The Annotated Mixtape

I met my mailman, Barney, an affable fellow with white hair and tinted glasses, the day I moved into my rental house in Rhode Island, May 2001. He stopped his USPS Jeep beside the twenty-foot Penske truck that my wife, Sarah, and I had rented, and leaned out the window to shake our hands and pass us some mail that had already found us here. He drove away and I wiped sweat from my face with my shirtsleeve. Our friend Will had brought a dozen donuts and a gallon of water and come to help Sarah and me unload the truck. By the time Barney arrived, we’d been moving furniture and boxes from their piles in the truck to new piles in the house for an hour or two; we’d worked our way to the front of the trailer, where, the previous afternoon, in Pennsylvania, we’d stacked all the heaviest boxes—most of which were either boxes of books or boxes of LPs, with a few boxes of CDs mixed in.

“How many more boxes of books?” Will gasped, and I remembered him telling me, months earlier, about a comment a hired mover had once made to him: “I hate moving smart people.” Sitting in front of the box fan we’d plugged in, swigging water from the plastic jug, I wondered how the mover would have felt about moving music-obsessed people.

I talked to Barney many times after that first afternoon. Because we then lived on a rural route, Barney drove down our road, stopping only to reach out to slip mail in mailboxes, collect outgoing envelopes, and lower red metal flags. But since a large percentage of the mail I received didn’t fit inside my box, Barney instead leaned on his horn for a good three seconds as he approached my box. The first time he did this, I opened the front door to see what was going on outside, and he waved me over. “I’ve got a package for you,” he said, handing me a few envelopes along with a cardboard LP mailer. I quickly learned that a blast from Barney’s horn was intended—despite the neighbors—only for me, and he quickly learned my addiction: “You’re a record collector, eh?” he asked about the third or fourth time he handed me a box of records. “Yeah. How’d you guess?” I answered, lamely.

But Barney and I never had much to say to each other, mostly because I often felt somewhat ashamed when I saw him—ashamed that I was almost always home when he arrived with the mail; ashamed that he served as witness to and bearer of my consumption, which otherwise would have been largely inconspicuous. When I wasn’t home to fetch my packages, Barney—a veteran with a slow gait—had to climb out of the truck and leave them by my door, and that too shamed me.

I felt an odd codependency with Barney in these facts: that I worried about what my mailman thought as he delivered my mail, and that I believed he might actually be thinking about me and my mail rather than last night’s Red Sox game or what he’d eat for lunch or an itch on his heel; that I wondered if he were angry about having to deliver—even though his job required it—so many packages to my door, and also wondered whether I should feel guilty about this potential anger; and that I envisioned that, because of his horn-blowing, my neighbors peered from behind curtains, shaking their heads or clucking their tongues as I walked out to Barney’s truck to receive my near-daily ration of records.

As for my addiction, I received a credit card bill that summer tallying one month’s reckless spending: of the $846.39 total, over 70 percent went toward record purchases. I mention this figure—which is, let me hasten to add, not at all typical—not so that you may share the shock I felt, or feel the same disapproval I imagined my neighbors felt, but to illustrate this point: most of my transactions that summer involved one to four records at a time, at an average cost of probably $7 to $10 per record, and since they occurred over a thirty-day period, you get some idea of the number of packages Barney loaded into his truck, the number of times he had to beep me out of the house.

It seemed appropriate that Will helped me carry all those boxes of LPs into my new house the day I met Barney. More than anyone else I know, Will suffers from the same affliction I do, or at least shows signs of having been afflicted, since his buying has slowed down. (“There’s not much that I’m still looking for,” he recently confessed.) His collection of rock, pop, new wave, soul, R&B, disco, country, jazz, folk, and other LPs still dwarfs mine. My binge record-buying may suggest my insecurity about the size of my own collection, my anxieties about losing touch with my own past, the pathetic comfort I find in material things, a frequent desire to escape “boredom,” or all of the above. I’ve always, since preadolescence, bought a lot of records, but it’s only become more excessive over the years. I can relate to the claim Tim Gane of the British band Stereolab once made to a BBC interviewer: “I’ve probably spent a year of my life in record shops and I don’t think this much of an exaggeration. Since I was thirteen there has hardly been a week where I haven’t bought a record.”

Will once told me—circa 1999—that he thought my collection was the “right size,” that he admired it—and by extension, perhaps, what he falsely imagined as my restraint—for still maintaining what he called “a semblance of control.” But I exercise little control when Will and I shop together: we resemble two alcoholics on a bender, staggering from record store to record store, blinking at the daylight as we emerge from each one, and bearing increasing burdens as we go. An ex-girlfriend once told me, not long after we met, that she loved shopping for records but hated going to record stores with her friends, who sighed and rolled their eyes at how much time she spent browsing. (After perhaps the second or third time my ex-girlfriend and I went to a record store together, she sighed and rolled her eyes at how much time I spent browsing.) When Will and I shop, neither of us sighs or rolls his eyes. We don’t speak much, but we do pull albums that the other might find interesting, given our somewhat different tastes in music. After an hour, one of us will linger by the door, studying taped-up flyers for shows at local teen centers and bands seeking drummers, pretending to be almost ready to leave, while the other one continues flipping through the last few unflipped bins. Soon whoever wanted to move on is searching again too—now, perhaps, inspecting the soundtracks section, or the exotica/lounge section, or even the unsorted, unalphabetized LPs below the regular bins—and it takes us a good ten or fifteen minutes of this back-and-forth before we’re finally freed of the store’s gravitational pull. In fact, looking at my credit card statement, I can retrace the steps Will and I took in and around Harvard Square one afternoon that summer—Other Music, In Your Ear, Planet Records, Mojo Music.

Will and I met in rural Pennsylvania at an isolated university that had hired us both as visiting professors. The only place to buy vinyl was the local flea market—lots of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, or Sing Along with Mitch, but not much else; still, I pawed through mildewy stacks of LPs most weekends, and did manage to spend some money: Walter Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, the Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! in mono, an original pressing of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together.

Despite my weakness for pop hooks, I’ve always let my vanity about my own singular tastes lead me toward the obscure—if obscurity, post-Google, post-YouTube, still means anything—so even when I’ve lived in towns with record stores, I’ve still bought much of my music through the mail. For a long time, this meant writing letters and sending an SASE to an independent record label’s headquarters, which was also often someone’s mom’s house. In return, I’d receive a tiny, photocopied catalog—at most, a sheet of 8½ × 14-inch paper—often with only a dozen releases listed, no reproductions of cover art, and only the briefest descriptions of the music. I’ll quote a 1992 TeenBeat catalog as an example: “EGGS ‘Bruiser’ CD: Eggs, America’s new favorite indie-rock band, hit in the eye but still coming up with the goods. Some serious shit. Put a cold steak on it boys. Includes ‘Spaceman’ & a new recording of ‘Ocelot.’ CD $10.” I’d write a list of the records I wanted—not always certain what prompted my desire, given the oblique descriptions—and send a check or some cash wrapped inside several sheets of paper. In all, it might take a month to get a few records.

Before the secure server’s shopping cart standardized the transaction, mail order seemed to admit me into an appealing and esoteric community—a circle of strangers who, I felt, knew far more about music than I ever would: joining this community required at least the small effort of writing a note and buying a stamp. Although based on commerce, my exchanges with them seemed a strange blend of the intensely personal and the utterly anonymous. I never met the people who ran these labels—often members of the bands whose records I bought—but they became odd pen pals, my purchases of music a declaration of our shared passion. These curators of some musical sub-genre or other were also often college kids like me, and they scribbled goofy replies and enclosed pieces of candy with my records.

I am walking, music spurring my steps: down snow-packed South Flagg Street late on a midwinter night, accompanied by Wire’s “Outdoor Miner” on my Walkman; or following surf lapping the fogged-in beach at Eastham, Massachusetts, while listening to a taped copy of Section 25’s Always Now LP; or stepping out of the Haymarket Café with a friend, both of us reciting one of Ann Magnuson’s monologues from Bongwater’s The Power of Pussy.

I learn of my grandfather’s death at nearly the same time I’ve discovered R.E.M.’s brand-new “South Central Rain,” linking the two forever. Another friend remarks, as I drive him around in my old Mercury Bobcat, that the song playing on the tape-deck—Throwing Muses’ “And a She-Wolf After the War,” one of my favorites at the time—is “soundtrack music.” And though I don’t realize it then, my friend is right: here is another song in the soundtrack to all the incidental memories that measure my life.

One afternoon, after a few hours of Nerf football with my friends on a practice field at the local state college, I walked into the student center for hot chocolate. I might have been twelve. I no longer recall whose idea this was, or how we knew we’d find hot chocolate inside, but remember my curiosity and my desire to make even the smallest claim on this territory so clearly not our own. As we entered that cavernous room—nearly empty at four o’clock on a weekday afternoon—I heard the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” roaring from the speakers hanging among the exposed rafters and ductwork. At that moment, for whatever odd and muddled reasons—I’d heard the song before this—I felt the first inkling of what being a teenager might involve, might require of me, the first stirrings of adolescent self-consciousness. Or perhaps in that moment I foresaw that music would be my means of self-definition in adolescence, the thing that would see me safely through it.

All of this music seems inseparable from these recollections, or at least from certain moments; the records themselves seem almost the physical forms of memories, accessible by dropping a stylus onto grooved vinyl or tracing a disc’s code with laser. I’d long since have forgotten such everyday insignificances, except for the fact that when I replay certain songs, my unconscious mind summons these constellations of associations.

But records can also sometimes inspire imaginary nostalgia, faked memories. Years ago, I knew someone who deliberately scuffed and scratched his brand-new copy of Echo and the Bunnymen’s first LP in order to make it seem worn through years of playings, as if he’d been hip enough to have heard that group before they became popular. I doubt that anyone cared when this kid first heard Echo and the Bunnymen, and I doubt that anyone running a background check on his indie cred would have thought to study the condition of his vinyl. In any case, a true collector would never have damaged the record, but would have claimed that he kept it pristine through careful application of Discwasher every time he played it, that he took such loving care of it because of its importance to him.

Speaking of Bongwater’s The Power of Pussy: in 1994, I sold all of my Bongwater records to Main Street Records in Northampton, Massachusetts. The clerk, who moments before had been loudly discussing the Red Krayola with his co-worker, tried to persuade me not to do it. At the time, I probably smirked at his inferior musical tastes. Mine had advanced far beyond the world of Bongwater, a duo as antic and surreal as their nom de musique suggested. Whatever bands I was listening to in 1994 seemed to me incompatible with Bongwater; thus, I had to purge my collection.

Similar urges have befallen me over the years. Not long after the release of The Joshua Tree, I sold my entire U2 collection, some fifteen or twenty records, including their first few import singles, to a girl in my high school for $50. It took me only a half-dozen years to realize how serious an error this was, or for nostalgia to take effect—and though the two are not the same thing, I’ll probably never be able to distinguish them. Records, as with any commodity traded, have wildly fluctuating values, both financially and emotionally. Now that I’ve realized this, after years of selling off records I thought I’d outgrown, my collection has become less exclusive—roomy enough, even, for some of the classic rock the kids in my high school argued over (that eternal ninth-grade debate: “Who’s a better guitarist? Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, or Eddie Van Halen?”) and which for years I despised in comparison to the post-punk and new wave I grew up on. It took years before I could imagine owning a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, or Led Zeppelin I. But classic rock has a firm place in the soundtrack to my memories of childhood, and maybe I needed to reach a certain age before even those aspects of my childhood I would once have passed over as junk appeared valuable.

By graduate school, when I subsisted largely on Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese, I sold off many older records which had, like U2 and Bongwater, come to seem obsolete given the directions my taste in music was taking. Old Factory Records singles, the first Chameleons LP, three of SonicYouth’s early LPs, the first 7" by Codeine, and countless others all brought me the money to buy the then-new records by Broadcast, Fridge, Prefuse 73, and Novak. I doubt I’ll again find certain of the old records I sold, but the prospect of not having bought, say, the debut album by Movietone seems equally preposterous—I cannot imagine my old apartment on Tompkins Street in Ithaca without simultaneously hearing, in my memory, the delicately finger-picked guitars and mumbled vocals of Movietone’s “Late July.” But if I see music as memory given physical and aural form, then the revision of my music collection must also be the revision of myself—as if certain albums represent aspects of me or my past I’d like to forget, or to retrieve. Since few people ever give more than a passing look to my record collection, the person most often casting judgment over these unwelcome remnants of my identity is me. To browse the racks of records in my living room reminds me of leafing through an old diary, albeit one from which I have torn certain pages, or tipped in new ones.

I could download “Miss Moonlight” by Stockholm Monsters—sold off during graduate school, the one record I’d most like to recover—or pay $61 for the 12" single on eBay, as someone recently did, but listening to an MP3 of “Miss Moonlight” coming from my iBook’s single speaker would not only sound terrible, but, as an experience, could never match sitting crosslegged on the floor before my stereo, holding the Cultural Revolution—inspired sleeve in my hand, and watching the record revolve on my Thorens turntable.

I’ve always been a collector. In the early days my collections consisted of dinosaur books, Legos, and Star Wars action figures; other kids spent their allowances on candy bars, while I hoarded my money for a trip to the toy store. I don’t know if my habit of collecting arose from a childhood where money was sometimes scarce, but until fairly recently I did consciously prefer to spend my money on actual objects rather than consumables—sometimes I’d even think of a four-dollar pint of beer as a four-dollar 7" I could have bought instead, no matter how much fun I’d had at the bar. I began buying records and books at a young age, and to this day a persistent problem in my house is the need for a new bookcase or record bin.

Some of my best friends are compulsive collectors as well—not only Will and his records, but Mikey, who owns scores of vintage Catalin radios, many of which he has repaired (he built his own laboratory and taught himself how to make Catalin-replica plastics, in order to replace missing knobs and handles); or Andrew, who has amassed a near-museum of toys and dolls from the 1960s and ’70s (his molded plastic figures of the Mamas and the Papas are my favorites); or Natalie, who combs flea markets and junk stores for old agricultural paraphernalia—photos of tractors, tin road signs, and the paper labels from vegetable and fruit crates; or Jordan, who collects antique photos and memorabilia of pit bulls. None of us has ever asked each other, as far as I know, why we collect whatever we collect—I think we all understand, even if we can’t articulate a reason. It may be a simple comfort to us that there are other people we know whose homes and apartments are also turning into archives.

Book collectors use a terminology of deterioration: closed tears, foxed endpapers, sunned or price-clipped dustjackets, soiled paper wraps, remainder marks, bumped corners. (Without getting too defensive about it, I’ll point out that the Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for bibliomania—“an extreme passion for collecting and possessing books”—but no corresponding entry for those who suffer an extreme passion for collecting and possessing records. Bibliophilia and bibliomania are sanctioned passions; a bibliophile is seen as a scholar, while a vinylphile is seen as indulging in an extended adolescence.) The argot of record collectors is similarly concerned with decay—split sleeves, skips and scratches, missing inserts, ringwear, spindle marks, paper scuffs, cutouts, and sticker tears, though the grading system for records is less standardized than that for books. (Although Goldmine, a long-running magazine for record collectors, has an “official” grading system, it’s widely altered, misunderstood, or ignored.) Most sellers locate both vinyl and sleeve on a spectrum from M (mint) to P (poor), but exactly what constitutes an NM (near mint) or a VG++ (two increments better than very good) is a matter often left to approximation or opinion, as well as to the inflated economy for anything possibly collectible.

Such obsessive cataloging of and concern for the integrity—even sanctity—of the physical artifact seems a sort of nostalgia which seeks to recreate rather than simply recall the past. The object itself is most desirable when it is found in a condition most closely approximating its original state. Two Usenet newsgroups for vinyl collectors define mint condition in this way:

A mint record should look like it has just left the manufacturer, with NO flaws whatsoever. It should look as though it had never been handled…. We should actually use the term PERFECT rather than the term MINT…. PERFECT is to say that man [sic] (who is not perfect) can produce a perfect item.

The real concern in buying used records, however, is not perfection. Relying on a bit of diamond dragged through a groove on a stamped vinyl platter to transmit sound is not a perfect method of sound reproduction; many of the new, sealed records I buy pop once or twice the first time I play them.

We can recall or imagine the past by playing a reissue of The Velvet Underground and Nico. But, despite finding a mint, original copy of this same LP today, we cannot recreate the experience of coming home from the record shop in 1967 to peel the banana sticker from the Warhol sleeve, or the experience of hearing the seven jagged, nihilistic minutes of “Heroin” in the context of “Incense and Peppermints,” “Daydream Believer,” or “I Think We’re Alone Now,” to cite a few of 1967’s top forty hits—unless, that is, we owned the record in 1967 and already had those experiences. The search for the untouched, unsullied object—which, because of its perfection, has no human mark upon it, and thus no real history, no accompanying narrative—attempts to deny the passage of time, to wish oneself back to an earlier era, to impose one’s own history on an object’s blank slate. If the record is mint, one can pretend to have bought it when it was released—one can recreate one’s past, reconstruct one’s own identity, as the kid who scratched up his Echo and the Bunnymen LP attempted to do.

An LP from my own collection: crackling as it spins, its vinyl scuffed because, over the years, I carelessly and repeatedly slid it in and out of its paper sleeve; the occasional hairs of my old dog or cat, both long dead, stuck to the grooves of a record I haven’t played in a while; a sleeve split during one of my many moves—all of these remind me of my own history, the LP revealing them as conspicuously as rings on a tree trunk.

As the steady stream of cardboard mailers addressed to me arrived in Barney’s truck, I’d carefully slice them open with a Swiss Army knife. Maybe the mailer contained a few 7"s, an LP, and a CD. I might have played one of the records immediately, usually first choosing a 7" because it was short and required the least initial investment of energy and attention.

I might also have gone to the kitchen to make a sandwich, or, even more likely, to sit in front of the computer to search for other records to buy. The records began to pile up. There was no longer enough room in the 12" bins, so I leaned arriving LPs against one wall in a neat row. I stashed the new 7"s—which, until I’d given them a few listens, I didn’t want to vanish into the long racks of other 7"s—in the space between the stereo stand and the nearest rack, and, when that space was filled, against the fronts of some racks. Some hundred or hundred and twenty records, many still unplayed, occupied various postures on the living room floor, and I came to recognize the dangers of combining an adult’s income with an adolescent’s self-control. (My wife’s application for sainthood is pending.) I was buying music at such a rate—I continue buying it at such a rate—that I didn’t have time to listen to it all, or to get well acquainted with what I did listen to, a situation that Jacques Attali notes in his 1977 book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music:

Music remains a very unique commodity; to take on meaning, it requires an incompressible lapse of time, that of its own duration. Thus the gramophone, conceived as a recorder to stockpile time, became instead its principal user…. People must devote their time to producing the means to buy recordings of other people’s time, losing in the process not only the use of their own time, but also the time required to use other people’s time. Stockpiling then becomes a substitute, not a preliminary condition, for use. People buy more records than they can listen to. They stockpile what they want to find the time to hear.

Whenever I’ve determined that I want a record, I usually bend my will toward finding it; however, by the time it’s found and in my house, I’m already searching for another half-dozen records which have, in the interim, come to seem even more necessary. In his essay “Finding,” Guy Davenport, discussing his weekly hunts for Native American arrowheads with his father, describes the special skills of observation he developed, and the satisfaction he felt at using these skills to locate, for example, “the splendidest of tomahawks.” He also notes that “once we had found our Indian things, we put them in a big box and rarely looked at them…. Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.” Lately, I’ve realized, I don’t listen to music as much as I’d like to because I spend so much time searching for it. The greater my collection becomes, the less intimate are my experiences with each record in it. David Shields records a similar phenomenon in one of the several essays titled “Desire” in his book Remote: a desired object “attained this one quality: it was outside my consciousness. The moment I held it, my mind experienced it, so I no longer wanted it.”

In 1996, when I was a graduate student, Stereolab released a limited-edition, UK-tour-only, blue-vinyl split 7" with the band Tortoise—both bands were then at the height of their collect-ability, and the record fetched upwards of $50 when it was offered for sale. I loved Stereolab, and owned nearly every one of their records, so obviously I needed this one as well. I attempted to buy the 7" several times unsuccessfully—some other collector always outbidding me—until, after a few months, I finally tracked down a copy online at a small British shop for £25: a good deal, I believed (the exchange rate was more favorable then). I purchased an international money order from the post office, sent it overseas, and waited.

During the weeks since I’d first learned of the record’s existence, I’d imagined everything about it—what its sleeve might look like, what the song would sound like, and so on. I’d read various comments—vague but laudatory, boastfully triumphant—posted to a fan website by the lucky few who owned copies. The Stereolab song was titled “Speedy Car,” and even these words suggested distinct possibilities to me.

When the package finally turned up in my mailbox, I ran up to my third floor apartment and ripped it open. The copper-colored sleeve bore the close-up image of a signal-path schematic: even then, a trite and uninspired choice of artwork. The song, as I cued it and sat back on my Salvation Army couch to listen, featured some chimes, a repeating horn blat, a two-note keyboard riff, a measure of blurry bass notes, and contrapuntal vocals. I disliked it almost instantly. The production sounded congested and thin, and the music itself seemed to me a dead-end free-jazz experiment.

Maybe—after all my hoping and hunting and waiting—the record was doomed to disappoint my expectations. My desire for the record had increased in direct proportion to its elusiveness, but once I managed to consummate that desire, I saw how baseless it was. Buyer’s remorse? No. Even today, “Speedy Car” is my least favorite song in Stereolab’s vast catalog, and the 7" worth far less, but the collector in me is still pleased to own the record.

Buying music, for me, almost always requires a certain leap of faith, and for years, even using a downloaded MP3 to help winnow my purchasing options seemed unsporting. The simple question—will I like this?—hangs over many of my purchases, and I can rarely answer it without first turning on the stereo. If I remove this element of uncertainty, I deny myself the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised—or astounded—by a record I’ve just bought.

In junior high and high school, I had limited funds for purchasing new music: my allowance, or, later, the earnings from my first few jobs, some of which also had to be earmarked toward car repairs, gas, coffee, and the other expenses of a teenage existence. If I had $10 to spend on an import LP at Al Bum’s, and unwisely bought an album by the Bolshoi instead of one by the Razorcuts, well, that was my tough luck; I’d find out how tough only after the Razorcuts LP shortly went out of print while the Bolshoi’s LP mocked me for years whenever I searched the bargain bins.

Still, such purchasing decisions—even though I later donated many albums to my younger sister or sold them back to Al Bum’s at a loss—forced me to cohabit with certain records more than I otherwise might have, and more than I do now. Having invested in them, I was not content to play the one song I knew, but waded through the duds, toss-offs, experiments, and occasional moments of stupendous beauty. I know certain albums from early in my collecting career backward and forward, even after not playing them for years. I can’t imagine what my collection would look like had I been able to endlessly sample music before deciding to commit to it; if I’d heard excerpts from A Certain Ratio’s To Each… or Swell Maps’ A Trip to Marineville before buying them, maybe I would never have opened my wallet, but then neither would I count these two LPs among my favorites.

I sometimes feel depressed when I contemplate the amount of money represented by the racks of vinyl that occupy a large corner of the living room. It is terrible to feel in thrall to one’s things, and yet I keep bringing things into the house, each one making me more fearful of some potential loss.

When I sold my “Miss Moonlight” 12" in graduate school, the buyer was a man who’d once possessed every release from the influential British label Factory Records. I too had collected records from this label, if not to such an extent, and sold him a few that had come to seem dispensable. He told me he was trying to reassemble his collection, bit by bit, because his house had burned down, taking with it everything he owned. In the abstract, the idea horrified me, but until recently I think I failed to understand this idea in more than an abstract way. Now I wonder: was I conducting a fire sale of my own, selling off these scraps of my past, believing that I valued the object less than the memories it held for me? Or, if one has escaped such catastrophe, how and why do records still matter?

An old friend once gave me a small, spine-cracked novelty book called The IN and OUT Book. Robert Benton and Harvey Schmidt, the book’s authors, illustrate with copious examples the distinctions between “in” and “out” circa 1957:

There are two kinds of people in this world: IN and OUT. A thing can be IN for three reasons: a. Because it is so classic and great. Example: the Plaza Hotel. b. Because it is so obscure. Example: Veda Ann Borg movies. c. Because it is so far OUT even the OUT people won’t touch it. Example: Tchaikovsky. Some OUT people try to get IN by saying they like IN things but since OUT people can never be IN, they can only manage to ruin some good IN things. Everything that is not IN is OUT.

A detailed list follows this taxonomy. Many music collectors make similar classifications, in just as codified a way—and, as in The IN and OUT Book, the codes are always changing: to Benton’s and Schmidt’s assertion that “making your own preserves and jellies is going OUT fast (unless you live west of the Alleghenies),” or “It’s OUT to own small individual Modern Library editions of Remembrance of Things Past but it’s IN to own the big showy expensive edition,” I might counter that owning the original vinyl LPs by My Bloody Valentine is IN, but saying you’re still waiting for Kevin Shields, the band’s chief songwriter, to finish their next album—famously delayed since 1992—is OUT. (This statement was IN c. 2001, when I originally wrote it, and was perhaps still tenuously IN in 2004, when this essay was first published, but after My Bloody Valentine’s 2009 reunion tour, and the 2013 release of their mbv LP, it is indisputably OUT.)

Benton’s and Schmidt’s three-part definition of how a thing gets to be IN applies perfectly to music as well—which is cool because it’s classic and great (Odessey and Oracle, Forever Changes, Radio City, King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, Marquee Moon, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back), cool because it’s obscure (the Electric Eels, Little Ann, Naffi, Chrome, the Bush Tetras), cool because it’s so uncool (the Shaggs, the Beau Brummels, Esquivel, the Cure). And because everything’s IN status is constantly in flux, a patient record collector can do well either by buying duplicates of records about to become IN in order to trade them for other rare records, or by waiting until a good record is OUT before buying it.

But such speculation is difficult. Over the years I’ve foolishly ignored all manner of music, much of which many people raved about, because of some misguided principle, a reluctance to try to hear the band’s music through the noise of hype, or a song that misrepresented the band’s larger oeuvre: the Pixies’ album Doolittle, which I deemed too commercial upon its release (OUT); the noisy pop from New Zealand’s incestuous music scene, which for years I couldn’t be bothered to untangle (so IN that it was OUT); the post-1987-or-so releases by SonicYouth (ruined by OUT people trying to be IN).

Also, in retrospect, some bands seem to have gained importance—in my own musical landscape as well as in the wider world—so that while I originally passed on buying their work, now I feel it should find a place in my collection on the basis of how classic and great it has turned out to be. Am I OUT if I base my purchases on external forces, or am I trying too hard to be IN if I refuse to buy a band’s older records simply because they’ve become more popular in the interim?

As The IN and OUT Book demonstrates—as does Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, in a slightly more elaborate manner—possessions and culture become mere proxies for our identities. My belief that my record collection will reveal aspects of my personality to others reveals more about me than the records themselves ever could.

Listening to music is by nature a fleeting, temporal experience, which we cannot simultaneously suspend and hear, the way we can isolate a single frame from a film on a VCR, or stare at a painting or a sentence in a book as long as we like—and even though the record is a way to recreate that experience endlessly (as I memorably discovered at a young age, playing “I Get Around” from one of my mother’s old Beach Boys records over and over, lifting the needle only to cue the song again, until, her voice tinged with hysteria, she screamed down the stairs for me to stop), pressing the pause button on a CD player brings us only silence, not a single sustained note.

Though I enjoy returning to the pages of certain books, I usually reread magazines only if I want to teach an article from one of them; too few films reward multiple viewings. Music is the only form of popular art which we tend to replay over and over—at least until we’ve “worn out” a song or an album. Is this because music is inherently nostalgic, or because its pleasure is so elusive, so transient, that we try to capture it through repetition?

Late in 2001, I mailed Will a draft of this essay, along with two tapes I’d made for him. He responded, in part:

Your self-diagnosis made me aware of the ways in which my “affliction” differs from yours. For one thing, I have always been cheap. Lots of my records were purchased because they cost less than other records which I actually wanted more…. Of course, I do recognize many of the symptoms you identify: buying music and failing to listen to it, fusing music with events contemporaneous with its purchase (e.g., Steely Dan’s Katy Lied and the 1986 ALCS), selling and later regretting having sold, shopping with impatient women, the pleasure of “finding.” One thing you didn’t mention…. is the excruciating moment at which one has “found” too many LPs or CDs and has to put a few back before proceeding to checkout. For me, that moment of self-denial is important to my sense of myself as someone who is Not Out Of Control.

One morning when I was fifteen years old, my friend Ben and I skipped school to catch an early Boston-bound Peter Pan bus. Once there, I gladly squandered my pocketful of cash at the record stores in the Back Bay and Kenmore Square. We snarfled an ice-cream lunch at Emack and Bolio’s on Newbury Street before we decided, sometime in midafternoon, that it was time to head home. We took the T to South Station and walked into the bus terminal, only to discover that between us remained six of the ten or eleven dollars necessary for our return fares.

At this time the ATM was not the ubiquitous part of the landscape it has since become, and neither of us had bank cards anyway. We went into a vast marble bank lobby, thinking perhaps that we could withdraw money from the savings accounts we both had, failing to understand that having money in one bank does not mean that the money is accessible at another. The bank building we walked into was a large corporate office, not a branch, and a receptionist—likely noticing our skulking, uncertain, adolescent presences—asked us what we needed.

“Is there any way we can take out money from our accounts here, even if this isn’t our bank?” we blurted. When she realized that we needed four dollars to get home, she opened her purse and handed us a few bills from her own wallet. She refused to give us her name so that we could repay her later.

If it’s ever been important to me to see myself as in control of my record-buying habits, the memory of this day makes me think otherwise. To be sure, the moment Will describes is “excruciating,” but what I’ve found even more excruciating over the years is to have held a record in my hands and then decided to put it back—perhaps thinking that I’ll return and buy it in a day or two—only to find, on returning, that it’s vanished from the bins. According to the Vinyl Tourist website, “It’s axiomatic that the only purchase you’ll ever regret is the one you didn’t make when the opportunity presented itself.”

Some years back, while searching the messages posted to a vinyl-collecting forum, I discovered the following definition:

Vinyl Junkie: A record collector [who] has the collecting fever so bad that nothing else really matters. He/ she plans his/her vacations around looking for records. He/ she spends his/her weekends going to the usual swap meets, garage sales and record meets. He/she spends hours on the phone and internet with fellow record collectors.

“The collecting fever”: who knew I was simply infected? Thankfully, my record-buying binge of summer 2001 has—like other unsustainable practices of those years—since slowed, and I can say with certainty, or at least hopefulness, that this definition does not characterize me. I did recently find a flea market with bins and bins crammed with old records—perhaps a thousand or more. But these bins were mostly covered up with other junk—old throw pillows, wicker baskets, a lamp, a spool of fishing line, a dusty VCR—or inaccessible because of the junk on the floor in front of them, and I didn’t fuss much, didn’t even bother to flip through the Peter Frampton and Diana Ross and Herb Alpert and Ray Conniff in search of something better.

Once summer ended and I started teaching again, I was rarely home to feel ashamed when Barney delivered the mail—although, heading to class one day, I passed him a half-mile down the road from my house. I waved hello, but his wave in return was more frantic. I stopped the car beside his truck and rolled down the window, and he said, “Hi, Josh, I’ve got a package for you.” He rummaged around the cab of the truck for a moment, and then reached his arm through the window, holding a cardboard LP mailer out to me.