An interview with Weirdo Records
Interviews
Today, I had the chance to exchange emails with Angela, the founder of Weirdo Records, a Cambridge-based record store specializing in well, weirdo records. In text below, Angela shares an amazing perspective on passion for music, collecting records, and a series of lines that just made me nod my head and say "Amen" (underlined). Read it for yourself:
Tell us a bit about yourself and your love for vinyl
I am a record collector & run a record shop, that just moved into a proper storefront about 6 months ago. I started as an online mail order spot in my bedroom about 3 & 1/2 years ago, with about 5 titles. These days there are several thousand (roughly half vinyl, half cds, 60% new 40% used. My personal collection, if you're counting, runs about 10k titles, also roughly half & half).
On opening and running a record store...
Opening a record store is not something that's supposed to happen in a bad economy & sagging industry. So lately, I've been working like a nutbomb, up to my eyeballs in it about 12-15 hours a day 7 days a week. And by it I mean records, and I mean a fucklot of them. And not just your run-of-the-mill records either. Nope, the name of the shop is Weirdo and it's the name for a reason. Freaky garage psychedelia from Bolivia. Soundtracks to French VHS pornos. Housewives in green pancake makeup sitting on the floor of their kitchens, banging pots & pans & shrieking at the top of their lungs. One sided 78s about baseball from 1904. Cocaine-damaged open-mike-night songwriters who wish they were rock stars. Singapore's answer to Nancy Sinatra. That's my meat & potatoes.
On loving music...
Now most people think they like music, same way that most people think they're funny or think they can hold their liquor. But there are some people, a small percentage of people, who organize their every waking moment around music. They give up relationships over it, pass on decent food & housing in order to afford it, and they rarely talk or think or dream about anything else. An even smaller percentage of people do this, not just for six months while during a phase in college, but for years & years & years on end. Not only am I one of these people, I can't remember the last time I had a conversation of more than 5 seconds' length with someone who wasn't. Typical modern-day skills like cooking chicken, using a bank, or putting a band-aid on the knee of a child have, in my case, atrophied away to nubs. While I effortlessly sport seemingly esoteric skills like gargling coca-cola while using an electronic bullhorn, or remembering that Ananda Shankar & Laurie Johnson are men, while Blind Willie Dunn was not blind.
On being a record collector...
Why? Well, here's the thing about being a record collector. It's a lot less about owning stuff than you might think. For example, it's practically impossible to "invest" in records like you can in the stock market. People occasionally try some variant of investing with music (buying it 'for their kids' or for ebay), and they are a small source of amusement to collectors in their midst, until a few months later when the money runs out & they disappear. In fact, if you spend your life connected to records, you are conscripting yourself into a life of poverty, gar-un-teed.
But few collectors mind, because they care a lot more about carving out an aesthetic goal. They want to know. Is it possible to write a song that is both musically and politically urgent? Are funny songs automatically less profound? What is the secret ingredient that turns a mess of unformed noise into something meaningful? Is dancing a mode of appreciation or detrimental to it? Can a serial killer write a good song? How about a two year old? Are some chords better than others? Are some guitar sounds always cooler than others? What about the different kinds of listening that you do when something is live vs. when it's recorded? Or when something is a hundred years old vs. released this week? Memorized it from when you were a kid vs. never heard it before? These questions are not rhetorical. They have answers. Long, detailed ones. Because even if they never articulate such questions (some of them are nearly autistic, after all), record collectors define & delimit good music to themselves, by saving the worthy & pushing away the dross. Like a gardener, little by little, they weed garbage, plant seedlings, expand, upgrade, re-landscape, and continually focus, tighter and tighter, on the myriad number of ways that good music takes place. And they get to savor it along the way too.
Why vinyl?
And that's why collectors like vinyl so much. It requires focus. Sure, digital music is useful. Cds & reissues allow you to get access to music that you'd like to have around, but would be way too expensive as original vinyl (or shellac). If you get really excited about a particular title, you can always pony up. And mp3s have replaced the function of the radio. They let you do the kind of scanning you need to do once in a while so you can figure out what to spend your real time and money on. Digital music is like the background of a picture, and you can't have focus without a background and a foreground together. And focus is what you're gonna need if your listening is going to be meaningful. Every single record worth listening to, every single one in the world, answers questions and asks new ones, gives you little beautiful moments and makes you wonder what other kinds there are. If you listen, you can spin out ideas/pleasures, building upon them over time like a scaffold to the stars.
Some folks would say that aesthetic projects don't necessarily have to be done with vinyl- and they have a point. Except that they're also idiots. Imagine if you started talking to someone who said they were an art collector, and they collected art of all periods & owned some pieces hanging in the Louvre. Sounds like a lifelong commitment and a depth of knowledge that would be impressive as hell, until you found out that they only owned xeroxes. So when people ask me how I got into my job, I usually answer 'one wonderful record at a time'. The Four Freshmen & Lambert Hendricks & Ross convinced me not to go to grad school. The Beach Boys got me out of bed & to a doctor that time I had a 104 degree fever. I decided not to move to Chicago after all, because I was gripped by a yearning for Emmett Miller yodels & figured it would take months to meet anybody I could talk to there. I nearly got arrested throwing things at a passing train because I was so hopped up on the Music Machine. Lord knows the gossip or bargains or morning coffees I've missed because I couldn't stand to be in a room with Carol King's 'Tapestry' for one more second. How many times have I freaked out my neighbors trying to sing along to Joan La Barbara records, or whistle to Evan Parker? And how about the recent risks in identity/postal theft in order to buy obscurities from Bangkok or Lebanon or Istanbul? People often ask why I decided to open a record store, and I think to myself, 'what was I gonna do, take up taxidermy?'
On the future of records...
Maybe the future will have fewer record collectors in it (more for me, buddy!), but whether it does or it doesn't, enough of them will remain for stores to continue to exist. Maybe not crappy stores (lookin' at you Tower Records), but stores. Because you get something wonderful from a life spent surrounded by records- something interpersonal that's a bit beyond what computers can do- the chance to grapple with & go swimming in the entire history of music, sometimes whole chunks of it in an afternoon. And that's every afternoon, brother. How could you want to spend your time any other way?
Thanks again to Angela for sharing this perspective with our readers in such an eloquent way.
Stop by the Weirdo Records site and see their incredible selection of unique vinyl for yourself. And, if you're in the Boston / Cambridge area, stop by their store located at 844 Massachusetts Ave. Keep it up Angela.
Use links:
Weirdo Records Flickr photo stream
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