Featured Conversation: Marc Masters

Published on Dec 31, 2024

I ordered one from them once and I opened it up in the post office, and all this dirt just came flooding out because it was packaged in a plastic sleeve with just dirt and hair, and it smelled really bad. Every record of theirs was this kind of weird, handmade thing, and I have them all.

Do you want to start by just introducing yourself and talking a little bit about your collection?

So I’m Marc Masters. I’m a music writer. I write about music as one of my kind of jobs/hobbies. I have a lot of records that I’ve been collecting since I was a kid. I was born in 1968 so I started collecting records probably in middle school, high school. And you know, I’ve gone - as most people who have collected records  - for a long time, I’ve gone in and out of having some I have from the first day I started collecting and some that I’ve gotten since.

And you just moved recently.

Yeah, it was pretty crazy. Three years ago I moved all the way across from the East Coast to the West Coast. That was really crazy. This latest move was just a couple hours away, so that wasn’t quite as bad, although still, I mean, ultimately you still have to pack everything up and figure out where to put it all and stuff. But that last move prepared me well for this one. You have to be careful with packing; Bags Unlimited sell really good record boxes. And so when we first moved, I kept all those boxes. I didn’t break them down. I’m like, I better keep them, just in case. And luckily, I could just put everything back in those boxes and put them in a moving truck. So it was pretty painless, except for those couple hours when they’re driving and you’re just crossing your fingers, hoping nothing’s gonna happen, right? 

And then you had the pleasure of getting into your new home and having to reshelve all those records.

Yeah, in a bigger space. So I have enough space now that I was able to even buy one more set of shelves that I can expand into a little. Because I was getting to the point of one in, one out, but I don’t have to do that as much here. But pretty soon I’ll be there again, because I don’t have a lot of space beyond this, so there’s no feasible way for me to add another cabinet.

Let’s talk about your records. What do you think is your greatest score?

Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I’ve never had a big major score in a record store, where I walk in and I’m like, Oh, my God, not only can I not believe they have this, but it’s got a price that I can actually deal with that. I don’t really have big memories of that. The one thing that I do always think about and remember is I had a friend who was moving from New Zealand to England, and he sent out an email to some of his friends saying, “I’ve got to get rid of all these records.” And he had quite a few cool things in it, including a copy of No New York, the No Wave compilation, and that was one I where I thought I’d never get to own a copy. Now, there’s been weird bootlegs and stuff, but this is definitely an original, and he was getting rid of things for a pretty good price because he just needed to unload. So that one was always up there, not only because I’d always been looking for it and always been hoping to have it, but then I eventually, not too long after, I wrote a book about that old subject. So it was nice to have an original copy. 

When did you start becoming a record collector? What got you interested in it? Is there a person who got you into it?

My parents liked music enough that they had records around and I just thought those were interesting. And I listened to music on the radio, and it was cool that you could also play it at home. There wasn’t a single person, I mean, when I started getting into music, who turned me onto everything, but my parents at least inspired me. We had music around and we played it on turntables, before I even knew what it was. So that was mostly it. And then just kind of parallel friends in high school and middle school who were also getting into records at the same time. I never really met that kind of Guru person who was like, these are all the things you need to listen to. But in a way, I kind of like that. I had a group of like five or six friends who we were all getting into similar stuff at the same time. And so one of us would get a U2 album that no one had heard. And then I do remember that one of us got a Captain Beefheart album and we all kind of flipped out about that. 

Do you remember the first records you bought?

I do remember. In fifth grade, my parents started letting me buy singles. This was still long ago enough that you could get singles at a drugstore. For my first purchase I got an Electric Light Orchestra single, because it was on purple vinyl. That was the little bonus, even though there were a bunch of them there that I wanted to get from different bands. But that one not only was a song I liked, but it was on purple vinyl. So I thought that was pretty cool.

I don’t remember ever having another colored vinyl besides that, and I remember our fifth grade teacher would let us play them, and so I was always bringing that in to play. Also a lot of the records, the singles that we used to buy, would come just in a white paper sleeve. They didn’t have picture sleeves. So I used to take old manila folders and cut them out to the size of the record, put tape on the side, and then make my own decorations.

Do you have a favorite record store?

I haven’t really been in Arizona long enough to develop one. There’s a bunch of good ones, but I haven’t got one that I just go to all the time. Back in DC, there’s one called Red Onion that’s really good. I’d go there a lot before I moved. Growing up in my formative years, I went to college in Williamsburg, Virginia and it was pretty close to Richmond, which had a Plan 9 - the flagship Plan 9 store -  which ended up kind of stretching out around Virginia. And that was definitely the coolest. Even when I started working at a record store in Williamsburg, I would still on my days off drive to Richmond to go to Plan 9, because they had so much better stuff than the record store I was working in. So Plan 9 made a big impression on me because they would get all kinds of indie stuff and all kinds of things that you just couldn’t find anywhere else. And I always thought of that as like the whole church of vinyl. And I think they still exist. I think there’s still one in Richmond (ed note: there is).

What’s the weirdest record you own?

Well, in terms of packaging, there was a band from San Francisco that was called Caroliner. They make these really crazy records, this weird kind of experimental rock that’s about old, 1800s subjects. But then they’d always package them in these crazy ways. I ordered one from them once and I opened it up in the post office, and all this dirt just came flooding out because it was packaged in a plastic sleeve with just dirt and hair, and it smelled really bad. Every record of theirs was this kind of weird, handmade thing, and I have them all.

In terms of weird music…there was a little bit of time there not too long ago when I was starting to get into the more novelty-ish stuff. I have a record that tells you how to play golf, like a golf instructional album. That’s pretty weird. You know, I don’t know if you know Andy Zax. He’s a really amazing musicologist and collector and he used to post a lot of the weird stuff he had. And at one time he posted this record…remember the show Webster? There was a whole record that came out that was like, Webster talks to kids about about safety and sexual abuse and Andy posted a picture of his on Facebook. I was like, Oh my God, I’ve been looking for that forever, and he had an extra copy, so he sent it to me. That’s a good one.

Are you a completionist when it comes to your favorite bands?

I’m not quite a complete completist. I think there are bands for whom I will buy almost anything I see. I don’t really have a band where I think I’ve got to make a list of all their stuff, and I’ve got to eventually get it all. But like with the Velvet Underground, I pretty much have all the bootlegs I’ve been able to find.

Sun City Girls, the group from Arizona, I have liked from the beginning. I got hooked on them early, so I got everything as it came out, pretty much. So I might have everything of theirs. I’m not a completist in the sense that I know for sure that I have everything. I mean, there’s definitely been times I’ve been tempted to collect an entire discography of a band, but almost always, when you do that, you find at least one thing that’s out of your price range, and then you’re like, well, I can’t complete that. 

One question I like to ask everybody, because this is a very telling kind of question: You’re having some friends over and the night is kind of winding down. What record do you put on at this point?

Yeah, I mean, over the years, I had different ones, like Captain Beefheart.  I used to love to put on Trout Mask Replica because it was just such a litmus test to see how weird people like to go, how far into it people stay.

And how many people leave?

Yeah, exactly. But in the past like decade or so, when the kind of people coming over has been more like parents of my kids’ friends, people that were not necessarily coming over because they’re music fans. I don’t know if you know this artist, Hailu Mergia, who was kind of rediscovered by the label Awesome Tapes From Africa. Brian from that label found a tape of his in Africa, and then they tracked him down, and they’ve been slowly reissuing his stuff. There’s one called Tche Belew. It’s this really cool Ethiopian kind of funk rock music that every time I put it on, whoever is over will say, what is that? I don’t expect anyone’s ever heard of it, but I expect them to like it pretty much right away. It’s upbeat, it’s fun to listen to, but it’s also challenging. It’s the perfect kind of “I bet you’ll like this, and I bet you haven’t heard of it” music.

You have any projects going on you want to talk about?

Yeah, I have a podcast about music books. It’s just called The Music Book Podcast where I interview authors of different music books about how they went about writing these books. I do that every two weeks with one author, one book. And then I have another podcast with a friend of mine back from DC. It’s called The Spindle, and that one also comes out every two weeks, with an episode about a different seven inch record, mostly seven inches from the 80s and 90s, but some a little earlier, some little later, where we just kind use it as a launching point to explore different artists and how seven inch records factor in their histories.

Marc Masters is the author of No Wave (2008) and High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (2023). He has written for Pitchfork, The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, The Washington Post, NPR and others. He hosts the Music Book Podcast and co-hosts (with John Howard) The Spindle, a podcast about 7-inch records, via Wastoids.com.