IT’S A SEROTONIN THING
In psychiatric circles, the expression “going mental” is generally frowned upon. So, to some extent, is collecting, which is seen as a fairly benign disorder.
According to Alen Salerian, director of the Washington Psychiatric Center, the need to collect anything stems from a serotonin deficiency. Serotonin is the enzyme that controls worries; with too little of the former you get too much of the latter. “It’s a form of addiction, if you want to call it that. The current thinking in neuroscience is that people with serotonin deficiencies are much more driven to compulsions, including the compulsion to collect. Various life events may disturb you and prompt that compulsion.”
Serotonin deficiency is the condition that Prozac and
other antidepressant drugs are commonly prescribed to treat. Those with lower levels of serotonin are believed to have higher appetites—whether for sex, alcohol, gambling or original copies of the “Scythian Suite.” A study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that rhesus monkeys with lower serotonin levels were also more likely to demonstrate violent or dangerous behavior. No word on whether the monkeys preferred to collect vinyl or CDs.
So an ideal serotonin balance can be tougher to obtain than, say, a still-sealed copy of Nazz Nazz on red vinyl. The good news, however, is that this condition is more common among creative types. “Many people with creative genes also suffer from various neurological disorders; you can be Mozart and still be bipolar,” says Salerian. “There is a very close link between creativity and dysfunction of the nervous system—it’s part of a mood disorder package that artistic people have a higher chance of suffering from. As for collecting, the line I would draw is whether a person’s life is compromised because of this habit. You can gamble without being a pathological gambler. But if something like collecting interferes with your ability to function effectively, then it’s a problem that should be addressed.”
Or, to put it another way, “At least they’re not as bad as Trekkies.” This contribution comes from Jeff Tamarkin, who saw his share of crazed collectors as an editor of Goldmine. “What always amazed me was how a certain kind of obsessiveness took over that went way beyond even caring about the music. You start off because you like what’s on the records, and it becomes something else along the way. I saw
people that would buy a record and never play it, and that struck me as pretty odd. Of course, the records they prized the most were the ones in mint condition, and you can only keep it mint if you don’t play it. So people would buy a record, wrap it in plastic and mount it. The people I thought had the best attitude were the ones who didn’t mind buying a record that was covered with scratches, as long as they liked the tune.” Tamarkin points out that he’s sold original singles by the infamous gutter punk GG Allin. Before his fatal overdose, Allin was notorious for flinging abuse, and various bodily materials, at his audiences; I can vouch that he once chugged Ex-Lax before a Boston gig. Nowadays his records go for hundreds of dollars on eBay: the music may be filthy, but the vinyl is still pristine.
There’s a thin but definite line between serious music fans and collectors, but the two worlds will always intersect. If you discovered garage rock from the Nuggets or Pebbles series and were driven to hear more, if you bought a Velvet Underground album before R.E.M. or Kurt Cobain told you to, or if you even buy vinyl in the twenty-first century, then you’re on the road to collecting—you’re looking for something that the charts and the chainstores won’t give you. But when you start thinking seriously about methods of alphabetizing, or start worrying about preserving records instead of collecting them, then you’ve entered the realm of the true collector.
The choice of music may be different, but the obsession is the same, and collecting punks have more in common with jazz and classical snobs than they might realize: in each case, it’s about holding onto something beyond the music. Other
theorists tell us that the idea of collectors as “anal” has some basis in clinical fact. Otto Fenichel writes, in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses, “The anal retention, which always contains the two components, fear of loss and enjoyment of a new erogenous pleasure, may also be displaced to another object. Cupidity and collecting mania have their correlating determinants in the infantile attitude toward feces.” We won’t even venture to guess what the notoriously scatological GG Allin would have done with this one.
Elaborating further, the psychologist Werner Muensterberger poses that the urge to collect may stem from early childhood traumas. In his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion, he writes: “Provoked by early, possibly unfavorable conditions or the lack of affection on the part of not-good enough mothering, the child’s attempt toward self-preservation quickly turns to some substitute to cling to. Thus, he or she has a need for compensatory objects of one or the other kind. This can also be interpreted as a self-healing attempt … . To put it another way, such a person requires symbolic substitutes to cope with a world he or she regards as basically unfriendly, even hazardous.”
Pat, the store owner and collector, says that his mother influenced his collecting in a more direct way. “I always told her she was to blame, since she was a music lover who accumulated a lot of records. Or at least that’s what I thought, that I was using her as a role model. It was only after I told her that, that she said: ‘You know, I didn’t have more than maybe one hundred records. I never dreamed you’d go so berserk.’”
Muensterberger goes on to offer a role model that record collectors may be more comfortable with: “There are, to be sure, all sorts of collectors and facets of collecting. While one would not normally think of the infamous Spanish nobleman Don Juan Tenorio as a collector, did he not in fact ‘collect’ the chaste young maidens he seduced one after the other?”
Intentionally or not, Muensterberger has just hit on one trick of successfully living the collector’s life—to embrace the Don Juan model, spiritually if not literally. In other words, to treat collecting as a safe outlet for promiscuity, to follow crushes and make conquests. And you don’t have to unload the old passions when you move on—you can just file them in the basement, and maybe rekindle the affair someday. “I’d get rid of the ones I’ll never play again, but Lord knows which ones those are,” says Pat, echoing a sentiment familiar to collectors. “It’s good to have them there whenever I want them. And it’s a comfort to know that I can read or think about something, then go down to the basement and hear it. That’s immediate gratification. For some people, the drug is in the purchase; it speaks to some sense of order that they have. Some relate to records as an artifact of an era. And, of course, for some collectors, the drug is being able to find something rare, and then to lord it over everybody else.”
In that sense, collecting—as Salerian notes above—is like many other drugs: not necessarily something that needs to be avoided, just something that you need to know how to handle
and live with comfortably. And that includes the knowledge that you can’t embrace collecting without succumbing just a little to the X factor, that urge to go mental. Pat recalls the time that some Japanese friends stayed in his house, and voiced concern over how close one of his floors was to collapsing. “They saw that I sleep right below one of the record storage rooms, and they saw how easy it would be to get crushed by records if the ceiling ever caved in during the night. And I just thought, ‘Well, you’re right. But wouldn’t that be an honorable way to go?’”
Serotonin, anybody?