CHAPTER EIGHT

ON THE ROAD 2: SOUL HEART TRANSPLANT

Record collector John Tefteller gets a phone call one afternoon, from a guy who saw his name on the internet. “I know you collect blues records,” says the guy, “and I just picked up a stack of them at a thrift shop in Nashville.” Having fielded hundreds of calls like this, Tefteller takes it with a grain of salt, and asks the guy to read off the titles. The first few are nothing special, but then come the magic words: “This one’s on the Paramount label, and it’s by someone named Blind Joe Reynolds.”

Based in Grants Pass, Oregon, John Tefteller has received the ultimate compliment. Even Robert Crumb thinks he’s truly obsessed. Tefteller claims a six-figure income from dealing rare records and has paid as much as eleven thousand dollars for prize finds. At forty-three, he’s relatively young to be harboring a fetish for shellac records that were made three decades before he was born. But having a minority taste is one advantage he enjoys. Another is his smooth-talking manner, with a voice that could easily belong to a seasoned DJ. An outgoing personality is always an asset, when you’re trying to get folks in their 70s to look through stacks of records that they stashed in their attic a couple generations ago.

Having devoted much of his life to tracking down rare blues 78s, Tefteller knew from that phone call that he’d just hit paydirt. What the guy had wasn’t even Reynolds’s famous record—“Outside Woman Blues,” a minor classic that Eric Clapton covered with Cream—but the followup, “Cold Woman Blues.” Collectors knew that this one existed, since there are master lists of Paramount releases, but nobody until now had ever found a copy—it was never reissued or transferred to CD, so the record was lost to history. Assuming the guy didn’t do anything stupid, the world’s supply of vintage, late-’20s blues had just been increased by two songs.

“Great,” says Tefteller, “Just tell me where the record is.” “Oh,” says the guy, “I tracked down a disc jockey in Washington, D.C., who wanted to hear it. So I mailed it to him.” Now take into account everything you know about shellac records, figure in anything you know about the U.S. Post Office, and sure enough, the guy did something stupid.

“My heart sank. Now we know this record exists, and we know that we’re never going to hear it.” Miraculously enough, the record made it to D.C. in one piece. Tefteller not only had to head to D.C. to retrieve it, he also had to outbid the DJ who wanted to buy it himself. One road trip, much negotiating and a few thousand dollars later, he made the score.

This is where record detecting moves into the big leagues, taking on an element of intrigue that garden-variety collectors don’t have to deal with. When I’ve scrounged through record bins, I was strictly in amateur class. For one thing I was in record stores, and well-known ones that tourists go to—bad idea, considering the number of music fans who’d been there before me. For another, I was in places like Memphis and New Orleans—great music towns, but ones whose supply of original vinyl has been picked clean over the past four decades. I came away with a few treasures, but any dabbler who’s seen an Elvis movie or The Big Easy could have gotten there before me.

Can’t say it wasn’t fun, however. I’ve spent the last few years having a long-distance love affair with New Orleans music, and I’ve long made it past the obvious hits and gone in search of the rarities—which I’ve learned are often better than the songs everybody knows. For instance, a chestnut like the Meters’s “Hey Pocky Way” may be great, but you’ve really got to hear the Party Boys’s “We Got a Party”—a demented, audio-verite anthem to excess apparently recorded by a bunch of drunks when the studio crew wasn’t looking. (After bragging that they got the party, the women and the whiskey, they drop this timeless chorus: “I can’t hardly stand up/ Won’t somebody help me?”) Hearing the record, you’re invited to picture the celebration that must have been going on inside that studio. I like to figure that they left the window open so people on the street could get into it. (According to legend, that was actually done by Allen Toussaint, the renowned Crescent City musician and songwriter. A young Toussaint cut a sprightly instrumental during one of his first recording sessions in 1960, opened the studio window, and smelled coffee. So he named it “Java,” and trumpeter Al Hirt made the song a hit soon after.)

 

 

In nearly every city I’ve visited, there’s a record store I’ve come to love. Can’t imagine how I’d live without Waterloo Records in Austin, where the late local hero Doug Sahm gets the same amount of shelf-space that most stores would devote to Eminem. Or Boston’s own Newbury Comics, which was a punk-identified comics store and indie singles outlet before it became a small chain. Among those who’ve worked the counter at Newbury is Aimee Mann, who wasn’t yet a star but carried herself like one. I well remember the dirty look she gave me when I handed her the just-released Genesis single “Mama”—a good record, dammit—and asked for a preview listen. I got less attitude from Sid Griffin, the former Long Ryders leader and an unsung hero of the alternative country movement, who used to work the counter at Rhino Records in Santa Monica. From Griffin I made an even less trendy purchase—the Bee Gees box set that came out in the early ’90s. He rolled his eyes a bit, said, “Yeah, their early stuff was pretty good,” and knocked a few bucks off the price.

In recent years I’ve been enamored of the Louisiana Music Factory, a collector’s hotspot in New Orleans. It’s not the only record store in the French Quarter, not even the only good one. The local big-chain outlets, Tower and Virgin, both do their bit to stock independent local CDs and import oldies collections. But neither has much vinyl, and neither has quite the same atmosphere.

There are few more picturesque places to put a record store than on Decatur Street, just two blocks upstream from the Mississippi River. Down the street to the south is an instant tourist magnet, the local branch of the nationwide music chain the House of Blues. To the east is a different sort of tourist magnet—a block’s worth of strip clubs, with dancers hustling business from outside the doorways. Daiquiri bars sit on every corner, selling deceptively sweet Day-Glo concoctions that prove more dangerous than anything you’ll get at home. Assorted street punks, panhandlers and off-duty vampires brush past you on the way in. As vices go, the idea of spending a week’s pay on old vinyl starts to look awfully harmless.

The Music Factory sits right in the middle of this clutter like a great old album sitting in a messy living room. Like many good things in New Orleans, the Music Factory is a head-on collision of tourist culture and the real, indigenous stuff. During one of the city’s festivals, Mardi Gras or the Jazz & Heritage Festival, the place will be packed with out-of-towners satisfying their Neville Brothers cravings, perhaps winding up there only because they stumbled onto this tiny homegrown store on the way to Tower. On a good day the owners would set up a keg behind the front desk, knowing that a free draft never hurt anybody’s potential for impulse buying.

Nor does free music, and the store also provides its share of that. During festival days they squeeze a makeshift stage right between the bulging CD racks, the cash register and the bathroom. Plenty of local musicians have sold stacks of CDs by playing a live set for the crowds on festival days, so you might wind up bumping into one of the city’s legends—and the aisles are narrow and crowded enough that I mean that literally. One day I did my part for the cause of music and art by letting Boozoo Chavis, the late accordionist who could rightly claim he invented zydeco music, cut ahead of me to use the bathroom.

I’d heard about the place via a CD by the Treme Brass Band, a street-parade outfit that hails from one of New Orleans’s tougher neighborhoods. On this day they were joined onstage by a Japanese tourist that nobody’s seen before or since. The man picked up a banjo and proceeded to sit in. Normally he’d be likely to get the bum’s rush, but it turned out that he played well and knew the songs, so he stayed aboard for most of an hour-long set. As fate would have it, the performance made it to the group’s next album, with the unrehearsed banjo parts left in. Last I heard, they were still trying to find the guy to pay him his royalties.

I had the good sense not to bring my banjo when I paid my first visit to the store. But I did make a point of filling my wallet beforehand, and headed down there single-mindedly. No desire to score a loaded daquiri, no time to grab a dozen oysters for the road, no temptation to duck into the strip clubs—well, maybe a quick glance. This day I was a man on a romantic quest. I had to find more of those old singles, preferably something I’d never heard of before. Even the band onstage didn’t sway me as I pushed through the door, said a few quick hellos to faces I vaguely recognized, grabbed the obligatory free beer, and got to work. I walked past the CD racks that everyone was browsing, and made my way to the diehard’s refuge—up the stairs and in a quiet, relatively deserted, library-like room—where the vinyl is kept.

In truth, much of their vinyl collection is nothing special, just multiple copies of those same REO Speedwagon and Styx albums that everybody had the sense to get rid of after they graduated high school. These are the records that nobody will admit to owning but, to judge from the sheer volume of the used copies that turn up, everybody did, even in cities that would theoretically be above all that. New Orleans may pride itself as the home of the Meters and Professor Longhair—a place where the world’s funkiest jazz and R&B is there for the taking—but the awful truth is that the city harvested as many worn-out copies of Frampton Comes Alive as any other.

But tucked away on a lower shelf is the real deal: about two dozen boxes full of vintage 45s, every seven-inch they could find that has anything to do with New Orleans. Some of these records were retired from service in jukeboxes, some were probably buried deep in radio-station libraries, others were store copies that managed to last for thirty-plus years, shuffled from one store to another without being sold. So the original copies of that rowdy R&B that I’d come to love would wind up here, and some of the city’s musical secrets would be in these very stacks.

The adrenalin races as I thumb through the piles of well-worn picture sleeves, weeding out the ordinary stuff—yes, Irma Thomas’s “Time Is On My Side” is a great song, but only an amateur would still need a copy—and looking for the obscurities. So Dr. John recorded a football song for the New Orleans Saints, one that nobody outside the city ever heard? Good Lord, stash that one in my pile before anybody else comes across it. “Ape Man,” a non-hit Aaron Neville single from the mid-’60s? Maybe not, because I already had the song on a CD. But something about that plain and fading yellow label—stamped with a simple, functional “Parlo Records, New Orleans LA”—had the inescapable feel of the ’60s about it. Maybe some DJ encountered Neville’s name for the first time on this very record—hell, maybe Neville himself brought it to the station. That possibility alone makes it worth the six dollars they’re asking.

Next up, an ultra-obscure single by an ’80s rock band, Li’l Queenie and the Percolators? Might have passed that one by, but in fact I’d recently been introduced to Queenie herself—a warm, exuberant woman who happened to show up at a party I’d been to. Maybe I’d run into her again, and the urge to tell her I’d just bought a record that she probably hadn’t thought about in years proved too good to pass up.

I browsed further along the alphabet, and there it was, the treasure I’d been seeking: “Show Me Your Pretties” by Oliver “Who Shot the La La” Morgan. I gave myself a mental pat on the back for recognizing the artist’s name—he’s one of those one-shot regional artists who turned his sole national hit from the mid-’60s into his nickname. This particular tune was recorded years later. I’d heard it on a local radio station that specialized in New Orleans trivia, and recognized it as the kind of party record that we well-behaved Bostonians have trouble making: vaguely smutty, pure doggerel and pure abandon (let’s just say that “pretties” is a radio-friendly rhyme for what he really wants to see). My head was already planning my next party tape—the songs I’d use to build the mood before this gem came on the sound system. “Is he really saying that?” some well-behaved guest would ask, and I’d smile knowingly.

I could get a pristine copy of “Pretties” for ten dollars, or a rather scratchy one with a beat-up sleeve for half that. Sounds like an easy decision, I thought as I stuck the clean copy into my pile. But hold on a minute: what sort of history did the scratchy one have, and how exactly did those scratches get there? This is a Mardi Gras song, so surely the owner hadn’t listened to it sober. Maybe it was played at some society function as the debutantes got into costume. Or maybe it came from further downtown, as the festival kicked into high gear, the potions flowed and plenty of, er, pretties were being shown. So that explains the scratches, I thought. If this record was listened to in the proper spirit, nobody would have the presence of mind to make sure they were handling it by the edges. Couldn’t let the thing sit in a dusty box forever; it needed to be the soundtrack for a few more parties.

I stuck the clean copy back and tucked the worn one under my arm. Now I could finally relax—after the records had been paid for and my bag safely stowed away, of course. Now I could say hello to the fellow collectors I’d avoided on my way in, for fear they’d find the singles boxes before me. Downstairs a swamp-rock band from bayou country had taken the stage, somebody was buying a T-shirt with Professor Longhair’s picture on it, and the city’s musical history was still being written and danced to. I knew I’d have a piece of that history to call up anytime I gave “Show Me Your Pretties” a spin.

A good afternoon’s haul, but still nothing compared to what the likes of Tefteller does to find records. While I was poking through boxes of well-used singles, the truly devoted were scavenging trunks and basements, and looking in unlikely towns like Port Washington, Wisconsin.

 

 

This city on the west shore of Lake Michigan—population at last count: 9,338—is one of the last places you’d ever call a blues hotbed, especially during the ’20s and ’30s. Unless you know that this quiet, predominantly white, German town was then home to a blues label that some would call the greatest of all time: the Paramount Recording Company, which released 78s by Son House, Charley Patton, and Skip James—essentially the cream of pre-war blues, the same records that Robert Crumb and like-minded collectors are hoarding today—along with seminal jazz sides by Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Paramount was owned by the Wisconsin Chair Company, which had a sideline in making phonograph cabinets. Many of its records were given away as bonuses for cabinet buyers. In fact, Paramount only jumped into jazz and blues after finding that its German and Mexican ethnic records weren’t selling. Port Washington is only 110 miles from Chicago, with a railway joining the two cities, so its blues connection isn’t all that farfetched. Today the city draws tourists with its historic lighthouses, but the site of Paramount is still unmarked.

 

 

“The locals were not fans of blues music,” says Tefteller, whose Paramounts are the prizes of his collection. “Most residents of that area probably didn’t know that blues were being recorded there, unless they were employed by the company. The singers were brought in on the inter-urban railway, they were recorded, put up in a hotel to spend the night, and sent home the next morning. They weren’t even seen on the street—and given the times and the racial things, that was probably fine with the people of Port Washington.”

Now picture a man with grey hair and moustache, prone to wearing a T-shirt marked “Record Collector,” driving around this town, knocking on doors, chasing down senior citizens who might have old Paramounts in their attic. The Blind Joe Reynolds disc may have fallen into his lap by pure luck, but much of Tefteller’s collecting has been more methodical. He’s out to find records that haven’t been collected yet, an enterprise that requires a willingness to travel, enough cash to throw around, and a lot of detective work. Forget about record stores and Internet sites, he says—that isn’t where the real action is. “The obvious place where a novice will look is Salvation Army stores, goodwill stores, junk and antique shops. If you did enough of that, you would probably find something—but you’d be absolutely destroyed with expenses before you did. If you pulled into New Orleans or a good music town, the records may be there but you wouldn’t find them just lying around. That’s like winning the lottery—forget it, it’s not gonna happen.

“And if you’re looking for blues and R&B, you probably want to stay in the South—anywhere from Virginia to Florida, and down to Texas. It starts to dry out when you hit New Mexico. Arizona is pretty dry; Colorado is pretty bad. And you have to stay out of places where they were only into easy-listening pop, or polkas. I’ve been on too many wild goose chases to some basement in Iowa, where they’d tell you someone had a thousand 78s in their basement, and it would all be polka records. Or people will think they have a blues record because the word blues is in the song title. It could just as easily be some dumb dance band doing a song that has blues in the title.”

You can’t even do what Crumb did in the ’60s, going into black neighborhoods and knocking on doors—especially if you want early 78s, which have now outlasted their original owners. “What was hard work in the ’80s is really hard work now. You’ve got working against you the sheer expense of staying on the road, rental car fees, the cost of staying at cheap hotels. Whatever records were left on store shelves—Crumb and those guys already got them. You have to be a real good hound dog to sniff them out now. But”—he throws in a pregnant, James Bond-like pause—“I know how to do it.”

 

 

So how do you find any records? You pull into the library and do research. You look up the names of disc jockeys through the decades, what vending companies were around, and who was in the music business. You find the record stores that have been around the longest, and start dropping the names you’ve just learned. “You’re not looking for people who bought records, because they probably just got what was popular. You want people who were in the music business—the ones that have them just because they were able to take home a lot of records. I’d walk into the little mom-and-pop stores, usually the people who owned them were in their 60s, and I’d talk to them like I was an old-time customer—‘You remember so-and-so who used to come in here?’ If you talked enough about the business in their area, you could open the magical doors real quick. ‘Do you have any old inventory in the basement? Do you have any put away at home? Can you put me in touch with the widow of this DJ?’ I would do that constantly. And I’d get records where people said there were no records.”

The raid on Port Washington was the peak of his sleuthing. Before hitting town, he called around and got himself written up in the local newspaper. He also called the radio stations and put the word out that he was looking for descendants of Paramount employees. The big haul came from a woman who called him, someone whose grandmother had stashed a bunch of records in a trunk. These included another uncollected Paramount, “My Buddy Blind Lemon” by King Solomon Hill. Best of all, the woman said the magic words: “I don’t think Grandma ever played this one. She didn’t like blues very much.”

Tefteller is the first to admit that it’s only a good, not a great record—but the payoff is that he’s able to say that at all. The mystery that will remain is how much he paid for it. “I gave her quite a substantial amount of money. I told her it was an important record, that I’d make her very happy, and she was. For her it was free, a part of her inheritance, and she was glad to see it go to someone who appreciated it. And I do, and it’s not leaving my house; there’s no price for it now. You’ll have to make that one up.”

 

 

It’s safe to say that nobody goes prospecting for records in Maine or Martha’s Vineyard—maybe in 50 years when there’s a market for Carly Simon’s leftovers. The hotspots are places that once had a thriving independent music circuit. That still covers a good part of the country, since the South had its blues and jazz, the Northeast its doo-wop, and the Northwest its garage rock. Lightning struck twice in Seattle, once the “Louie Louie” capital of the world, and more recently the home of Sub Pop. “Everything got inflated during the time of Sub Pop mania,” says Steve Turner of Mudhoney, referring to the label that broke Nirvana along with his own band. “There’s still good records here, even though Japanese tourists keep coming over and buying them. But that’s alright, because I’ve sold a few myself, and now I know where to look when I go to Japan.”

One motherlode that’s still being tapped is that of ’70s funk. The giants of this genre—James Brown, George Clinton, the Meters—seem to get rediscovered every year, not least because a generation of rappers have sampled their licks. But though Brown and Clinton made more records than most ordinary human beings, the well is bound to run dry sometime. At the other end of the notoriety scale are the regional funk bands who made one or two singles in the ’70s, played a bunch of parties and disappeared. With rappers hungry for new samples and fans looking for more grooves, it’s no surprise that the search for those records is something of a scavenger hunt.

One of the big winners on this count is producer Eothan “Egon” Alapatt, whose funk and hip-hop label Stones Throw is the kind of enterprise collectors love. No matter how much you know about funk, you probably didn’t know anything about the records he’s unearthed (though his 2001 compilation, The Funky 16 Corners, offers a neat crash course). These were fly-by-night bands under the Brown/Meters spell, most of whom never got as far as an album, none of whom ever got close to national recognition. Tracks like the Ebony Rhythm Band’s “Soul Heart Transplant” are just a little more gonzo than anything that would have made the radio.

Finding records like these is what Alapatt lives for. He swears he chose to attend Vanderbilt University in Nashville during the early ’90s, specifically because it was convenient to so many record-intensive cities. “Any free weekend I had I was going into Indianapolis, Little Rock, Memphis.” Not to mention to the Louisiana Music Factory, where he scavenged the same boxes of 45s that I did. But he found the clue that led to a bigger score. “Most of it was just stuff that I’d seen before. But I found one record that I knew I was into: ‘Do the Cissy’ by Charlie Simmons & the Royal Imperials, that one’s topnotch. But I’m looking at the record, and inside the dead wax someone had taken a marker and written the initials ‘TW.’ I asked the guy at the counter what that means and he said it was a guy in the country who brings records in, but he couldn’t give me his number. I finally talked him into it—told him I’d come all the way from Nashville—and it led me to a record store in the projects that had been closed since 1990. The Jamaicans had already been there a few times looking for 45s. And the place was a freakin’ goldmine, it was just chock full of the funk.”

The word goldmine is appropriate, since most of the people holding those funk nuggets know what they’re worth. “Let’s say that I’m trying to find these records, so I can reissue them and do it legally, giving money to the guys in the bands. And maybe somebody else wants to hoard them or to bootleg them, and we’re both trying to call members of the same band. Some of these people want to find one hundred and fifty copies of a record, hold onto most of them, and maybe put five in circulation to keep the value up. A lot of these older dudes did a funk record or two and didn’t record anything else, and maybe someone’s trying to get the record from them, saying that it isn’t worth anything. Meanwhile the guy is just happy that somebody wanted to hear his music. Which is why I’m hoping I can get there first.”

Besides, we probably wouldn’t have heard “Soul Heart Transplant” if he hadn’t gotten it pumping again and put it back into circulation. “No joke, that one took years. We’re talking trips to Indianapolis, staying in twenty-five dollar hotels when it’s one hundred degrees, sun beating down on your head. It was on a relatively well known Indianapolis label, but it was the one piece nobody could find. Turned out the bass player’s mother had just died, and he tells me, ‘I think she may have a copy or two in there, but I’m not going through her stuff’—How frustrating is that? Finally I find a dude in the band who tells me, ‘I have it, but my friend Butchie played on that record, so I can’t possibly send it to you.’ And I tell him, no, you’re wrong—I know who’s on those records, and Butchie played on a different one. When he figured I was right, we finally got it. Some of those guys have made a lot of money off me.”

As a relatively young guy into a relatively young kind of music, Alapatt figures he has years of sleuthing ahead. “A friend of mine just got back from Minneapolis, and he got some pretty heavy records. Out of nowhere he pulls a record with no address and no label information, but it’s by the Black Conspirators, and this record sounds like Jesus. And I’m thinking, how did I miss this one? It may have come from somebody who brought a collection in from Gary, Indiana. So we’re gonna go down there and make some more rounds.”

For the sake of my own collection, I can only hope he succeeds. If the heart transplant worked so well, there’s got to be a “Soul Quadruple Bypass” out there somewhere.