THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE
For some collectors, it’s not just about acquiring a bunch of records. It’s about living in the pop culture era of your choice. Anyone who gets deep into non-standard music is already making a decision about living outside the mainstream. If you discovered punk rock in high school, you were differentiating yourself from the Bon Jovi masses. And if you collect jazz, blues or ’60s psychedelia, you’re sending a message—at least to yourself—that you’ve evolved beyond the constraints of pop culture. And while you’re at it, you can always acquire a bunch of records.
Peter Prescott is the type who wouldn’t be caught dead living in the mainstream. Among the Boston music community, he’s known as a gifted drummer and a founding member of the post-punk band Mission of Burma (who influenced the likes of the Replacements and Sonic Youth; got covered by R.E.M. and Moby; and broke up in the early ’80s, but recently did a successful reunion tour). He’s also known as the town cynic: at the Burma show I saw, he punctured the event quite nicely by greeting the crowd with an exaggerated, “It’s so nice to see so many wonderful old faces!” When not on tour, he manages a funky basement of a record store in the pricey Newbury Street area; the kind of place that seems to exist as an antidote to its surroundings. I spent an hour there recently, and didn’t see anybody buy anything. But we did get through both sides of a European, red-vinyl pressing of the Cramps’s Flamejob, which he threw on the turntable as soon as a used-vinyl dealer brought it into the store. Instead of skipping over the song “Let’s Get Fucked Up,” as they would surely have done at Tower or Virgin if they played the album at all, Prescott just turned the volume up a tad.
If he maintains a bit of ironic distance about reunion tours, he feels the same way about collecting. “I’ve never had much patience for people who treat records like diamonds,” he says after we adjourn to a nearby coffeehouse. “Of course, I can see why you’d treat them that way, if you’d paid $150 for a record, but I can’t imagine doing that either. Some people collect records the way people collect statues, Beanie Babies—that’s their approach to the world. If you want to fill your house with newspapers or thimbles, go ahead. But it’s a
lot easier for me to relate to someone who collects something with an aesthetic value beyond its collectibility. Collecting is like a prism, a lot is what you project onto it. For some it satisfies an obsessive-compulsive-disorder-style need. And if that keeps people from going nuts, more power to them. Most collectors, in an honest moment, would admit there’s a pathetic side to it—it’s an obsessive need for an object, which is pretty pathetic. But it doesn’t have to be only that.”
What it can be, for him, is a personal version of the do-it-yourself ethic: program your own music instead of letting the culture do it for you. “I don’t think I’ve changed my mode of dress very much since I was 25,” says Prescott, now into his 40s with a preference for jeans, T-shirts and punkish, close-cropped hair. During that time, his musical taste has only become more idiosyncratic. Along with punk rock, he’s developed a love for the experimental rock of the Birthday Party and the Fall, and the “space age bachelor pad” realm of ’60s easy-listening.
“Now that I’ve owned up to being a collector, I’ll say that what really gets me off is knowing I have this personal library of everything that appeals to me, and that I can pull any of it out whenever I want to. That’s the wonderful thing, customizing the soundtrack of your life. It goes against the fact that so many things are considered disposable now. Music has always been the center of my life, and to some extent it keeps you from just walking outside and fitting into the crowd. What better way to avoid that than to surround yourself with the music that you relate to the most? That really is a way of adjusting the world to you.”
But some specialty collectors have evolved even further, taking themselves to a particular corner of pop history, usually a particular corner of the ’60s—always a rich era for pop culture. Since many collectors are in their 30s and 40s, they just missed growing up in that era, so they see it as something of a lost paradise. But that doesn’t mean you can’t absorb the music, and shape a bit of your worldview accordingly. Maybe you can’t transport yourself back to the days of the British Invasion, or to the Sunset Strip in 1966, or to Las Vegas when Frank and Dino were around. But at least you can bask in a little bit of that glory.
In this realm, it’s often the female collectors who can be a little more creative with their personal style, and a whole lot more creative with their choice of a musical soundtrack. High on the list would be Lisa Sutton, a Los Angeles-based artist and designer who finds a source of inspiration in her lifelong passion for bubblegum.
She’s an easy one to spot in a crowd, especially this crowd. It’s a county fair in Newport, Rhode Island, and the entertainment is provided by the most famous group to come out of this city, the Cowsills, the singing family that scored a few quintessential bubblegum hits in the ’60s. And this corner of Newport looks pretty much the same as it did when “Indian Lake” was on the radio. It’s still a place where the yachters hang out. Today it’s a suntanned, mostly well-to-do crowd heavy on porkpie hats and shirts with little anchors on them—in all, the atmosphere is more lobster roll than rock ’n’ roll. Having reunited and recorded over the past decade,
the Cowsills are now appreciated by power-pop diehards, but that’s not who’s in this crowd: it’s the old Newport locals and the middle-aged rockers who still cherish their teen crushes on various Cowsill sibs. Lisa is here to interview them for a VH1 documentary—at the moment, she knows more dirt on the group than anyone outside the immediate family—and she stands out in this company. She’s the one with the TV cameras and the purple hair.
I think of Lisa as the grown-up version of those girls you’d see in cartoons in teen magazines—the ones dancing around their room with the radio on, cutting photos of their favorite pin-up. You figured they’d grow up to be funky and artsy, and she has. An artist and occasional TV producer, she personifies the Huey Lewis law of nature—namely, it’s hip to be square. The purple hair attests to her days as a punk rocker and Rocky Horror devotee. But her abiding love is for bubblegum, music that is some of the least hip and most fun in pop history. Her work in the biz has helped keep that era alive: She’s compiled and annotated various Bobby Sherman and Brady Bunch compilations. The first thing I learned about her was that she’s repainted a Monkees album cover. The original prints for Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd are long gone, so when the album was reissued in the ’80s she created a lookalike cover (if you bought it since then, you’ve got her version) and I can pride myself on being one of the few dozen people in the world who would be impressed by that. In another life, she might have been Keith Partridge’s girlfriend. But her personal soundtrack connects her to a place where the ’60s are still in progress, and everybody’s having a nice day.
“I was born in a constant state of nostalgia,” she explains—a line she borrowed from songwriter Rupert Holmes, but one that she can wear proudly. “I’ll admit that I totally pine for the ’60s; it’s something about those earlier, wonderful, carefree days. My father used to go to parties in Topanga, and I remember being a kid and really wanting to go to Woodstock [which wasn’t likely to happen, since she was seven that summer]. But it was so beautiful to live in L.A. at that time, surrounded by the whole hippie culture. It wasn’t about replacing anything that was missing in my life, but when I grew up I wanted to get one of everything I’d ever wanted as a kid. And if having one or two Partridge Family records meant a lot to you once, then having them all would mean even more.”
I suggest that her musical taste might be a hard sell to other collectors—even with my abiding love for the Monkees and Cowsills, I’m reluctant to follow her into Partridge territory. “I just think it means that I dig really good pop music, since I also like things like the Free Design and Association [two equally frothy, but more critically sanctioned bands]. But the Partridges were probably easier to get into, after the teenage crush I had on David Cassidy.” And it’s not that much of a contradiction that she was equally drawn to the innocent world of the Partridges and the less innocent one of Rocky Horror. “It’s really on the same level, the glam and the glitz. When you’re a kid you respond to color, same way that they’re into the whole tie-dye thing now. But the ’60s were the last time when that whole kind of grooviness was going on. Back then it was cool to want to be a go-go dancer,
and nowadays that would make you a stripper.”
In fact, a teenage life crisis turned her into a born-again bubblegummer. “The only way to describe it is that I was the victim of a random act of violence. I was in eleventh grade, and I was beaten up badly by a girl in my school—bruised and battered so badly that my mother didn’t want me leaving the house. This girl was looking for a fight with someone, and she just whomped me. My right eye was paralyzed. It was horribly depressing. Then a friend came over while I was laid up, and she brought a copy of The Partridge Family Sound Magazine—I’d owned that when I was younger, but now I was a teenager and it just wasn’t cool anymore. That was a ritual when you were growing up, you’d reach a certain age and get rid of those records. You’d sell them for a buck-fifty and throw a part of your childhood away.
“So now my friend comes over with the Partridge Family, and I had a real emotional reaction. We put it on, sat there and sang and laughed, and I just loved the hell out of that record. This was around the time they started re-running the Monkees on MTV, and after not having seen it for so many years, I watched it and just got tears in my eyes. From there we started going to used record stores, buying Monkees and Partridge Family albums for a buck. That was when I started record collecting. And I still think that The Partridge Family Sound Magazine is one of the finest albums ever recorded.”
Though it started on impulse, her collection’s become amazingly thorough. She’s got actual boxes of Rice Krispies with teen idols’ faces on them, and the krispies still inside. She’s got David Cassidy necklaces, many stacks of coloring
books and paper dolls, and every issue of Tiger Beat that’s come out since 1965. Her memorabilia regularly gets leased to magazines and TV shows looking for a little period flavor. The lava lamps and smiley-face clocks that adorned Rhino’s Have a Nice Day series? Those were Lisa’s. So was the poster spread of Monkees ephemera that came with their box set—an array of Monkees clocks, posters, puzzles, trading cards and the odd tambourine, even a copy of the very “Monkees Music Book” that I learned to play guitar out of when I was ten. Damn, I’d been looking for that one myself.
But her love for the Partridge Family has been the biggest springboard to her collecting. And yes, one can be serious about collecting a group that never literally existed. Her personal Holy Grail was a set of records she’s heard about before she actually saw them: acetates that were produced for the cast members, so they could learn the songs and lip-sync them onscreen. “Collectors refer to them as the Screen Gems records, or the rehearsal records. There were three or four of these for every season of the show—they each have an album version of the song, plus the short TV version, and maybe an alternate version as well. If they weren’t owned by one of the six cast members, they would come from the musical supervisor, or the director of that episode. To me that’s the pinnacle of cool—to have these records and be pretty much the only person that has them, as sick as that sounds.” Especially since the copies she eventually found, and spent a total of two grand to get, came from a garage sale at Tracy Partridge‘s—that’s actress Suzanne Crough’s—house.
“My mother used to tell me that I did everything to excess,” she notes. “I think it’s true that it’s largely a male thing, that hunter/gatherer mentality. Girls are more inclined to think about things like, well, David Cassidy’s hair. When you find women that are big time collectors, it’s usually that they’re more aggressive types; girls don’t have that mentality as much as men do. But I also think that we all have that drive, we all have varying degrees of testosterone in us.” Not surprisingly, she says that collectors of teen-idol pop tend to be even more obsessed than the rest of us. “I’m the first to admit that I’ve met some really odd people in the collecting world. Eighty-five percent are lunatics, and the rest have something wrong with them—they’re greedy or competitive, or just not nice. But that’s fine, we all have some geekiness in us. And I believe you should let your geek flag fly.”
Super—fans devoted to one artist are among the most devoted collectors there are. Beatles collectors are still as rabid as ever, to judge from a recent eBay auction that found the notorious “Butcher cover”—the garish pop-art satire that was quickly yanked from the front of the Yesterday & Today album—being snapped up for more than two grand. I know a Bruce Springsteen fan who keeps two copies of every one of the Boss’s albums—one to play, the other a sealed copy held in reserve, just in case an artist that popular should suddenly vanish from the shelves. And you’ve got to hand it to fans of the Grateful Dead (and Phish, and scads of other jam-bands) who managed to
collect and catalog endless hours of tapes and bootleg CDs, even while living in a van to follow their heroes on the road.
It’s only natural that some of the most admired artists in popular music should have suitably devoted fans. It takes a little more gumption to dedicate yourself to someone who’s obscure, overlooked, or just plain unhip. My choice for originality would go to Boston writer Zoe Gemelli, who devoted a good chunk of her life to an artist who’s not often mentioned when the usual lists of the all-time greatest come up.
When most young lesbians talk about Olivia Records, they’re usually talking about the label of that name; the one that signed the likes of Meg Christian and Cris Williamson, and popularized the notion of “women’s music” before Ani, k.d. and the riot grrls came along. But for Zoe, Olivia records were something different: they were Olivia Newton-John’s records. They were the ones that took all her money and every available inch of apartment space; the ones that were integral to her escaping her born-again Christian background, finding herself as a writer and coming out as gay. A pretty tall order, you might think, for “I Honestly Love You” and “Have You Never Been Mellow.”
To some extent Zoe’s life was tangled with Olivia’s since day one: That would be September 16, 1971, the day she was born and the week that Olivia’s first hit single, the George Harrison cover “If Not For You,” was in the charts. As an avid listener of AM radio and reader of teen magazines, Zoe
discovered her idol just a few years later. “Why Olivia?” she ponders, probably holding back the impulse to ask “Why not?” “It’s so hard to pick one reason. For one thing, I really loved her music and her voice. And on an unconscious level, there was something really wholesome and honest about her. I needed someone to look up to who was good. She represented that in the industry as much as anyone, and I was too young to understand punk rock.” And nowadays she can justify her taste like the music critic she’s become: “You can say that the Patti Smiths of the world are beautifully talented, but people like Olivia and the Spice Girls will make you get up and dance. There’s a place in the world for both. And there was a time in my life when I didn’t admit my Olivia fondness to anyone. I got over that, though—decided I didn’t want to be ashamed of anything in my music collection.”
Crushes on artists are a cherished part of the record-collector experience. But having those crushes doesn’t necessarily lead to a collecting jones. For heterosexual guys reading ’60s teen magazines, the pickings were definitely slimmer. The first strong musical crush I can remember was on a singer calling herself Jennifer, who was a regular on the Smothers Brothers Show. A definite hippie dream, Jennifer was prone to white lipstick and peasant dresses, and she wore glasses more fetchingly than Lisa Loeb ever dreamed. I remember her singing “Easy to be Hard” on the show one week, exuding a wide-eyed waifishness that nailed me to the wall, or at least my parents’ couch. (I recently lucked into the video of this show and yep, Jennifer and the song are still pretty gorgeous.) But I’ve still never owned one of the
woman’s records, even after I put it together, many years later, that she’s the same Jennifer Warnes who hit with “Right Time of the Night” and made a critically-praised album of Leonard Cohen songs—it just wouldn’t be the same. (My more recent crushes on Kristin Hersh and Liz Phair don’t count, they only happened after I was a fan of their music.) My first stabs at record collecting were more like male bonding—I yearned to hang out with people like Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, who was smarter and snottier than anyone else in 16 Magazine. Or Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders, who seemed a mix of the sensitive type I already was and the party animal I really wanted to be. And he had that really bitchin’ Revolutionary War hat.
But Zoe’s Olivia phase was a more profound rite of passage. She sustained it over ten years, and it went from cutting pictures out of teen magazines to getting her first record store jobs, bringing home a weekly stash of Olivia booty. Even today, with the spell long since broken, she’s quick to head off any cheap shots about her idol’s career. How about the movie Xanadu, pop culture’s first and only linking of Greek mythology and roller disco? “Loved it. To me that’s the ultimate fan’s film. It has all the right elements of pure kitsch, and the sense of ‘Let’s milk the fans for everything they’ve got.’ If you can appreciate what the Spice Girls did with Spice-world, then Xanadu comes out of the same place.” Okay, so what about the long-forgotten hit “Let’s Get Physical,” and the singer’s attempt to recast herself as an edgy sex symbol? “Oh, that was awesome. It made me fall even more in love with her. Suddenly she was everywhere, you could turn on
the TV and she’d always be on, and I liked those times when she was more accessible. Besides, the image change wasn’t that big a stretch after the end of Grease—you look at ‘Physical’ and it was really just an extension of Sandy II.”
Redheaded and bespectacled, Zoe herself evinces a style somewhere between the early, wholesome Olivia and the later, sexy one. As a lesbian in her early 30s, and a recovering Olivia-fan, she doesn’t exactly fit the collector stereotype of a middle-aged guy with a Springsteen or Beatles fetish. She met her share of the latter when she was frequenting used-record stores and later working in one herself—the better to enhance her stash of Oliviana. “I can tell you that a lot of the stereotypes are reality. The male collectors are more status-oriented and more into the details; if I didn’t know as much as they did, it didn’t take long for them to write me off. I didn’t get a lot of their respect until I started winning music trivia contests. It was always a challenge to keep up, and it still is.”
Yet she caught the fever as strong as anybody, and had thousands of Olivia records to show for it. With an international star who dabbled in disco, there are at least two slippery slopes to go down, and she took both: there were Australian-only singles and European picture sleeves on one hand, limited 12-inch remixes on the other. And that was only the start. “She did Xanadu with the Electric Light Orchestra, so there were all the ELO singles I had to get. Then there were a lot of K-tel albums that had only one song by her. There were the cheap albums on the Pickwick label that said ‘Sounds Like Olivia Newton-John.’ I got those even
though they didn’t really sound like her.” Then there was her French label’s habit of putting a special, starburst-type logo on the picture sleeve of any single that made it to #1 in that country—thus Zoe had to find that version of the “I Honestly Love You” 45.
Like all good relationships, hers with Olivia grew and evolved over the years. “I started by cutting out pictures and hanging them on the bedroom wall. They I’d play the records and act out little skits to the songs.” As she grew older, the attachment only got more intense: she started listening intently to AM radio and following singles charts, tuning in whenever a Newton-John record was being pitted against someone else’s, wondering how she could be beaten out by lesser talents like Elton John and Paul McCartney. Then she got hold of collectors’ magazines, finding out just how many of her idol’s records were out there in different forms and with different sleeves. There were enough out there to fill up her one-bedroom apartment, as they wound up doing.
“It got a lot easier around the time I started getting a paycheck. Then I started going for the Australian-only albums, the ones that might have a song that hadn’t made it to America. There was one album where the cover got changed after the first pressing, that was the one I spent the most money on. Of course I needed them because they were unique; it wasn’t something everybody else had. You could always get somebody to tape the songs for you, but it wasn’t the same—I just liked knowing that everybody else had the other cover. I wound up owning at least one version of everything she ever released on vinyl. And if she covered somebody else’s
song, I had to get that artist’s album, too. I have an ‘Olivia-related’ section with a couple hundred singles in it. She made me start buying Peter Allen records, and I didn’t think anyone else cared about getting Lesley Duncan’s album [in fact a lot of Elton John fans did, because he also covered one of her songs]. It lasted all through my teenage years, and I spent thousands of dollars on her. I remember how hard I cried when I found out she had breast cancer, which was around the time I moved out of my parents’ house.”
Depending on how many rumors about Olivia Newton-John’s sex life you believe, Zoe’s choice of a role model might be especially apt. “The rumors that she was gay? Believe it or not, I had a hard time hearing those things. I was in a born-again Christian household at the time, and I wasn’t anywhere near ready to hear something like that.” For what it’s worth, Newton-John herself has denied the rumors, which sprang from an appearance on the Johnny Carson show in the ’70s. Asked if she’d come to the studio with a date, the singer—who apparently didn’t know her American idioms too well—said she’d come with a girlfriend, thus spicing up her image a bit more than intended. “She said it was taken out of context and only she knows if there’s anything beyond that, but the rest isn’t my business.”
Besides, something about first crushes needs to be kept pure. Zoe’s actually given serious thought over the years as to whether she’d sleep with Olivia if the chance ever arose—and since she wound up working in the music business, the possibility of at least meeting her wasn’t out of the question—and she probably did her own love life a favor by deciding
not to go for it. “All of my ex-girlfriends asked about that,” she admits. “I confessed all this to mv last one; she called me a freak. The funny thing, though, is that my feelings for her never turned sexual, my own sexuality never had much to do with it. What she gave me was more the escape from my home life and the freedom to find myself. I do remember the moment I started having sexual feelings for a woman, and her name was Madonna.” When I suggest that other ’80s pop stars might have been more crushworthy—say, the androgynous allure of Annie Lennox—she zeroes in on one of Madonna’s trade secrets. “The problem is, that if I had felt attracted to Annie Lennox or someone else, that would have been admitting I was homosexual. Madonna was a totally sexual being—everybody loved her and was attracted to her. So it didn’t mean anything in particular if I was.”
What finally broke the spell was a near-random encounter with one guy who had a bigger Olivia obsession than hers. “It was Claude from Montreal, someone I’d met through the fan club. We were always trying to outdo each other, and I remember him saying, ‘I am her number one fan in the world.’ Suddenly I just started laughing: what made him believe he could possibly have the right to that title? And I remember what I said—‘Her number one fan has to remain her daughter.’ Even though I spent every last penny on her, I realized he knew more about her than I ever would; he’d gotten to a level that I didn’t want to go to. I wasn’t her number one fan and never would be. I walked away and that was it.” Thus ended the first great love affair of her life.
Zoe had been through her moment of reckoning by the
time she finally met her heroine at a record-store appearance. “All I said was ‘Hi, nice to meet you’—it wasn’t a thrilling moment on either of our parts. But it meant I could get on with my life.” Still, old loves die hard—she may have purged her Olivia collection, but kept all of the greatest-hits CDs. She was still the only person on her block to buy Newton-John’s last CD opus, Gaia, and to think it wasn’t half bad. “My girlfriend agreed to let me play it as long as we could hear the new Madonna record first.” The people that pay her to write about music probably don’t know the extent of her Olivia obsession, but she can look back at those days with some amusement. “I don’t mind revisiting it, but it’s not me anymore. It’s become like a joke in some quarters, but I’m proud of where it took me. When it was over I realized I’d grown up.” She still wouldn’t mind a date with Madonna, however.