Q&A Remix With Kory Adams

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Kory Adams

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork? 

I think I was at the Amoeba, or maybe Rasputin Records, in San Francisco when I bought my first real vinyl. That day I got Brothers by The Black Keys because I really liked Thickfreakness, and an album by CSS, I think? It’s gone, I don’t know where or how. But I also bought All The Sweet Stuff, by Gravy Train!!! based purely on looks. The album art featured the band members wearing white button ups with long red ascots and shimmering gold pants with gold suspenders, the men with full pants and the women wearing bootyshorts. It was not at all emblematic of the music I liked at the time, but the cover made me laugh. I still have it!

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

I’m usually headed for the ska, punk, or hip hop area first. You truly never know what you’ll find there, not least of all because I feel that there is so much about those genres that I simply don’t know. Most places don’t really have a ska section, though, so I end up in reggae or world music. I got a comp called Club Ska ‘67, which has a lot of great stuff on it, like Desmond Dekkar, The Skatalites, and Rita Marley.

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

That’s a tough one, and I had to face this during the wildfires (I’m safe and well and housed, please don’t worry). The thought of losing or even selling any album I have gives me great pain, truly. I’d probably die before parting with Tokyo 2 Step, Just Devils, A Call To Arms, or *Diminishing Returns –*not to mention anything by Jeff Rosenstock– but the big one might be Six Demon Bag, by Man Man. I brought it to a show (they played with Rebecca Black???) and got him to sign it. He held it and looked at it like it was a baby, or like a photo album that he thought he’d lost. Then he signed it and quickly drew a picture of a guy shooting another guy in the neck with a gun.

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

What I’m eager to share is not necessarily what most of my friends want to listen to, to be honest. A lot of people are stoked to see Wu Tang, Dre, and Biggie, but they forget or don’t know that like every couple of tracks there’s a skit featuring the sounds of gratuitous sex or a conversation about torturing someone to death. These usually crop up during a lull in conversation and then someone looks up and says “what the fuck are we listening to?” 

Uh, art, dude. We’re listening to genre-pioneers at the top of their game. 

So, what I usually put on instead is this comp called COLD HEAT: HEAVY FUNK RARITIES 1968-1974 VOL 1. It’s dope as hell, and no one I know has ever heard a song off it before. As far as I know, there have not been any further volumes, which is a shame. The liner notes are nuts, too. For some tracks, they are literally guessing at who might be playing. For instance: track 2 (“Free Your Mind” by Amnesty) says “unknown trombone player, perhaps Gary Tifford.” It’s either that, or Madlib’s Shades Of Blue, which I’m just not gonna talk about. Pick it up, spark up, and bliss out baby. Ok, actually I will say one thing: it coincidentally also has crazy liner notes. Instead of not knowing who the musicians are, Madlib just creates a bunch of aliases for himself and uses his samples to create new bands. You know, the kind of high-caliber hijinks you might expect from a collaborator of MF DOOM.

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

I do lean towards completionism, though for the sake of my wallet I try not to. I probably have the most records from Jeff Rosenstock, but it might be a tie with Man Man*. Jeff is probably my favorite artist, but being a completionist for his discography would be really hard! He’s done so much, and a lot of his work with BTMI will probably never see a vinyl rerelease, if it was ever released in the first place. That was a band that would encourage fans to bring blank discs to the merch table and they’d burn you a copy, or bring a T-shirt and they’d spray paint it for maybe 5 bucks or whatever. Doing a big expensive vinyl production would probably be antithetical to their ethos. For Man Man, I’m only missing two of their LPs, and one of them I straight up do not like! Still, when I look at my shelf and see that gap in the chronology, it feels bad!

*ok, i actually went and looked at my collection. i have the most releases from Ryan Kattner– going under the names Man Man, Honus Honus, and Mister Heavenly. But if we’re talking just a single artist name, it’s actually a four-way tie between Man Man, Jeff Rosenstock, MF DOOM, and the utterly inimitable Fiona Apple.

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

If I saw a VMP edition of telefono by noname I’d flip my shit. I wish she would re-release it, or that it had a larger release to begin with. It sold out almost immediately despite me being on a waitlist. It’s just one of the best albums, lyrically and musically, that I had heard in a long time when it came out. I love the album art, too! Before that, it was the Over The Garden Wall Soundtrack. It was a similar situation. Every once in a while, MONDO would do a re-release, I’d hop on the waitlist, and then it would be sold out in literal seconds. Eventually they just did a mass pressing because I guess I wasn’t the only one getting frustrated by missing out. I’m so so so glad that I have it, but to be frank the fact that it is no longer a limited thing takes away a little of the magic. That’s dumb, I know.

Who/what got you hooked on records?

My dad used to play records whenever I was hanging out with him in the garage. He had a big rug on the concrete floor, some little posters, a punching bag, and the garage door was always half open. He’d put on “YMCA”, “Kung Fu Fighting,” Whale Sounds… Stuff that he thought a kid would like, I guess. He was right! After having spent my teen years only listening on headphones, I guess I wanted to recreate that feeling of listening in an open space. Plus, in the digital age, I like having the physical thing. I’ve always loved reading liner notes, and sometimes they come with neat little freebies, like a poster.

Tell us a little about your favorite record store

Oh dang, big time RIP to Timewarp Records on Venice Blvd. They were also a venue, which I was lucky enough to play at before they closed down. They still have an online shop, but it just makes me mad because that space is vacant and has been for years— and now I happen to live right down the street. I went there for record store day and grabbed whokill by tuneyards (Merrill Garbus is not only a total genius, but also total babe) and a Leadbelly comp. They were cool dudes who worked there.

What’s the weirdest record you own?

I started my collection pretty much when I raided my dad’s stash that he kept in storage, followed by my uncle’s when he passed. That was an experience: he kept all his vinyl in this big green trunk, and when I opened it up, I got a big blast of eau de weed straight to my face. Talk about a time capsule. Dude had some Beatles records, but they were all scratched up and vandalized! I think my dad said something like “oh, Pam must have gotten super pissed at him one day.” I have a horrible feeling, though, that it might have been me and my cousin, bored and drawing glasses on Paul and Ringo on the cover of Revolver when we were 4 years old. He also had like three copies of the same Three Dog Night album? Between those two guys and my random bin searches  I’ve got some weird stuff, like The Ballad Of The Green Beret, the OST to Brigadoon, Famous Presidential Speeches, some Bahamian guitar music, a stage play of Cromwell, readings of a Davy Crockett children’s book, and this crazy case of old Victrola records of classical music– I think they’re made of shellac. But maybe the weirdest thing I have was given to me by a friend for xmas or a birthday. It’s Tragic Mulatto, with Judo For The Blind. The album art features Jesus sitting on a toilet, his halo sort of floating between his head and the water tank, while a nun is in a bathtub next to him. She looks like she’s having a pretty great time while the faucet is gushing water into her vagina. All this seems to be happening in the great seedy apartment building in the sky. It looks pretty dope. The music is also some of the worst noise I’ve ever heard in my life. But what do I know? I’ve only listened to it once, and I hated Dark Side Of The Moon the first time I heard it.

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

I guess I’m kind of a snob, and vinyl is so expensive now that I don’t really want to buy it unless I know that it was sourced from the master tapes. I heard from my old college professor— who is definitely in the know— that a lot of producers who do vinyl remasters and rereleases will literally just pick up an old CD of whatever album they’re doing and use that as the source. And I don’t know, one of the points of vinyl for me is that it’s the ~aNaLoGuE sOuNd~, so sourcing from a digital medium pretty much defeats the purpose! For a long time I got my records from Vinyl Me Please. The packaging is always nice, and they really care about the quality of whatever album they put out. I think those folks all have pretty great taste, but it just got too expensive for me. Now, however, I pretty much just buy vinyl from whatever band I’m seeing at a show, especially if they’re a smaller touring band. More than likely, this flies in the face of my audiophile snobbery since pretty much none of these bands are cutting their tracks to tape. That doesn’t mean that it’s not Hi-Fi or that it’s low quality. I guess they sort of serve as totems for me. Like a concert poster, I pull one of these out and remember that I was there, man… I saw the only ska band in Mississippi play in California! I saw Russian Circles right before the pandemic hit! Norah Jones at The Greek!

What’s the last record you played?

Roots and Bases, a latino skacore comp from Asbestos Records. It’s another album I bought based on the artwork. I was at the record release show for Matamoska! and it was there on the merch table. Mata is on it, and so are some of the other bands that played that night, I think. It’s pretty aggressive, which I somehow wasn’t expecting considering some of those bands that night.

Kory used to be in some bands, but now he’s not. When he’s not watching horror movies you can probably catch him at your local ska/punk show, convincing himself not to buy MORE merch and then doing it anyway.

I Have That on Vinyl is a reader supported publication. If you enjoy what’s going on here please consider donating to the site’s writer fund: venmo // paypal