That afternoon, Nagoski welcomed me at his door, and after a lunch of cheese and olives at his kitchen table, we wandered down the street to buy some beer from the corner store. After we’d picked out a six-pack, Nagoski told me the cashier would almost certainly ask him about me later. “It’s a small town,” he said.
Nagoski had soft brown hair that fell to just below his ears, a fuzzy beard, and kind blue eyes. His record room, on the second floor of his home, was charmingly rumpled: there were empty and full cardboard boxes, piles of pennies, rolls of packing tape, a couple toothbrushes, stacks of books, and scattered 78s and LPs. Unlike the music rooms of other collectors I’d visited, Nagoski’s wasn’t an exacting space. It seemed more like the office of a distracted college professor.
One of the things Nagoski and I had spoken about on the phone was the question of why people collected anything, and why a person might collect 78s specifically. It was something he’d thought about a lot already. “Some people are just really good at listening to records. It’s a real talent.” He shrugged. “When you get to a certain level of knowledge, and can start passing that along to people, that’s really exciting and really beautiful.” For Nagoski, the understanding and presentation of the material was just as important as its acquisition. “I see that in 78 collectors over and over again—they’re dying to express, to someone who wants to know, how beautiful the whole thing is. The Ghost World generation of [Terry] Zwigoff and [Robert] 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.”
Occasionally, there was enormous power to be had in that sharing. In Escaping the Delta, in a chapter titled “The Blues Cult,” Wald talks about how “for most modern listeners, the history, aesthetic, and sound of blues as a whole was formed by the [Rolling] Stones and a handful of their white, mostly English contemporaries.” But the Stones and their ilk were taking their cues from reissue compilations conceived of, produced, and sourced by 78 collectors—the ones who preceded Salsburg, Ward, Millis, and Nagoski.
In the early 1960s, after the Blues Mafia was well established and enough 78s had been canvassed and hoarded away, reissue collections began appearing on long-playing, 331/3 rpm vinyl. Pete Whelan was the first to reissue Charley Patton, on his Origin Jazz Library label in 1960; the records were sourced mostly from Whelan’s collection, with additional contributions from Bernie Klatzko. One year prior, the writer Samuel Charters had compiled an album for Folkways called The Country Blues, which was designed to accompany his book of the same name. Like the Anthology, it became a kind of guiding document for the folk revival, but most 78 collectors considered it too commercial, including, as it did, top sellers like Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson. Shortly after its release, Whelan delivered a retort LP titled Really! The Country Blues that featured more obscure bluesmen like Henry Thomas, Son House, and Skip James. (Like Patton, James had never been reissued before Whelan thought to do it.)
Then, in 1961, Columbia Records put out King of the Delta Blues Singers, a mono collection of sixteen Robert Johnson sides. It was the first time those songs had ever appeared outside of their original shellac. Columbia executives were ultimately convinced of the music’s import by the set’s producer, the collector, critic, and talent scout John Hammond, who had recently signed Bob Dylan and would eventually go on to bring Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen to the label. As Wald writes, Hammond “had a gift for persuading other people to share his enthusiasms.” Hammond had been interested in Johnson for decades. He’d even tried to get Johnson to perform at a concert he was organizing at Carnegie Hall in late 1938, not realizing that Johnson had died in August of that year. (In a particularly prescient move, Hammond instead rolled out a phonograph and played two of Johnson’s 78s to the assembled crowd—already Johnson had been reduced to ephemera; already his music was an exalted object, sacred, fascinating, and distinct.)
Because no one knew what Robert Johnson looked like (and wouldn’t—or not really—until a tiny, postage-stamp-size photo was uncovered in the early 1970s), the cover of King of the Delta Blues Singers featured an illustration of a faceless black man wearing farm clothes, hunched over in a chair playing a guitar. Most of the cuts were pulled from Hammond’s personal collection or from the shelves of the collector (and fellow Columbia employee) Frank Driggs, with the exception of “When You Got a Good Friend,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” and “Traveling Riverside Blues”—which had previously been unissued and were taken from surviving metal masters.
The Johnson set, especially, was a big deal. Eric Clapton lost his mind when he heard it: “It came as something of a shock to me that there could be anything that powerful . . . At first it was almost too painful, but then after about six months I started listening, and then I didn’t listen to anything else,” Clapton wrote in 1990. Keith Richards went similarly nuts: “I was astounded at what I heard. It took guitar playing, songwriting, delivery to a totally different height,” he declared in his 2010 autobiography, Life. In 1990, Columbia would issue another set, now called Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, on two compact discs. It contained what was, at the time, Johnson’s entire surviving canon, and ultimately went on to sell over a million copies.
For a while, the blues’ stepping-stone role in the development of rock ’n’ roll became the genre’s primary narrative—this must have enraged collectors, seeing a music so vital and whole relegated to a supporting part—and rock fans were taking a sudden interest in reissue records previously made by and for 78 collectors exclusively. “By the time you get to 1970, Led Zeppelin was just lifting whole songs, lock, stock, and barrel as rock performances. So every fan of those guys—and they inspired some heavy-duty fans—then had to go get the source records, which were these reissues,” Nagoski explained. “So these reissues became the foundational bible for ‘Where does rock ’n’ roll come from? Where do our rock ’n’ roll heroes draw their sources from?’ ” he said. “Then you get interviews with Keith Richards where he’s talking about Robert Johnson, the crossroads myth and all that kind of stuff. And then there are legions of fans who think this stuff came up out of the Delta, whole cloth. Nothing existed before it, it’s the oldest, weirdest music imaginable.”
Around sunset, we walked to Dante’s, Nagoski’s favorite local bar, sat at a table out back, and ordered sandwiches and more beers. Although Nagoski was still young—he had just turned thirty-seven—he already had a sophisticated sense of how the collecting sphere operated, of all the social mechanics of the game. Although collectors wanted to share their work with the world, and to secure validation and influence through that exchange, they also wanted to share their discoveries with each other.
“It’s dudes hanging out, relating to each other through objects,” he laughed. “It’s such a manifestation of dude culture, where guys tend to gather and not talk about their actual lives, if they can avoid it, but instead refer to the engine of their car, or whatever third thing they can talk about. And then through the aesthetics of that, they’ll relate to one another and get a sense of whether somebody is trustworthy or not and if they can actually open up to them,” he continued. “It’s a compensation for all kinds of male skills that are supposed to be present in adolescence that may not be present, so you compensate with other things—the superiority of specialization in some arcane field. Science-fiction nerds and baseball-card guys, motorheads. Wanting to talk about your sound system first and your marriage months later. But literally having a shared aesthetic experience of a particular style of speaker could be the found
ation of a lifelong, very, very deep male friendship.”
I am not male, but by the time I stumbled back to the Hotel Gunter—we’d gone in for another listening session after finishing up at Dante’s, this one capped by a spin of Okeh’s infamous Laughing Record, a 78 recorded in 1922, of a man and a woman cackling crazily while funereal-sounding music plays—I was feeling warmly toward most things. I took my place amid the dolls and relics, artifacts enduring in a new world.
I was introduced to Richard Weize, the owner of the German reissue label Bear Family Records, by Chris King, who had overseen the mastering for several Bear Family releases, including 2011’s The Bristol Sessions, 1927–1928: The Big Bang of Country Music, which collected all the tracks from Victor Records’ famed recording stint in Bristol, Tennessee. (Those sessions yielded the world Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family; it netted King another Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album.) King put us in touch over e-mail. Bret and I were going to be traveling from Berlin to Amsterdam and planned to stop in Bremen, a city on the Weser River in northwestern Germany, not far from the Bear Family headquarters. “Yes, we are approximately 25-30 miles from Bremen,” Weize wrote. “It is probably best to come here to see what is going on.” I accepted his invitation for us to stay the night at his farmhouse.
Bear Family was founded by Weize in 1975, who has since (rightly) declared it “a collector’s record label.” Although the company has released plenty of one-disc compilations, usually focused on a single artist, Bear Family is still best known for its elaborate boxed sets, which are pricey and startlingly comprehensive: in 2005, the label released a seven-CD set featuring 195 different versions of the German pop song “Lili Marleen,” which was written in 1915 and most famously recorded by the cabaret singer Lale Andersen in 1939. Weize’s products aren’t for dabblers. But he serves his particular customers with particular aplomb.
Bear Family reissues a lot of rockabilly, bluegrass, folk, world, pop, oldies, and blues, but Weize’s primary focus has always been on country and western music. Although he owns thousands of his own 78s, he collaborates frequently with American collectors, who help source and notate his releases. I was curious about the way prewar American music had translated globally, and especially how a specialty German label had become so synonymous with the propagation of rural American music.
Bret and I pulled up to the Bear Family farmhouse in our rented BMW at just past dusk. It wasn’t all that far from Bremen, but the landscape was pastoral, and Weize’s sprawling home was surrounded by tall, imposing trees and huge plots of farmland. The sun was dipping below the horizon, but I could still discern the giant carved wooden bear sculpture (with cub) that beset the front door.
Weize answered my knock in denim overalls and a plaid shirt. His long, scraggly gray hair was pulled into a low ponytail, and he was sporting a robust beard and small round eyeglasses. Weize and his wife, Birgit, graciously invited us in, and after a supper of sausages and potato casserole, Weize offered to walk me through his 78 collection, which he keeps in a barn adjacent to the main house. It took a while to navigate it all. He commands a staggering amount of media: LPs, CDs, reel-to-reel tapes, and 78s, all organized on wooden shelves reinforced with metal beams. Weize didn’t know precisely how many records he owned, and he didn’t seem to care that much. We walked for a long time. The barn felt endless. Huge chunks of Weize’s collection had been acquired in wholesale lots or auctions, and there was no way one person could have heard even half of it in a single lifetime. It was odd and overwhelming to see all those records corralled in a barn in a quiet corner of Germany, most now thousands of miles from where they’d been written and recorded.
Weize, who was born in 1945, had always been interested in American music. “Everybody in Germany was interested in American music,” he said. “I bought my first record in 1956. It was ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley, and I got infected, real bad. Records were precious then, not like today, when you can get music anywhere.” Weize has an exacting German accent, but there’s a gruffness—an imperfection—to his voice that makes it oddly musical, almost soft, even when he’s calling someone “a stupid idiot.” (As he often does.)
Eventually, we settled in his office, a cavernous space filled with books and antiques, many of them bear related. A large Stetson hat box was balanced atop a filing cabinet. I sat down in a yellow, RCA Victor–branded vinyl chair. “I work with collectors, but more on a professional basis—I’m not looking for things for myself,” Weize said. I was trying my best not to stare at a bear rug—the animal’s head still intact, its plastic teeth bared, snout frozen midattack—spread across the floor just to the right of his desk. “If I go to somebody and say, ‘My name is Richard Weize from Bear Family,’ they’re very open. But the records are precious to them,” he added. “Let me say something: a collector is a nut, regardless of what he collects. And if he takes things too seriously, if he can’t laugh at it, if he doesn’t find it amusing, if he can’t see that he is a nut, then that’s about the time to put him behind bars.”
Weize partnered with collectors to source his releases—he had to—but they were also his primary foils. “I have collectors who come up to me and say, ‘On your last release, why did you mess it up?’ And since I try to be perfect, my heart sort of sinks into my trousers,” he admitted. “And I’ll say, ‘What did I do?’ ‘On that one track, you faded it two seconds early!’ And I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much.’ I don’t need that stupidity. Kids are dying in Africa, and we are already wasting our time on stupid things, and in addition I have to waste my time on something like that?” Weize tried to maintain some sense of perspective on the whole enterprise. “I live for it, twenty-five hours a day,” he said. “But still, there is a life next to it. Birgit, she doesn’t like collecting, she doesn’t know anything about it, she does what she wants, I do what I want, and we’re getting along fine. But you have to be aware that it’s not the center of the world.”
That night, Bret and I slept peacefully under a framed poster of Mickey Mouse. The next morning after breakfast, Weize brought me to the Bear Family office, also on his property, where a few of the label’s employees were prepping sets for shipping. It was an impressive display: big square boxes of CDs lined up on shelves, wrapped in plastic, ready to be pulled and sent off to whomever had beckoned them.
Just then, I felt extraordinarily overwhelmed by the heft of the collector’s preservationist mission. Seeing all that music—so much of it recorded, as it was, in tiny American towns, by artists deeply unaware of the people they might one day reach—being packaged up for global dissemination was humbling. I thought of Salsburg and Ward and Nagoski; I thought of every 78 collector I’d met. They may have written this story imperfectly—they may have imbued it with skewed narratives and faulty parameters—but they couldn’t have possibly foretold the scale of its retelling.
/ / Thirteen / /
Luring Me Out Here for Nothing but a Damn Bunch of LP Records!
Joe Bussard’s Basement, Fog, Alexis Zoumbas, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues,” Black Patti, Scrambled Eggs, “Vernon Stalefart”
The upmost peak of Afton Mountain seemed like a reasonable place to meet someone—poetic, even. A few weeks prior, Chris King had agreed to ferry me from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Frederick, Maryland, to meet Joe Bussard, one of the foremost living collectors of prewar 78s and already the subject of dozens of feature stories and even a short documentary film, 2003’s Desperate Man Blues. I thought King might make for a useful conduit. Bussard, now seventy-seven, had a wide-reaching reputation for equal parts capriciousness and charm: he was politically conservative, particular about his meals, prone to fits of cackling, deep into fart jokes, unimpressed by the last six decades of American culture, and real fucking serious about records. A lot of folks were angling to get into his basement. He and King had known each other for fifteen years and enjoyed what King called “a pretty fast rapport.” There was also this remarkable fact: when King w
as six or seven years old, Bussard showed up at King’s parents’ house and bought Les King’s entire stash of 78s. Ten thousand records, stacked in whiskey boxes in the basement, handed off to Bussard for ten cents apiece. “I remember it vividly,” King said. “Dad had mint runs of Jelly Roll Morton, mint runs of the Skillet Lickers on Columbia. Dad had shit that God hadn’t seen.”
And now Bussard did.
Our rendezvous spot was King’s idea. It seemed, at the time, like the most convenient move. I had to ditch my car somewhere so we could travel together, and Afton made geographical sense, given its proximity to Interstate 64, which would take us halfway to Frederick. Still, it arrived with a caveat: “I initially felt that we could leave a vehicle at the top of Afton Mountain where an abandoned hotel is falling in on itself, but then I remembered that crowds of people converge there to sightsee and smoke crack,” King wrote a couple days before I left New York. I didn’t think anyone would be terribly interested in pilfering the contents of my thirteen-year-old Honda—its seats littered, as they were, with Kit-Kat wrappers and promotional CDs and old newspapers—and eventually, he acquiesced and sent directions. “Taking 250 West, as you crest the mountain, there is a monstrous parking lot on the left . . . This is the place where hotels go to die. I’ll be there at 9:00 a.m.”
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