Featured Essay: Record Collecting and Sibling Rivalry

by John Ore

My brother and I have been listening to vinyl records since the 1970s, back when it wasn’t collecting, it was just listening. Not because it was cool or had better fidelity. But because that was the form factor for music back then. It was how you experienced music. My parents had a bulky, blocky Panasonic hi-fi system – tuner, receiver, turntable and speakers – that we used to listen to Beatles and Donna Summer records. In elementary school, when our teacher asked us to bring in music from home, I thought I was so cool when I brought in my parents’ copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and my teacher jammed out to “Lovely Rita” while the rest of the class was bored. Until a classmate pulled out an ELO record that the kids loved way more. When we finally got old enough to spend our allowance on music, it was cassettes of Blondie and Rush and AC/DC. But vinyl was always in the mix.

As teenagers in Southern California in the 1980s, it was the golden age of pop, punk, new wave, post-punk and hip-hop for two skate punks. It was KROQ and Liquorice Pizza and Moby Disc. I still have the original copy of the Repo Man Soundtrack on vinyl that introduced me to punk. We went to London when I graduated from high school and discovered Carnaby Street back when it was still punk and mod and ska. We bought Doc Martens and dozens of records, including a 7” copy of “Popcorn” by Hot Butter that I still own. On the flight back, we nicknamed the duffle bag full of vinyl we delicately carried on the plane “The Baby”, and guarded it like our child. We amassed quite a collection back then, most of which followed each of us around the country as we went off to college, got jobs, and got married. Some of our respective collections were lost over time (I suspect our parents tossed a good part of it), but we always held onto our records for long stretches when we didn’t even own turntables.

Once I moved to New York, a stay in a hip hotel room stocked with a turntable and Bowie records inspired me to get a cheap Numark portable turntable and get reacquainted with my favorite vinyl. I’ve since upgraded to an Audio Technica. In the past dozen years or so, my brother and I have begun collecting again in earnest. It’s mostly replacing lost albums or rounding out our collections with unicorns we’ve always wanted. It’s a way for him (in Colorado) and I (in New York) to stay connected. 

And in the last several years, we came up with rules! 

1. You have to find records in the wild: no Ebay or Discogs.
2. They have to be original pressings: no reissues or remastered 180 gram releases. 
3. Feel free to upgrade! We’re constantly replacing reissues with original copies, or original copies with even better original releases.
4. There are exceptions, of course: I’ll buy new releases like Kendrick’s GNX, the occasional RSD gem, The Linda Lindas records for my kids, and I love buying vinyl records at live shows instead of (ah, let’s face it, in addition to) a t-shirt. We buy each other vinyl as gifts. 

We text each other constantly with new finds, or when we’re on the way to a record store. It’s become a bit of a competition. We share new spots we’ve discovered that are in our wheelhouse, like the amazing appointment-only Rockaway Records in LA or Spike’s Record Rack in Catskill, NY. We brag and give each other props for our finds, we text pictures of records spinning on our turntables and bin flips of our new scores. 

It’s an evergreen conversation for us, as our collections grow and get more interesting. We learn more about each other’s evolving tastes, relive memories of shows 40 years ago that get unearthed simply by slapping a specific record on the turntable. We haven’t lived in the same city for over 30 years, but we still manage to find time to visit record stores every time we’re together. We haunt Criminal Records in Atlanta, Drop To Pop in Denver, and Spike’s. We’ve scored at Smekkleysa and 12 Tónar in Reykjavik when we were there for Iceland Airwaves, and Downstreet in Riga, Latvia when we went to see The Cure. My brother is in the music business, so he gets to travel a ton and explore new spots way more than I can. Yeah, I’m more than a little jealous of his trip to the UK seeing Peter Hook and the Light and hitting new record shops in Bristol, Manchester and London. 

My brother even opened his own small record store in the entrance of his 80s-themed speakeasy, named after a favorite song by The Cure. It gives him another mission to go on when digging in bins: “one for me, one for the shop”. I’ll often find myself grabbing duplicates for my own collection. How can you pass up an original Dali’s Car UK pressing? Or my absolute favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees record, Juju? 

Physical media is an investment, but it’s more than an investment in money or space. It’s an investment of time, our most precious resource as humans. I love the tactile feel of listening to records: the ritual of picking something out of your stack, pulling it out of the sleeve and placing it on the turntable. Dropping the needle. Sitting down with the liner notes. Getting up to flip the slab to Side 2. Spending time with a piece of music, with a piece of art. And it’s also a way to communicate with my brother across time zones.

John Ore is a Brooklyn, NY-based vinyl enthusiast, writer and beer-league ice hockey player who works in product and technology by day. He’s written for The Awl, Deadspin, Jezebel, and Slate. He posts a lot of #nowspinning photos on his Bluesky account. When he’s not digging in crates for original first pressings, he’s walking his dog or bass fishing in upstate lakes. You can occasionally find him behind the bar as well, but his favorite seat at the bar is on the corner.