Featured Essay: Q&A With Ankur Razdan (with bonus essay)

by Ankur Razdan

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Yes, many times. The most rewarding time was when I bought Parka Bruthaz UK’s record ^H. Quite an amazing record whose quality is, to my mind, completely disproportionate to the amount of information out there about the group on the internet (i.e. virtually none.)

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

Buying the Birthday Party’s Junkyard and the record store clerk with a teardrop tattoo telling me it was a great record. And then coming home and showing it to my family who all exchanged disgusted looks based on the cover.

What’s the first area you head for in a record store?

The C’s, for Cave (you’ll notice I am a fanatic) and Can.

What’s the most treasured album in your collection and why?

Easily that PB UK record I mentioned. Just because I know of no other way to listen to their music.

What one record in your collection would you be most eager to share with new friends?

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ The Firstborn is Dead. The cultural cache of the blues can be an effective Trojan Horse for people.

Are you a completionist when it comes to artists? Which artist do you have the most records from?

God no, not enough money or frankly, interest. Most from the Bad Seeds.

What is/are your white whale records, something you have your eye on but haven’t been able to find?

Would love to have some things that aren’t on Spotify, like Ys by Joanna Newsom, Godard/Spillane by John Zorn.

What is your greatest “score;” could be on value or just rarity or something you were looking for the longest? Do you have a favorite live record?

They’re not record store finds, but I’ve got a few copies from the more or less original 60’s/70’s pressings of a few things from my great aunt’s collection, which she gave to me when I was a teen. That includes Hejira by Joni Mitchel. which I really value, even though the cover’s all beat up. And then live, the Stones’ Got Live If You Want It! is pretty close to my heart.

Who/what got you hooked on records?

I first got into the idea of listening to whole albums as a teenager by reading about music in some of those first-gen, web 1.0, amateur rock critic sites, like Mark Prindle’s, Piero Scaruffi’s, and Only Solitaire. Back when people had their own HTML and everything wasn’t on social media. From there it was a short hop to asking for a record player for Christmas at 16 and buying records.

What are your first memories of listening to records?

Putting on John Cale’s Paris 1919 and just listening while following along with the words on the sleeve.

Tell us a little about your favorite record store

Cow Records in San Diego. My family would rent a house on Mission Beach every summer and we’d drive up from Phoenix. And this small record shop with a nice middle-age owner is only a few blocks inland, and I would buy records on vacation and listen the next week when I got home. The owner taught me about record store etiquette, namely not leaving the records a mess once you’ve flipped through them.

What’s the weirdest record you own?

Probably Grandaddy’s version of their record The Sophtware Slump but played on an old piano. Or a vinyl that contains as a single record the first CD’s worth of the multi-CD Bad Seeds b sides and rarities box set.

How has your record collection and appreciation for vinyl evolved over the years, and what has influenced your tastes?

So it’s a funny thing. As a teenager and in college I amassed a pretty solid collection, not huge, but some really good stuff. And at the end of college I took a job over in India which I knew would last several years, and I was transferring almost all my belongings over to my mom’s for safekeeping in the interval. But the last semester of senior year I happened to be reading John Lydon (of PiL fame)’s memoir, where among many other things he had a passage which I found quite moving about how records are meant to be listened to and books meant to be read and about how he was constantly giving records away to his friends. And I thought that was right, the records are meant to be played, and not kept shut up tight somewhere, so I made a google doc of all my records and passed it around to interested friends and told them to claim what they wanted. I passed out all the records they asked for before I left the country, including to several people I don’t particularly know anymore. And not all of my records were claimed (there were some beautiful weirdos nobody but me wanted), but a lot of the cream of my former record collection is just out there in the world and I’ve never gotten them back. Hopefully they are being played.

So since then, while I have supplemented and augmented my collection, based on that seed of what I couldn’t give away in 2016, by stepping in at record stores every now and again, my passion for building a really big or god help me completist collection has gone out of me. My attitudes have changed to collections as a whole, as these consumer items you buy from a store to gratify yourself, I wouldn’t say I’m against it at all, but it’s just not as important to me anymore. But of course, if I do find myself in a store with a good selection, there will always be things I want to buy, especially if they are rare or can’t be streamed easily.

The point of collection to me now seems much more to be about archiving and caring for what is rare. For example, speaking not only of vinyls but of CDs, my buddy who worked at a flea market recently gave me two boxes of CDs he got there. I was hesitant to take them at first, knowing the low quality of random stuff you get from flea markets and thrift stores. But it turns out these boxes were donated or sold by a person with exquisite taste and an eye for extreme rarities. So I have been processing a lot of these rare CDs (most of them without their jewel cases) into a big CD book.

Or to take another example that gets us back to the subject of vinyl, I’ll tell you a story about how I came into possession of hundreds of antique 45s.

Last year, my family learned that my great uncle had died in York County, PA, within two hours of my brother’s place. My great uncle Ricky was a lifelong amateur musician and general prick, who left Arizona when my great-grandmother, whom he’d sponged off all his life, passed away, and took many family possessions with him, and dropped out of sight.

It turns out for several years he’d been living with a family in a farmhouse up in rural York, before coming to bad terms with the owner and moving out to a small apartment, where he died. And what me and my brother discovered was that Ricky had left many of his possessions at the farmhouse, and the owner had packed them all up into an otherwise empty horsebarn. And furthermore this farm owner himself had passed away about a month before Ricky had, and his own children had quickly put the very derelict farm property up for sale. By the time we got to it, it had been sold but not yet occupied or really looked into in any way.

This is all to say that my brother and I then had the mission of trespassing on this empty rural property to recover as many of our family possessions as possible. It was also the dead of a desolate winter at the time, with the full earth covered in snow, and nobody having been over to the property to clear any of it.

The barn was of course in the very back corner of the maybe two acre property and it was a struggle just to get from our car to it and back with anything heavy. In it we found among the horse mulch many family photos, press clippings, ruined musical equipment, and some CD’s of Ricky’s self-produced album. None of the family jewelry which my mother had been exhorting us to find. But we did discover something else: trunks and trunks of vinyl 45’s.

Their original paper sleeves were largely rotting dusty dirty and home to spiders, and some of the trunks’ bottoms fell out when we tried to move them, but the records themselves were pressed together so tightly that they were obviously in decent condition.

To make a long story short it was an odyssey to get just a few trunks to my brother’s car. Between trunks falling apart, the demoralizing effect of the snow, limited space in the car among the other things we were grabbing, and the unlawful nature of our activities out in shotgun country, we made the difficult determination that not every trunk of 45s could be saved, and left that farm property forever with only a few of them. God knows if the new owners have salvaged some of those records we left behind.

So now I have 4 (started with 5) trashbags full of 45s sitting in my cellar. One at a time I keep a bag up in my home office and every morning I carry out a ritual: I grab a few 45s, discard their dirty sleeves, clean them with vinyl cleaning solution, repackage them in fresh sleeves which I order in bulk, and pile them up (and listen, of course.)

The 45s themselves are mostly from the 50’s and 60’s (with a tail through the 70’s and very occasionally an 80’s monsterhit) and very much reflect a normal guy’s taste at the time. Doo wop, pop, R&B, rock. It’s like a window into the habits of a normal Philly music-buying teenager and young adult back then. Some of these little records have accounted as great personal discoveries for me, some of them are not to my taste at all (sometimes listening to all these 50’s wedding ballads I get to thinking, gee, a British Invasion sure sounds like a good idea right now.)

But at the leisurely pace I am going it will likely take me a couple years to clean them all. I will surely keep some and maybe sell the rest to somebody who would get more out of some of these particular records than I. But ultimately, while I could, given unlimited funds, pick better records from a store to build a personal collection out of just by applying my own tastes, it feels to me like a far more important endeavor to be archiving and preserving these objects of past musical production and consumption. I am a strong believer that you must understand where you and your antecedents have come from if you want to understand your present, to say nothing of having hope, aesthetic or otherwise, for the future.

And so that kind of thing is much more important to me now than collecting records per se.

What’s the last record you played?

Last 45 (from the Ricky collection) is a pseudo-EP that includes several Dixieland jazz numbers (incl. The funny “Evolution Mama”) by Turk Murphy & His Jazz Band. Last LP was “Basie Jam #3” by Count Basie, which I found on the street in my neighborhood. So, two jazz records randomly found, oddly enough.

Ankur Razdan is the leader of Washington, DC folk-rock group Different Answers. He can be followed for his musical micro-reviews on Twitter at @mukkuthani or for his band on Instagram at @differentanswersband, and corresponded with by email at ankurmrazdan@gmail.com."

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