songs that they will never hear, are not real people. I like to go to shows and talk about other bands. I only buy organic, and smile as place my canvas bags in the back of my 08 prius. i’m the kid at the starbucks writing my novel on my mac book, while randomly checking myspace to see when the next transformers movie comes out. I love going to party’s and talking about my sneakers. I enjoy talking about politics when I’m drunk and smoking cigarrets cause my life is stressfull. I am a Seattle hipster and my music and clothes define me. I am as original as all the other2000 hipsters in the city.

    (in no way related to this article, I am way more hip than that)

  91. I completely and totally sympathize with your situation

    I was the CJ at a large New Years party and my 80 gig Ipod was stolen. I dont drive, so my bus rides across town are now painfully long and unpleasant.

  92. I had the same thing nearly happen to me and my 2000+ contemporary classical CDs (many of which are super rare or OOP) during my move from Delaware to Kansas City this fall. Same exact thing two week guarantee… yeah right. I moved on Sept. 11, didn’t see any of my stuff ’til Oct. 25. I was a wreck; here I was in a house with one suitcase, an air mattress, one suitcase, and two dogs (who of course had all of their belongings) for a month and a half. Oh also on the truck…my desktop computer which contained my soon-to-be-completed dissertation and all the scores I had written as an undergrad. Of course everything was backed up… but the back-up was on the truck as well. Luckily I did get all my BOXES back but all my large furniture was missing or destroyed. I feel for you man. It certainly is a loss of self. Your personal history has been exorcised from you in manners that would befit the Exorcist! Hang in there in there Linda Blair.

  93. Holy shit.

    My music collection (8,000-ish songs) is virtually all digital at this point, and thus theoretically easily replaceable, and I’d STILL be heartbroken to lose it. I can’t even imagine having my collection be on vinyl and then having a bunch of it be *gone* all of a sudden. That’s just nauseating.

    Sorry, man.

  96. In 1997 I first had my VW van and everything I owned stolen from me in Atlanta. This included a large music collection, my sax, and all of my personal belongings as I was living out of the van working the Summer Olympics as a waiter. At first I was heartbroken and very lost but as time moved on I begin to see things in a different light. After walking back to the restaurant I worked at and asking to be let go that night I stumbled down the Greyhound station with everything I had left: my leather jacket, a pocket computer, my I.D., and the clothes on my back. Looking up at the Arrivals and Departures board I found myself standing at the crossroads of life with each of destinations leading to a different, unknown fate. But the thing I realized in that moment was that all of those roads really lead to the same place. Unencumbered from the weight of how I defined myself previously I was free to become anything I wanted to be. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.

    I’ve traveled the world now and don’t spend most of my time collecting objects I know will never make me happy. I don’t think one can ever really own things anyway in a sense. It’s more like you just get to spend time being around them and worst yet, when you define yourself and your value by them, they end up owning you.

  100. I got screwed in much the same way. I hired a moving company to move my stuff from Massachusetts to California and it never showed up. The last thing I heard was that the driver decided that he needed to be paid first so he put everything into an anonymous storage facility and split (despite the fact that we’d paid thousands of dollars in advance).

    I talked to a couple of lawyers who refused the case. They said that an interstate moving and trucking theft case was near impossible to win. They both told me to file an insurance claim and call it a lesson learned.

    I’m still not sure what the lesson to be learned is but my advice to anyone moving precious cargo is to only use the absolute *best* moving company with the squeakiest clean reputation you can find. It just doesn’t pay to shop around based on price…

  101. Have you considered hiring a private detective rather than a lawyer? The records are somewhere, and somebody knows where. It’s only a matter of finding out where. A detective is better suited to this task than an attorney.

    If you’re serious about recovering money damages, though, you should definitely hire an attorney. Don’t be afraid of that. He won’t bite!

  104. I empathize with you, man. I swear this on the original copy of Esquerita Capital which was smashed in two by a careless faceless USPS worker.

  105. Thank you for sharing your personal horror story that turned into something of a revelation.

    About 3 years, I was moving so much that I sold my record collection before they could get damaged in storage or natural causes. I had nowhere near the number of records you had, but I still felt like I had gone through a huge break-up, thinking of all the good times I had with each record, everything that we had been through together over the years. The endless montage playing over and over for weeks.

    Then I heard the radio DJ that I sold my record collection to put on the first press of the White Album that used to be mine, and it was like the DJ was the new relationship and that I wanted my records back, my relationship back with those records.

    That was three years ago. I’ve moved about 3 times since. I miss having them every now and then, but I don’t miss being responsible for them, worrying about them, having nightmares about fires or floods.

    Sorry for your loss. I salute you and your journey and for sharing it so brilliantly.

  107. Reading this gave me post-traumatic stress disorder after my own hellish move (not only did I have an estimated 4,500 lbs. of music/magazines, but also five antiques that are all 120 yrs old).

    Quoth an an old friend: “Next time I have to move, I’m burning my shit and starting over.”

  108. If you lost “Heaven’s end” and “Wolf flow” by Loop, let me know your adress and i will send them to you (for free of course). I have two copies of those records. I will be pleased to give those cds to you who, i know, will apreciate them. That will be my grain of sand to your recovery.

  110. @108
    I did lose those Loop records, Miguel. Your entrance to paradise will be assured if you were to send them, care of The Stranger, but, really, it’s beyond the call of duty.

    @109
    Been badgering Eagle Express for some kind/any kind of monetary compensation, with no luck. The owner promises to send money, but never comes through.
    Outright thuggery might be my best bet at this point.

  111. Dave, I don’t have time to read all the comments to see if this has been suggested yet but have you been calling record stores & looking on craigslist(or ebay or whatever) to see if somebody has been trying to unload a large collection? Surely in that big of a collection there were some pretty rare gems that if somebody is selling, odds are it’s yours. I realize it would be an exhausting process, but obvs worth it. I once had about 200 CD’s taken out of my car, not being an “iPod guy” it stung pretty bad. What pissed me off more than anything was the amount of TIME I spent gathering those. About 7 years of purchasing/burning down the tubes. Condolences…

  113. No worries, robotbutler. I haven’t done that, but I did make the rounds of area record shops to look for my stuff. I saw some similar titles scattered here and there, but that could’ve been coincidence.

    Sorry to hear about your loss, too.

  115. Every effort made to retrieve my records, get compensation from the moving company, and contact government officials about measures to take failed.

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