The Annotated Mixtape

On Thursday, December 11, 2008, as the New York Times reported, the “legendary” and “consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme—perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.” Within days, of course, everyone in the country knew the name of “New York’s most hated man” (as a Times blogger soon referred to him), Bernie Madoff, and at least some of the details of the elaborate Ponzi scheme his firm had operated for decades.

Five days later, on the Terminal Boredom web forums—which have for years offered a smart and rowdy clearinghouse for record reviews, want lists, for-sale ads, and what-are-you-listening-to-now threads about music that fits both narrow and generous understandings of the term “punk”—a poster with the handle WOLFGUTSSS offered a pre-order sale for an upcoming 7" record, titled “In Here,” by a then-still-somewhat-mysterious band called Blank Dogs, in the caps-locked typography of the online-inept and the conciseness of the initiated-only:

TWO GREAT BD SONGS. 700 COPIES. 100 YELLOW (PRE-ORDER ONLY), 200 CLEAR BLUE AND 400 ON BLACK. ORDERING INFO ON THE PAGE.

WOLFGUTSSS included a link to the spare website of his brand-new label, Down in the Ground. “ALSO PUT UP A SECTION FOR USED/SECOND HAND STUFF,” he noted. His post was time-stamped 9:15:27 A.M., December 16, 2008.

Within twenty minutes, another poster had already replied: “money sent. psyched, etc.” Blank Dogs had, in 2007 and 2008, released a series of well-received and highly collectible singles on various micro-labels while remaining anonymous—though Blank Dogs was soon revealed as the solo project of a guy named Mike who worked at Brooklyn’s Academy Records and previously played bass in the band D. C. Snipers—so such a reaction was foreseeable. Three minutes after that, WOLFGUTSSS followed with a warning to anyone else reading the thread: “Fuck[,] these are already going fast.” By midday, a number of other posters who had “Paypal’d” funds for the record wondered if they had paid their seven dollars too late to have acquired one of the hundred copies of the record pressed on yellow vinyl. Just after 1:00 P.M., on the second page of the thread, WOLFGUTSSS reassured these anxious posters: “First 100 are yellow, second 200 are blue, the rest (400) are black, so if you want to view it from an eBay standpoint, the first 300 are eBay gold haha. Or you could keep it and listen to it.”

There followed some complaints over the price of the record, and rebuttals to those complaining—“$7 is pricey it’s true / however; I don’t know if you guys have noticed but the economy is, in a word, fucked / …it just means I take less [sic] gambles on records for now” one poster noted; another suggested that the complainers weren’t “considering the PayPal fees [WOLFGUTSSS’s] gotta pay too.” WOLFGUTSSS himself responded with this explanation of his economics:

I’m not cutting any costs with these releases and each record is coming out to about a buck or so less than the wholesale price I’m charging for it. Every dollar I get goes into the next record being released, period. If I was pressing 1000+ of each record it’d be much easier for me to charge a lot less and still get records out but I’m kind of stuck doing it this way or else it’d be a failing endeavor.

Only hours after the initial post, the point was clear, even from the person releasing the record presumably for the love of the music: this record was a commodity, understood in its particulars entirely in the language of the market. A few pages into the thread, only two posters had casually noted that they liked the music on this record; no one had even bothered to describe it.

In the mid-2000s, around the same time the housing bubble peaked, many retail record stores went out of business. The last Tower Records stores—some of them large enough to occupy former grocery stores, or, like the one I frequented in Boston as a teenager, several floors of a Frank Gehry office building—closed days before Christmas in 2006, but countless smaller, independent shops had already shut their doors. It’s a commonplace to blame such closures on file-sharing and other changes in listening habits, or preferences for digital rather than physical media, and no one needs me to rehearse the ways the Internet has forever changed commerce. (As my friend Hua has noted, in his eulogy for Manhattan’s Fat Beats, “a good record store can be a theater of dreams, but I’ve never expected anyone beyond this community of finicky consumers to understand this, or care about all the record stores hanging on for dear life. Their ranks are dwindling, and, given the free movement of MP3s across the Internet, there’s really no reason this shouldn’t be the case.”)

Still, it is perhaps worth considering some ways that the Internet has affected (and enabled) the movement of collectible media. If inventories are now largely online, if prices paid at auction are indexed and searchable, if everyone has far greater access not only to price and stock information but also to the same desire-manufacturing blogs and online fanzines, then knowledge of what is or isn’t valuable—always highly volatile where musical tastes and fashions are concerned—becomes democratized: geography, age, and lack of expertise are no longer handicaps. Seeing records “from an eBay standpoint” becomes habitual. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s description of day trading—“Day traders sit in front of computer screens and look for a stock that is either moving up or down in value. They want to ride the momentum of the stock and get out of the stock before it changes course. They do not know for certain how the stock will move…”—also applies pretty well to contemporary record collecting, where one needs to check in regularly, if not obsessively, with trusted forums or blogs to keep up with even a portion of what’s being released.

Most vinyl sellers moved their auctions from Usenet newsgroups like rec.music.marketplace.vinyl to eBay around 1997 or 1998, and with eBay’s explosive growth and corresponding exposure, the competition for truly rare and/or desirable records increased wildly, as did prices; common records lost value; perceptions of supply and demand fueled turbulent market fluctuations and swift corrections (a supposedly rare record that sold for a high price on eBay was inevitably followed by a flood of additional copies for sale—all with opening bids near the first record’s final price). Crate-digging no longer required rising at 4:00 A.M. to hit garage sales and thrift stores, but only some good bid-sniper software, or the willingness to click through thirty-six pages of Google results. There exists a finite number of every record, but it began to seem possible to find absolutely anything online, given a little time and an understanding that one would likely pay a premium.

Independent hobbyist labels—often run out of someone’s bedroom (or parents’ house), as opposed to the few independent record labels with paid staffs—tend to press vinyl in small quantities for reasons of both capital and demand, especially since so many of the bands on such labels are new and unknown. So the pre-order—an inversion of Wimpy’s “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”—allows the young entrepreneur to fund the manufacture of five hundred 7"s, and by issuing different quantities of the record on different-colored vinyl, or housing some of them in different sleeves—and, crucially, publicizing such quantities—he or she can help ensure their desirability.

Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad’s engaging history of 1980s American independent music, details the lessons famed Seattle indie label Sub Pop Records learned about producing and marketing their singles:

Limiting supply…would increase demand; that and their customized inner labels, colored vinyl, and bold artwork would automatically make Sub Pop releases collectible fetish objects. Lo and behold, the pressings sold out and then shops would put the records on display for exorbitant prices…. When the first pressing of [a record] sold out almost immediately, Sub Pop did a reissue…, getting around the limited edition tag by using a different shade of vinyl, also ensuring that a certain percentage of collectors would buy the single again just for the new color. The scam would be copied by countless other indie labels in the years to come.

Sub Pop…started to get letters complaining that their limited-edition singles (a) were hard to find and (b) sold out too quickly. “We put the two conditions together,” says [Sub Pop partner Jonathan] Poneman, “and realized we had a great marketing tool.” The Sub Pop Singles Club was born. For $35 a year, subscribers got a single a month—a pretty good deal, but the brilliant part was that Singles Club subscribers paid before they got their records, which gave the label a significant financial boost. “On a limited budget, if you have the desire to sell a lot of records,” [Sub Pop founder Bruce] Pavitt says, “you have to figure out ways to scam and manipulate the public.”

For the collector, especially one who buys several copies in order to later flip some of them, the vinyl pre-order offers a futures market. The entire fragile enterprise is maintained by various levels of speculation and trust. No record pressed in minuscule quantities is designed for sale in a shop, anyway: given the low number of units, the label won’t be able to sell it wholesale much more cheaply than retail, and distributors have little incentive to carry a record that will go out of stock instantly. You’ll find these records in a few shops—in Brooklyn, Providence, Chicago, Los Angeles—but otherwise you can only acquire them online.

To “sleep” on a record—that is, to fail to “PayPal” it immediately, the minute someone announces its availability—is to potentially risk paying twenty, thirty, forty dollars or more for a record that last month—last week—was offered at five or six bucks postpaid. And of course everyone who did buy it then will proudly describe that record’s face-melting qualities on blogs and online message boards—if for no reason other than to protect their own investments—so that as you search for a record and find these various descriptions, its apparent desirability only increases. Demand for some records—the recent reissue of Dolly Mixture’s Demonstration Tapes LP in an edition of 300, for example—can be so high that the records sell out within a day of the initial public offer, even when, as is often now the case, labels and distributors limit purchases to a single copy to prevent speculators from buying in bulk. In the era of Internet commerce, when everyone knows of the existence of pretty much everything, artificial limits on quantity are the only way to ensure a product’s exclusivity and desirability: the fear of missing out becomes the engine powering the market. One can’t deliberate about such purchases, or one will quickly find oneself unable to make them: the clickable PayPal button will disappear, replaced by the words “SOLD OUT.”

If nothing else, the Internet has made us all expert consumers. Jean-François Lyotard predicted as much, in 1979’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: “The miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited,” Lyotard wrote then; his report concludes with the observation that “the computerization of society…could become the ‘dream’ instrument for controlling and regulating the market system.” When I first learned of the iPhone, my immediate thought about how I might use it involved Googling LPs while I was standing in the record store—and trying to establish a market value of the pieces of vinyl I could potentially buy more cheaply on the spot. Like all traders, I imagined how the machine could offer me an edge. Of course, some of the most popular smartphone apps enable exactly such price comparisons via barcode scanning.

The Internet’s effect on trading in markets where real money is at stake has been even more profound: the subprime crisis, short-selling, credit-default swaps, and especially the so-called “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, in which the Dow Jones plummeted nine hundred points and then recovered most of these losses within a matter of minutes—as a result of computerized high-frequency trading and flash orders, executed in microseconds—all offer evidence of such market manipulation. Or, as the New York Times quoted Joseph M. Mecane of NYSE Euronext, “which operates the New York Stock Exchange,” trading has “become a technological arms race, and what separates winners and losers is how fast they can move…. Markets need liquidity, and high-frequency traders provide opportunities for other investors to buy and sell.”

Still, to pre-order a bunch of 7˝s based on pre-release hype or expected demand is to build a record collection filled with assets as troubled as those on Lehman Brothers’ balance sheets in 2008. For every five-dollar record that turns into a forty-dollar record, there are scores—hundreds—of five-dollar records that turn into one-dollar records, as a quick look through the floor-level bins in most of those now-long-gone record stores would have shown.

The first record by Wavves—originally the one-man-band home recordings of Nathan Williams, a twenty-something from San Diego—was the sort of 7˝ that sold out on pre-orders within two days in November 2008. Almost immediately, those who missed out questioned the decision by label Tic Tac Totally to release the record in a “one-time limited pressing of only 300 copies gloriously packaged with ’80s cool-kid nostalgia via spray-painted fucking grip-tape sleeve and shamelessly self-promoted regular printed sleeve” when descriptions of this unheard band’s sound—“Beach Boys-meet-Siltbreeze,” per the label—gave record nerds the shakes. But within weeks, posters on Terminal Boredom were simultaneously mocking the already overwhelming hype about Wavves and whining that their pre-ordered records hadn’t yet arrived—to which Matt, the owner of Tic Tac Totally, joked that he was “ripping everyone off. There is no Wavves 7". Never was one.” Since a nonexistent record by an unknown band could inspire such lust, another poster instantly responded: “Quit stealing my ‘making up fake records to make money’ idea.”

Wavves has always seemed more than a little absurd: the goofy name, lyrics such as “I’m getting high / to pass the time / no reason why…,” the either deeply cynical or obliviously naïve pastiche of failsafe Hipster 101 musical reference points and retro-slacker vibe, Williams’s statement in an interview that his passion, “if it can’t be masturbating or smoking weed[,]… is playing video games.” And this debut record—two songs, titled “Beach Demon” and “Weed Demon,” in a sleeve sheathed in skateboard grip tape—invoked the clichés of Southern California so unambiguously it had to be a joke (right?—but the songs often seemed earnest in their delivery). The beach, surf, weed, skateboarding, boredom, sunshine: Jeff Spicoli seemed to have arrived intact from 1982, surveyed the scene, and decided to cut a record that suited 2008 the same way Van Halen had suited his era.

“Beach Demon” is a simple rocker: quickly strummed, distorted guitar chords and semi-shouted vocals with drum-machine beats, the whole thing level-maxed for an overblown-speakers effect. It sounds like countless other independent records released since 2007. “Weed Demon” is a simple ballad: slowly strummed and sloppily fretted guitar chords with sweeter, multi-tracked vocals that rise to a falsetto in the chorus. Neither song provides anything particularly special, but for whatever reason—the wistful chord progression; the fact that I’ve always liked B-sides—I thought “Weed Demon” sounded pretty good. I didn’t know then that it would reappear on Wavves’s second LP, so I wanted to track down the 7˝ to have the song—and thought I’d also try to pick up an extra copy.

Through strategic acumen, good timing, connections, a bit of luck, and an understanding of how to exploit the inefficiencies of the independent record market—valuable skills that evade me entirely in the more important financial dealings of my life, such as jobs and mortgages and refinances and mutual funds—I acquired, at the regular retail price of $5.50, three copies of the “Beach Demon” single at the height of its value, in January 2009. Had I listed the duplicates on eBay upon receiving them, I might have sold them for something like $90–$100—as several copies did fetch in that initial period: a nice 1,700 percent profit, which one imagines even Bernie Madoff would have admired. Instead, I gave one copy to Hua, and let the other two sit on the floor next to my stereo as the demand—apparently, everyone who’d ordered a copy quickly flipped it, or else the listening public had realized that Wavves’ music was not nearly as extraordinary as his sense of the musical Zeitgeist—approached equilibrium with supply. Copies were trading at $40 a week or two later, at $30 a few months later, and have now settled around $20.

In late January 2009, a few posters revived the Blank Dogs preorder thread: “I forgot all about this record…good thing these threads exist or I’d never know where my money’s mysteriously disappearing to via PayPal.” Several others chimed in, wondering whether the records had been shipped yet. WOLFGUTSSS reassured everyone with the explanation that the “Blank Dogs vinyl is being picked up at the plant on Friday.” A week later, he claimed that “the Blank Dogs vinyl was supposed to be done Friday but they called and said Tuesday or Thursday.” Days later, he posted a photo of another record he was releasing—a split 7˝ with songs by three bands, including his own—on his label atop a pile of sealed cardboard mailers, and then he added that the “first 100 Blank Dogs records (yellow wax) go out on Monday. Thanks again!” All seemed well; the posters variously urging patience, quoting Media Mail transit times, or defending WOLFGUTSSS seemed vindicated.

But those contributing to the thread grew restless. “One Blank Dogs 7˝sold on eBay = about 10 pop records I’ll actually listen to more than once,” one poster noted: “There’s a lot of money to be made in garbage.” Another wondered if he could “make more money flipping burgers or flipping records.” Others griped that they had paid individual shipping rates for three of WOLFGUTSSS’s records, but that he would ship them in a single package and collect the profit. Still others noted that because more than forty-five days had passed since the initial transactions, PayPal would no longer allow them to file claims for missing records. And when WOLFGUTSSS admitted that the “dude who cuts my lacquers fucked up and had 880 copies pressed instead of 700[,] so the first 100 on yellow have an alternate sleeve,” there was mock outrage about records that weren’t as limited as advertised (and paid for: “25% more records = 25% less speculative value!!! You should PayPal us a 25% discount!!!”).

A number of posters—all of them suspiciously new to the forum—also began offering innuendoes about WOLFGUTSSS:

A little bird told me that the shit-stain that does Down in the Ground is a few days from getting knifed due to eBaying a copy of the 3-way split before giving [copies] to the other 2 bands. And then lying about it. Over and over.

Is this the same douche who ran away from Portland? Do things ever change?… To anyone who doesn’t know well enough not to deal with [him], be cautious.

I believe in second chances but this kid is a permanent fuck-up. He’s an internet troll parading around collecting hyped bands for his label and people are foolish enough to fall for it, to no fault of their own, but hopefully time will prove all the wiser. You know he’s read all these threads where people are asking the status of their orders but doesn’t reply.

This is the biggest scam since Watergate.

WOLFGUTSSS responded to his critics with a simple rejoinder: “All I do is package and send out records every day.” He then posted a photograph of three copies of the Blank Dogs 7˝—with yellow, blue, and black vinyl records peeping from the sleeves—and offered refunds to anyone who wanted one. “No one has been ripped off,” he wrote on March 2, 2009.

Ten days later, in a Manhattan courtroom, Bernard Madoff declared his mind clear and, in response to the eleven charges he faced, pleaded guilty. “I operated a Ponzi scheme through the investment advisory side of my business,” he told Judge Denny Chin. “When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. However, this proved difficult, and ultimately impossible, and as the years went by I realized that my arrest and this day would inevitably come.” Among several victims of Madoff’s scheme who spoke, Ronnie Sue Ambrosino asked Judge Chin to reject Madoff’s plea in order to “find out information as to where the money is.”

I hadn’t placed a pre-order for the Blank Dogs record, but found the escalating drama (and comedy) over its production as gripping as the various recessionary dramas unfolding in the national media. Like everyone who’s ever mail-ordered vinyl, I’ve had two or three records go missing over the last twenty years, and I’ve signed up for a few twelve-month subscriptions that took well over twenty-four months to fulfill, but have generally found my trust in the system, such as it is, well-placed. I doubt that Internet anonymity has made record-for-sale scams much easier than ones perpetrated via mail, but I can easily imagine the potential for abuse when a would-be impresario types a brief description of a record in an online forum and suddenly finds a few thousand dollars in his PayPal account. (“When it took me over a year to get the [Last Sons of Krypton] LP done after pre-orders it was due to a combination of laziness and lack of funds to pay for postage. Sure everyone paid for postage, but I spent all that $$$ right away, and postage is expensive!” someone admitted on Terminal Boredom, by way of potentially explaining WOLFGUTSSS’s behavior.)

Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life also reports that Washington, D.C. punk band the Teen Idles had, “in their one-year existence,…amassed $900, all of which went into a band kitty kept in a cigar box. When the band dissolved, they had to decide whether to split the money four ways or press up the recordings they’d done…. The choice was obvious.” But in the easy-credit era, there may not be cigar boxes filled with cash funding the indie records, so the pre-order, like crowd-sourcing and micro-lending, allows instant access with minimal personal investment, just as subprime mortgages allowed many borrowers without good credit or sufficient income to overspend on houses, or leverage one property to acquire others they could refurbish and flip at a profit. But this notion of something-for-nothing runs counter to the fundamental ethos of punk and independent music, which has always been summed up by the acronym DIY—do it yourself—even after all the home-improvement reality TV shows spawned by the housing bubble appropriated that term. The 7˝ pre-order speculators were—like those who put down 3 percent on a $450,000 house financed with an adjustable-rate mortgage—gambling that the 7˝ would be worth something after the sale; they were also gambling that it would exist at all.

The first year I owned a home, I bought very few records. A mortgage payment—never mind a new hot water heater—felt as daunting as the hours I spent cosigning documents to acquire it suggested, as did the total figure to which thirty years of those monthly payments would amount.

Sarah and I began house-hunting—though we wouldn’t have called it that—in the winter of 2001–2002. We’d recently moved to coastal Rhode Island, and hoped to make that move permanent. Decided amateurs and academic itinerants, we weren’t yet paying close attention to market trends or the post-9/11 housing boom, though we quickly became experts. Still, our motivations were old-fashioned: we wanted a house as a home, and for the feelings of permanence and stability we fantasized it would offer us, not as an exercise in speculation. George W. Bush had yet to deliver his October 2002 speech in which he stated: “You see, we want everybody in America to own their own home. That’s what we want. This is—an ownership society is a compassionate society.”

Houses in one nearby town jumped something like $100,000 in asking price one year while we dithered. Interest rates were low, our credit scores were high, and lenders preapproved us for preposterous sums, but we never found a place that we desired and felt we could afford; like many buyers, we had little cash to put down, but, risk-averse, we also couldn’t stomach the gamble of an adjustable-rate mortgage. We made an offer on a Sears house with cathedral ceilings, a fireplace, and too many rooms, though the deal fell apart when our home inspector discovered an actively leaking roof and asbestos-wrapped ductwork. By 2004 we gave up our rented beach house and relocated again, this time to a dingy apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York: in that town, for parts of three years, we looked at overpriced and poorly maintained bungalows desecrated by aluminum siding, dropped ceilings, wall-to-wall shag, and fake wood paneling, and we despaired. Walking the dog a day after we’d decided to stop looking, we found the house we eventually bought.

And soon I began buying records again: we were able to pay extra on each month’s mortgage payment and still have enough money to replace the broken dishwasher, install a bluestone patio, and even, doing much of the work ourselves, gut the bathroom to studs and joists and renovate it—and to buy records, too. I rewired two-prong electrical outlets (stereo components need to be grounded properly). We knew we’d bought at the peak of the market, but reasoned that we’d be in our house for some years—long enough for the market to recover, we thought.

“It’s a good thing our jobs are secure,” I said to Sarah, standing in the kitchen of our house some night in the fall of 2008.

By the fall of 2009, we’d listed our house for sale: when an institution loses several hundred million dollars from its endowment, we learned, no jobs are secure, and all promises are revocable. A few months later, we’d moved. In April 2010, we closed on the sale of our house, writing a check for about $100 to make sure the mortgage we’d paid down early was now fully paid off.

My market timing has always been terrible. Though I’m skilled at buying records low, rarely do I profit from my shrewdness. I’ve bought and then held various records that I had no real interest in keeping, or that I even possessed duplicates of (duplicates often purchased for the express purpose of reselling), so long that they lost whatever demand or collectiblility they once had. The vinyl market is far more fickle, and far more prone to irrational exuberance and profound crashes, than even the housing markets of Las Vegas or Phoenix—people need houses to live in, but very few feel they need obscure 7˝s. (I will leave unanswered questions concerning why someone with a mortgage and the means to pay it purchased punk 7˝s, and which particular failures of maturation these purchases might indicate.) Rare 7˝s, if the songs are good, inevitably get reissued on compilations shortly after the 7" goes out of print; if the songs aren’t particularly good, the 7" becomes one of those dollar-bin specials. At a certain point, the only real value in a 7" is in having the thing itself—since most of them are available digitally these days—and in being able to impress one’s friends with it. These records are a form of financial and physical self-burdening—as anyone who’s moved as often as I have can attest.

Twelve pages into the Terminal Boredom thread chronicling the Blank Dogs pre-order debacle, Mike of Blank Dogs chimed in:

I’m still in “benefit of the doubt” territory and hope the records arrive before tour. Despite what others have said, [WOLFGUTSSS]’s been fine in emails and the 1st batch should be in transit here….

Again, sorry about this record in particular; from now on there will be a “no pre-order” clause if I do a record with a smaller label again.

Still, calling this situation a debacle on page twelve, after the thread has—as of December 16, 2010, exactly two years after it began—grown to 108 pages, and been viewed nearly 89,000 times, may have been premature: like the recession, the commentary on this one record has endured longer than some experts predicted, even after it was declared over. We might now read this thread as a registry of all the stages of grief at our collective foolishness with our money, and our subsequent attempts to laugh off that foolishness. A seven-dollar 7˝ is just one among innumerable useless things we bought amid the seemingly unending growth of the 1990s and 2000s.

“At this point everyone should just consider [it] a poor investment and get on with their lives, we’re not going to see them.” “First I lose money on the Stanford Bank scam and now this?” “Does this record even exist?” “Man does anything really ‘exist,’ it’s all a dream b’rah.” Someone Photoshopped an image of a fake LP sleeve titled Pre-orders Across the Internet: 18 Essential Punk Rock Scams (riffing on an actual series of compilation LPs—Bloodstains Across the UK: 16 Essential Punk Rock Blasts, Bloodstains Across Texas: 18 Essential Punk Rock Blasts, and countless others), and it was collectively decided that it should become an actual LP. WOLFGUTSSS disappeared from the thread for almost four months and did not, apparently, answer e-mails; his silence helped inflame a lynch mob mentality developing among posters to the thread—not unlike that around Madoff after his release on bond and house arrest. Finally, Mike said that he would release the record, under new title and artwork, on his own label, Captured Tracks, and sell it at wholesale price, as a way of trying to accommodate the fans and would-be profiteers who’d pre-ordered it from WOLFGUTSSS: “If I could make it free, I would,” he wrote.

While much of the outrage expressed on Terminal Boredom stemmed from record freaks feeling swindled out of cash, some part of it came from the apparent betrayal by someone those same freaks felt was part of a community they’d all built—a community whose members were supposed to be treated fairly, according to its own unspoken codes. Madoff and his advisors also enlisted their own communities—especially southern Florida Jewish communities—whose members trusted him to deliver the returns an investment with Madoff promised. Those whom Madoff defrauded “know him socially, through the Palm Beach Country Club or the Glen Oaks Country Club,” a lawyer representing some of these victims told the Associated Press in December 2008. “They played golf with him.” That same month, the New York Times noted the anguish of “Jews all over the country”: “Here is a Jew accused of cheating Jewish organizations trying to help other Jews, they say, and of betraying the trust of Jews and violating the basic tenets of Jewish law. A Jew, they say, who seemed to exemplify the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the thieving Jewish banker.” And Laurence Leamer, Palm Beach resident and author of Madness Under the Royal Palms—in which, according to Publisher’s Weekly, he “reveals the secrets of the Palm Beach elite who reside behind the high walls and manicured hedges of this exclusive enclave”—told the Times that “anyone can get robbed. Madoff’s scam was so much worse because he was one of their own.”

When I started collecting records, in the 1980s, a 7" single cost about $2.50, maybe more if it was an import. From the early 1990s and through the dot-com bubble and bust, 7"s regained currency as a medium for independent bands and labels—occupying some middle ground between the single as a promotional loss leader and its current status as quasi-artifact—and the pricing reflected it: most of these records cost $3 or $4; again, a dollar or two more for imports, especially when the dollar was weak. By about 2000, a price of $5 seemed to be the benchmark; during the just-concluded decade, 7" prices remained flat, though more recently labels have taken advantage of vinyl’s continuing renaissance, arbitrarily limited editions, and the speed and fury of Internet hype, and have begun charging $8, $10, or more for a single. Still, if we accept $6 as average for a 7" record today, then prices have climbed about 140 percent since the 1980s. According to United States Census data, the average sale price of a new house in 1985 was $100,800; in 2010—the most recent year for which data is available, and even taking into account the slump in housing prices—that figure was $272,900, for an increase of about 170 percent.

These rates of increase seem relatively comparable, though the jump in record prices—given that the cost remains, twenty-five years later, in single digits—feels smaller. But are vinyl records and houses, as commodities, pursuing opposing trajectories? The 45 RPM 7" record, introduced to the public by RCA Victor in 1949, was first touted as a technological triumph (better-sounding than a 33⅓ RPM disc), but because of its short playing time and consumers’ reluctance to abandon the convenience of LPs, quickly became something of a disposable, intended for pop singles, and, as the November 14, 1949, issue of the RCA Distributor’s Record Bulletin noted, the teenage market:

And—from coast to coast—teen-agers are lining up for bargain player attachments. The whole thing’s on key with their allowances—neat little records they can slip in their pockets, with a first-class band playing their favorite hit—for 49 cents…. They go for…the lowest priced at the new speed, they go for the little disc that fits on the shelf beside their paper-backed novels, is unbreakable, and has quality of tone that can’t be matched. Sell ’em, sell ’em “45.”

In the popular imagination, the 7" single is iconic for being stacked on record-changers at sleepovers or being plucked from carousels by the whirring machinery inside jukeboxes. (“The 45 rpm record once provided the basis for something like a religion,” Geoffrey O’Brien remarks in Sonata for Jukebox.) The value was promotional; sleeves were often generic, company-issued. Now invisible to mass culture, 7" records have evolved into significant documents of various musical subcultures, and their production reflects this status.

Records once accumulated value because the passage of time proved how popular or musically important a given record was, and either because few copies were originally produced or few people got rid of their copies, thus making originals hard to find. Today, records accumulate value because calculated scarcity manufactures high demand. Houses were once regarded not as investments but simply as domiciles, structures that required constant vigilance and upkeep; before the 2008 recession, artificially low interest rates, loose lending practices, the repackaging and trading of mortgage-backed securities, and government-fueled anxiety about safety and security combined to change the referent of “investment property” from a four-family unit in a poor urban neighborhood to a suburban raised ranch a buyer never intended to inhabit.

The custom-designed home, built by experienced craftspeople using quality materials and construction techniques, has for decades been an anomaly among houses fabricated from whatever shoddy, inexpensive, and readily available industrial products—asbestos, plywood, drywall, vinyl siding, T-111, PVC pipes, asphalt shingles—were not yet deemed toxic by consumers or regulatory agencies. In his book The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler describes the innovation of “balloon frame” wooden house construction—which is how my former house was built, c. 1930:

A house could be whacked together out of two-by-four inch “studs” nailed at sixteen-inch intervals. A couple of “framers” could do what used to take a dozen carpenters under skilled supervision in the old post-and-beam days…. [An] enduring legacy of the balloon frame was that it transformed the craft of house building into an industry. In so doing it turned houses into commodities, things made above all to be sold at a profit, so that those who ended up living in them were not the same ones who built them, meaning that they were houses built without affection—merely products whacked together for a mass market. These became the first speculative subdivisions of identical houses, built for a growing industrial middle class.

By skimping on materials and cutting corners during construction, a homebuilder can easily increase profit margin. One source of real bitterness among the vinyl fetishists on Terminal Boredom was that WOLFGUTSSS’s seven-dollar records had no printed labels and only photocopied sleeves.

I haven’t listened to that Wavves song in years, and even then heard it only via iTunes; those two grip-taped 7"s are filed somewhere among too many other 7"s. Hua arrived at my house one night with a copy of the first Wavves LP for me shortly after I gave him the 7", but I’m not sure I’ve ever played it. Bernie Madoff, as everyone knows, was sentenced to 150 years in a medium-security federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Madoff’s son, Mark Madoff, hanged himself on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest; days later, Barbara Picower, widow of Madoff insider Jeffrey Picower, created a $7.2 billion trust for victims of Madoff’s investment scams: “We will be returning every penny received from almost 35 years of investing with Bernard Madoff,” Picower said. “I believe the Madoff Ponzi scheme was deplorable and I am deeply saddened by the tragic impact it continues to have on the lives of its victims.” And in Rolling Stone, writer Matt Taibi claimed, in an article on the foreclosure crisis, that “the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s [is] perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history.”

On Terminal Boredom, in true Google-vengeance fashion, WOLFGUTSSS was outed as Toby Francis, his father discovered to be ZZ Top’s live sound engineer, his telephone number and home address posted and hyperlinked, and many threats made; one poster said he’d heard that WOLFGUTSSS did nothing with his ill-gotten gains but eat Subway sandwiches every day (Madoff’s infamous collection of Rolex, Cartier, and Patek Phillippe watches was sold at auction, along with his golf clubs and yachts); another, that he’d been beaten up outside a show his band played (“Madoff was treated for a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face” after being assaulted by a fellow inmate, according to the Wall Street Journal); still another, that he’d asked for help breaking into a high school to steal P.A. equipment. Others linked to a different web forum where, in December 2010—as I wrote this essay—Francis purportedly scammed other people by promising to sell various expensive and sought-after vintage Fender and Gretsch guitars, collected hundreds of dollars while sending empty envelopes for tracking confirmation, and, when he was finally flushed from Internet anonymity, bounced the refund check he sent to PayPal.

Some posters to Terminal Boredom received their records from WOLFGUTSSS during 2009; others apparently never did. Mike Sniper released the Blank Dogs 7"; now out of print, it’s still easily found for under ten bucks. Copies are also, allegedly, still available at the 2008 price via WOLFGUTSSS’s label, Down in the Ground…

Since Sarah and I sold our house, we’ve moved into another rental in another state, and have begun looking for a new house we might purchase, but without any of our former ardor for un-painted oak trim and crown moldings, brick fireplaces and pocket doors, remodeled kitchens and mature trees; I’m not sure how she sees the loss of money we spent on our former house, since talking about it usually causes us more grief than seems worthwhile or healthy, but, when I look back at that house, I sometimes imagine it as stacks of vinyl records I could’ve purchased.

I used to think—as much as I contemplated such things at all—of the ever-increasing bulk of my vinyl collection as a kind of nest egg, or long-term savings plan: something I could sell, probably at a profit, if circumstance ever forced me to. I imagine that all the homeowners who, in the past decade, refinanced their houses and cashed out the equity to fund other purchases saw their houses similarly. These were assets we developed and tended over years. By using my credit card to buy doubles of new 7"s, I participated in short-term speculation: higher potential gain, higher risk of complete loss. In so doing, we collectors viewed records purely for their exchange values, only as abstract vehicles by which we might profit. Whether we liked a record by Blank Dogs or Wavves didn’t matter, as long as someone else out there liked it—or maybe thought they could make a buck off our prices. But my record collection is unlikely ever to be an instrument for wealth-building—indeed, my addiction to music has cost me tens of thousands—and, given my sorry history of wheeling-and-dealing as a seller, I no longer expect it to be. That said, if you pulled any record from the racks in my living room, I could recall something about it, and memory, at least, offers its own kind of wealth.