78-rpm recordings from the American recording industry are becoming highly prized artifacts. The “good ones,” I mean. Rare blues, gospel and hillbilly recordings, printed on labels like Paramount, Black Patti and Gennett, have attained a mythical status and become the subjects of intense bidding wars among collectors. As you can imagine, many collectors have started to question the point of it all and wondering if there isn’t an area of 78-rpm collecting designed for the obsessive and dogmatic. Jonathan Ward’s solution to this problem has been to pursue the rich musical content found on ethnic 78s. 

Steve Krakow’s apartment is the psychedelic mind of his alter ego, Plastic Crimewave, externalized. Every shelf and wall space has been filled with comic books, figurines, campy LP artwork and a wide variety of vintage, psychedelic ephemera. “It was probably my parents to blame.” He said, acknowledging our wandering eyes. “When I was young they never let me hang anything on my walls.” A library of LPs, 45s and tapes occupies one side of the apartment. Nestled back in the corner of the living room sat a functioning 45-rpm record jukebox. An illustrator, musician and writer, Krakow’s varied influences are made evident by the curiosity-shop quality of his home.

Music writer and teacher at NYU’s Gallatin School, Amanda Petrusich lives in Brooklyn, NY in an apartment adorned with vintage guitars, CD box sets, anatomical posters and milk crates stuffed with vinyl records. Carl, her cat, gnawed at the lavaliere mic we’d placed on the living room table. “I’m sorry,” she said, scooping him up, “he’s in his bite everything phase.” She handed us both a beer and, after interviewing us for a time, acquiesced to the interviewee seat, ready to discuss her focus for the last few years - the world of 78-rpm record collecting.

At 11:35 in the morning, we left Charlottesville, Virginia and watched the blacktop of US-29 swallow up the city in the rearview mirror. We were headed south thirty miles or so to the small town of Faber to meet 78-rpm record collector, writer and a sound engineer, Christopher King. The two-lane highway was quaint, but wild. The farmhouses, churches and antique stores that dotted the lush scenery were contrasted against the sunbathing blacksnakes that lay motionless on the roadside like fragments of rubber tires and the dead trees, which, engulfed by undergrowth, loomed like surrealistic hedge sculptures. Staring out the windows of the car, we practiced interview questions. The advice we had been given upon meeting King was simple but ominous: listen carefully and don’t say stupid shit.

After interviewing Nathan Salsburg, we went out for lunch and sat among the cheering locals at the Frankfort Avenue Beer Depot and Smokehouse, wolfing pulled pork sandwiches and sipping on local beer. The World Cup game between USA and Germany drew the crowd’s interest, but we were too exhausted to pay much attention, focusing instead on satisfying the hunger brought on by the interview. Digesting his comments along with the sweet and salty pork, we exchanged awed and envy-laden thoughts about Nathan’s work. He is a record collector, a music writer and a professional guitarist in addition to his duties as curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. A badass. And an eloquent one at that. Our inspired exchange, however, was juxtaposed against an uninspired performance by our nation’s soccer team. Germany scored against USA, the bar groaned through their fingertips and, we, along with a bar-full of dejected fans, made the universal gesture for the check.

We left the car near the campus park and, using our visitor map, wandered our way toward building 20, the number that indicated the location of the Mississippi Blues Archive. The bright green lawns and red-bricked buildings had a startling effect on driving-weary eyes. We scanned the archways of the uniform colonial buildings until the etched words Library appeared and we entered into the air-conditioned lobby of the J.D. Williams library at the University of Mississippi, Oxford.

We arrived in New Orleans’ historic Garden District just in time to meet Ira Padnos eating his breakfast on the sidewalk outside his house. He was catching up with a friend who had just delivered him a bag of soft-shelled crab. As we neared, the man (who we later learned went by D SLUT) stepped into his ramshackle van, swatted away Ira’s extended twenty-dollar bill, and drove off, in all likelihood to deliver more crabs. Ira greeted us and looked after the van saying, “He did a few gigs with Black Flag but they kicked him out. They thought he was crazy and smoked too much pot.”

In a succinctly worded email, Doug Hanners instructed us to meet him at a storage shed in a suburb outside of west Austin, TX. It was there that we would do the interview. We pulled in next to each other on the gravel driveway and exited our cars into the humid morning air. He is tall and spry and, in a gesture that seemed to defy the scenario’s drop-off characteristic, strode over to warmly shake our hands. Ushering us into a generic white barn that had already collected the outside heat, he flicked on the fluorescent overhead lights. The shed is divided into two rooms. One contained a library of 45’s and in the other laid boxes upon boxes of records waiting to be catalogued. He plugged in an old fan to circulate the stifling odor of cardboard and finger grime saying, “they used to hang these in the general stores back before we had AC. It still works great!”

Bicycles of all shapes and sizes, spray-painted pink, littered the hillside leading up to Stanley Davis’ Sonoma County home. A transition into the realm of the collector was immediately observed. Reaching the top, we were greeted by beautiful Russian River scenery as well as a collector’s paradise of Coleman lanterns, cigar boxes and a whole lot of vinyl and shellac records.

Oliver Wang's vinyl collection spans three walls of his converted garage. Arranged alphabetically and by genre, the jam-packed shelves leave just enough room for a desk chair and a turntable station. That we had entered his most intimate of spaces was clear. The variety of soul music, boogaloo, jazz and hip-hop traces a personal journey of his beginnings as a hip hop DJ to his present-day status as a music scholar and writer.