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A review by hazel_amazel
Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett
5.0
I received a digital copy of this book for review from the publisher Duke University Press (via Netgalley). As John Corbett himself points out, the death of vinyl has been greatly exaggerated. Far from being killed off by the digital format, vinyl sales are now at a 25 year high, ushering in a revitalised reissue market and a new generation of collectors. With it has emerged a fresh economy in vinyl related merchandise, a new generation of affordable record players, storage solutions and books on the format. The latter are extremely variable, a few choice histories of vinyl, some memoirs spun around the collecting bug of the vinyl obsessive, earnest academic investigations into the longevity of the medium, but also a lot of cheap, flimsy cash-ins and vapid coffee table nonsense. Vinyl Freak is not one of these books. It is, for the record collector, a 180mg heavyweight slab of pure joy.
Subtitled ‘Love Letters to a Dying Medium’, Vinyl Freak alternates John Corbett’s personal paeans to the format with chunks of his long-running Vinyl Freak column written for DownBeat Magazine. The column celebrated obscure items from Corbett’s collection that at the original time of publication were not available digitally. Most of the Vinyl Freak columns focus on jazz records, but even for someone like me for whom jazz is genre blind-spot, the writing remains engaging. I can’t have read more than half a dozen of the original columns before I was opening YouTube to search for audio clips of the artists discussed, such is the infectious enthusiasm of Corbett’s writing. As Corbett points out, music history is written and re-written by what is and what isn’t currently in print. For this reason, the post-scripts to the columns are particularly fascinating, detailing the life of the recordings in the intervening years.
It’s the sections between the Vinyl Freak columns that give most insight into John Corbett’s life, and how he became a record collector. Thoughtfully he ponders what it is about the record format that makes it so special. Evocatively he describes the physicality of searching for records, the way in which the crate-digger navigates the racks, the look and feel and smell of vinyl. He writes exceptionally on the subculture of the collector, noting that what has always fascinated him about records is ‘the play between understanding them as objects of solitary attention and as the focal point of social interaction’. For this reason my one reservation about the book was the ‘Speciality of the House’ section where Corbett details personal highlights from his free-improvisation collection, which, without the engaging detail of the Vinyl Freak columns, veers into list territory, an aspect of record collecting I find slightly off-putting due to its association with one-upmanship.
For me, the real gem of the book was hidden right at the end, in the chapter nerve-rackingly titled ‘Anything Can Happen’. Nerve-racking because it retells the story of receiving a forwarded email in which it becomes apparent that the home of the recently deceased Alton Abraham is being cleared and the future of decades worth of artefacts from the career of Sun Ra, whom Abraham’s managed, hang in jeopardy. There follows a story of serendipity, of the subjectivity of value and of a man spending four years of his life, and damn near bankrupting himself in the process, to save what now forms the basis of an important archive of material. I was actually near tears by the end of the chapter.
A wonderful book. If John Corbett is a freak, then you’ve got to question anyone that wants to be normal.
Subtitled ‘Love Letters to a Dying Medium’, Vinyl Freak alternates John Corbett’s personal paeans to the format with chunks of his long-running Vinyl Freak column written for DownBeat Magazine. The column celebrated obscure items from Corbett’s collection that at the original time of publication were not available digitally. Most of the Vinyl Freak columns focus on jazz records, but even for someone like me for whom jazz is genre blind-spot, the writing remains engaging. I can’t have read more than half a dozen of the original columns before I was opening YouTube to search for audio clips of the artists discussed, such is the infectious enthusiasm of Corbett’s writing. As Corbett points out, music history is written and re-written by what is and what isn’t currently in print. For this reason, the post-scripts to the columns are particularly fascinating, detailing the life of the recordings in the intervening years.
It’s the sections between the Vinyl Freak columns that give most insight into John Corbett’s life, and how he became a record collector. Thoughtfully he ponders what it is about the record format that makes it so special. Evocatively he describes the physicality of searching for records, the way in which the crate-digger navigates the racks, the look and feel and smell of vinyl. He writes exceptionally on the subculture of the collector, noting that what has always fascinated him about records is ‘the play between understanding them as objects of solitary attention and as the focal point of social interaction’. For this reason my one reservation about the book was the ‘Speciality of the House’ section where Corbett details personal highlights from his free-improvisation collection, which, without the engaging detail of the Vinyl Freak columns, veers into list territory, an aspect of record collecting I find slightly off-putting due to its association with one-upmanship.
For me, the real gem of the book was hidden right at the end, in the chapter nerve-rackingly titled ‘Anything Can Happen’. Nerve-racking because it retells the story of receiving a forwarded email in which it becomes apparent that the home of the recently deceased Alton Abraham is being cleared and the future of decades worth of artefacts from the career of Sun Ra, whom Abraham’s managed, hang in jeopardy. There follows a story of serendipity, of the subjectivity of value and of a man spending four years of his life, and damn near bankrupting himself in the process, to save what now forms the basis of an important archive of material. I was actually near tears by the end of the chapter.
A wonderful book. If John Corbett is a freak, then you’ve got to question anyone that wants to be normal.