The Soul of a Collector

I am not a collector, or so I keep telling myself.

My record collection, my CDs and LPs, are not in any great order. I have some that are organized by artist but mostly it's one big amorphous mess. Thank goodness computer files sort of sort themselves out or I'd never find anything.

I call myself an "accumulator" not a "collector" but upon recent reflection, that may not be entirely accurate. I recently paid $22 for a vinyl copy of Phil Ochs Greatest Hits which, if you know about the late 60s protest singer and contemporary of Bob Dylan, isn't really a greatest hits record.

(By the way $22 bucks is way more than I usually pay for a record of any kind.) 

I have slowly been accumulating (collecting?) Phil Ochs' records on vinyl. Why specifically him over, oh let's say Uriah Heep or Laura Nyro? I'm not quite sure. I love his voice. His songs are well written and performed. I lean his way politically but not radically so.

My interest in his music was reinvigorated recently by watching a documentary about the man, his music and his eventual mental health problems that culminated in his suicide: Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune.

Len Wallace, Accordion Czar
and his squeeze boxes from hell

I can't remember when I first heard about Phil Ochs. A friend of mine was a friend of Ochs, Michael Asch, who was my neighbour when I lived in Edmonton and whose father, Moses Asch, founded Folkways records. It may have been from Michael.

Or it might have been from Len. My good friend Len Wallace does the best Ochs covers of anyone and I still think he should do an entire record of Ochs songs.

I guess it's no surprise these important and talented people have influenced me to hunt down Ochs' records but he's not the only artist that has triggered this obsession.

Warren Zevon  

I can pinpoint the exact moment that inspired my quest for a complete Warren Zevon collection. I went for a walk on a nice summer day in Calgary. A walk is always an opportunity to listen to music uninterrupted. I plugged in the iPod and began listening to my newly purchased Warren Zevon record Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings. It includes canned interviews Zevon had recorded for his record company. The questions were lame. Zevon's answers were amazing. His humour and genius came through.

It became my goal to own all his material on CD and all his vinyl, even the ungodly ugly picture disc of Werewolves of London which I bought on eBay for way too much.

I had been a fan of Zevon's since university and I picked up most of his records over time. I remember hearing about his tragic death and even remember seeing Bob Dylan perform a Zevon cover at a concert as a tribute to the dying singer, although I never got to see Zevon perform live which I heard was a crap-shoot at best.

There was something about hearing the interviews on that record that rekindled my interest. It revealed his musical genius and prompted me to devour his biography I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, The Dirty Life and Time of Warren Zevon. I then proceeded to buy every title.

In both cases the artist is dead so the collections are finite  of course. They also aren't generally considered "collectible" artists (like the Beatles and Elvis) which means their recordings aren't prohibitively expensive, lucky for me.

Looks like I am an accumulator and occasionally a binge collector and I can quit whenever I want. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.