Arcade Jazz

I first met the collector Christopher King on the same afternoon Hurricane Irene came whipping through central Virginia. I spent most of the drive to his home dodging cracked branches and other tree-borne detritus, eventually parking my rental car in a giant puddle and booking it to his doorstep. King, then forty-one, had short dark hair that he combed back and to the side, and a pale, round face that suggested a certain kind of old-fashioned innocence, although in actuality he was sharp and acerbic, quick with an eye roll and unlikely to let anyone get away with saying anything stupid. He had a tattoo of Betty Boop on his right bicep, which he acquired while working as a janitor, in an everlasting bid at solidarity with his colleagues. He smoked stubby cigarettes he rolled himself from a baggie of tobacco he kept in his front pants pocket. King was precise but open-minded, which was good, because he would eventually end up spending a terrifying amount of time walking me through the nuances of various recorded phenomena. I was grateful for that. If I wanted to learn about records—where they were, how they Got there, why it mattered—I knew I would need a tolerant sensei, a Patient guide King worked as a production coordinator at Rebel Records, a bluegrass Label, and County Records, an old-time label, both based in Charlottesville; He was also the owner of Long Gone Sound Productions, a Sound-engineering and historical music production company. On his Office desk, alongside a supplementary-seeming desktop computer—in My memory it was an archaic, Commodore 64–looking behemoth, although In actuality it was likely a contemporary PC—sat a green Remington Typewriter. His eyeglasses were of another era. He didn’t own A mobile phone, and referred to mine as a “smart-thing.” His house in Rural Faber, which he shares with his wife, Charmagne, his daughter Riley, and a bug-eyed Boston terrier named Betty, was outfitted with An assortment of carefully vetted antiques and oddities. Like many Collectors, King had insulated himself from the facets of modernity He found most distasteful. At one point he asked me if Lady Gaga was Indeed, “a lady.” He was not being coy or funny King was flummoxed by my interest in collecting, which he insisted Was a mundane if not static hobby, and he answered my questions With barely contained bemusement. What he was compelled by was Listening, and the myriad ways people required and employed sound: “The question that never gets answered, or maybe that doesn’t even Get asked, is what is it about being human that makes us desire this Thing that is so ephemeral?” Music, he pointed out, was a universally recognized salve, and it Was worth considering the mechanics of that exchange, because understanding It was the only way anyone could ever begin to explain Why he collected 78s. “There’s some sound or some group of sounds Or some line of sounds that evokes something cathartic. I think every Single human being has that, from one end of the spectrum to the Other,” he said Accordingly, King insisted he wasn’t collecting records so much as Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 32 4/28/14 5:29 PM 33 Do Not Sell at Any Price Performances. He liked the things, but he needed the songs, the catharsis— The records were a vehicle. I would eventually hear a version of this Speech get recited by dozens of different collectors, and it usually felt Like bullshit, but I believed King when he insisted that listening to a 78 (rather than an LP or a digital reissue) proffered him a more thorough And transformative experience. He didn’t try to define it any further “It’s a fidelity thing and it’s also an aura, an intangible. I’m one of those People who don’t think there’s much that is inexplicable, but this is one Of the things that I would say is inexplicable,” he said King was born and raised in Bath County, Virginia, and he’s never Lived outside the state, save a brief, errant stint in Steubenville, Ohio During which he completed three days of a PhD program in philosophy At Franciscan University. He’d previously studied philosophy And religion as an undergraduate at Radford University and learned The practice of collecting from his dad, Les King, a local teacher and Musician who steadily accrued upright music boxes, antique books Victrolas, 16-millimeter films, records, and other curiosities. His Father Who passed away in the winter of 2001, remained a considerable Presence in his life, and King mentioned him frequently, with a Mix of devastation and approbation As a kid, King was often toted along to yard sales and flea markets But his own collecting began when he serendipitously encountered a Stack of 78s in an abandoned shack on his grandparents’ land. It’s a Good story, cinematic: “My grandmother had died, so my grandfather Wanted me to come there and help clean out the sharecropper’s shed I remember opening the door to this tar-paper shack, and there was A dilapidated Victrola in the room. I knew what a 78 was and I knew How to play them, but I had never had a profound attraction to them Maybe what Dad was playing didn’t tug at the strings in the right way So I opened the lid and I’m going through records and there’s Blind Willie Johnson, ‘God Don’t Never Change.’ Then there’s Washington Phillips’s ‘Denomination Blues.’ Then there’s ‘Aimer et Perdre’ By Joe and Cleoma Falcon, a Cajun lost-love song. Dad helped me Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 33 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 34 Wash them. I was in eighth grade and became obsessed with going in People’s basements and looking under their porches. I can’t tell you The stacks of 78s people would put under their porches back then.” King started out looking for hillbilly records, which bled into blues Which splintered into a profound affinity for the raw and rural sounding “If there’s any one continuous thread through everything that I Have, it’s deeply, deeply rural and backwoodsy. It’s almost like it turns Its back to the city. There’s something about that,” he admitted. King Was also preternaturally drawn to narratives of longing and discontent To performances that sounded unhinged and uncontrollable. It was a Preference, unfortunately, that I recognized in myself—a base, possibly Shameful desire to hear someone so overcome by emotion that they Could no longer maintain any guise of dignity or restraint. I suppose the Idea was that it made us feel less alone, hearing someone else unravel Or maybe it was a yardstick by which we could measure our relative Damage. Or maybe it just sounded good and liberating—a kind of proxy Wilding. King was listening for it, constantly He was also a guy who thought frequently about dying (he worked Briefly, as an undertaker) and was prone to saying things like “I prepare For death every day. I’m obsessed with it.” It made sense that King, a Collector, would be fixated on the passage of time, and his preoccupation With his legacy—as a curator, a producer, a father—fueled much Of his work. “Look at all the blatantly transient things that, ultimately Are never going to last, like Facebook postings,” he complained to me One day on the telephone. “I’m definitely obsessed with the notion that It could end just like that. What’s going to be left behind?” In actuality, the question of what will endure has never been more Complicated to answer. Although King would have scoffed at the notion It’s possible to argue that our digital legacies (all those dopey Facebook Posts) will ultimately prove infinitely more enduring than our material Legacies. They are, after all, replicated and indissoluble—such is The way of the Web. These days, there are even services to help with The posthumous management of a digital legacy; now, when people Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 34 4/28/14 5:29 PM 35 Do Not Sell at Any Price Draft wills and name executors, they can also make arrangements with Companies like Legacy Locker, “a safe, secure repository for your vital Digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends And loved ones in the event of loss, death, or disability.” It’s hard not To assume that this is how future generations will engage with and be Edified by the past—that this is the way they’ll come to understand How humans used to live But I knew what King meant about endurance, about capturing Something true. Maybe what he was actually looking for on all those Records—what I was actually looking for—were songs that somehow Captured the tenuousness of even being alive in the first place. Songs That recognized, either explicitly or implicitly, the threat of swift and Complete termination that all living creatures are forced to contend With. And it’s not just that our existence is friable. Our happiness is Too. Anything can fall apart King had been involved, in one way or another, in many of my favorite Reissue collections, but the one that seemed closest to his heart (and that best encapsulates his particular worldview) is Aimer et Perdre: To Love & to Lose, Songs, 1917–1934, which was released in 2012 on the Tompkins Square label. King produced and remastered and fussed it Into being; all the 78s were sourced from his private collection, and His introductory essay is an earnest paean to what he refers to as “our Inexplicable mulishness in seeking out relationships that we know will Ultimately both enrich us and devastate us, more often at the same Time.” I think King found solace in the idea that bad love was an ancient Human pastime, and that our desperate search for (and epic bungling Of) intimate relationships was somehow hardwired into our DNA— That heartache was a kind of biological inevitability. In any case, he Had assembled a record collection that seemed to very clearly say as Much. Or, as he wrote in the same notes: “Many of the songs in this Collection convey the deep despair of abandonment and loss as if the Only precondition of our being is our ability to suffer, to hold multitudes Of contradictions such as regretting having done and not done the same Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 35 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 36 Thing at different times and under different conditions.” It was dark But it was true: we suffer, therefore we sing King’s records are neatly contained on squat, custom-built shelves Lining the north wall of his music room, itself a dark and mystical Spot—a small, cooled space packed with vintage audio equipment Instruments, artwork, and books. (If you are prone to romanticizing Such things, a gasp upon entry is inevitable.) King controlled one of The best assortments of prewar Cajun 78s (his friend, the collector Ron Brown, had the other), and his stock of Albanian folk records, a newer Preoccupation, was inimitable. Now that most of the coveted prewar Blues records had been discovered or at least named, many collectors Had moved on to more “exotic” fare, although the musical through line Running through all of it remained clear: these were outlier records Frenzied and raw More important—to me, at least—was that King is also the keeper Of one of three known copies of Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues” and one of three known copies of Blind Uncle Gaspard’s “Sur Le Borde de l’Eau,” arguably two of the saddest, strangest songs ever Recorded, a fact he summarized thusly: “So, I have two of the world’s Most rare and most depressing 78s ever . . . if I were to be swallowed Up, would all the sadness disappear with me?” King was joking, and I had not yet sunk so far as to believe that The whole well of human despair—that eternally flush reservoir—was Somehow being sustained or directed by two old records, but they did Feel imbued with a certain otherworldly import. I first heard “Last Kind Words Blues” on a 2005 Revenant Records compilation called American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897–1939) (King, incidentally Had remastered that collection). By then, collectors and researchers Had figured out the song was recorded in Paramount Records’ Grafton Studio in March 1930, but nobody knew how its creator, Geeshie Wiley, had gotten to Wisconsin, or where she came from (she might Have spent time in Natchez, Mississippi, or at a medicine show farther North in Jackson, or—as King suggested after noting the particular way Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 36 4/28/14 5:29 PM 37 Do Not Sell at Any Price She pronounced “depot”—been born and reared somewhere along the Texas-Louisiana border), or even what her real name was (“Geeshie” Was likely a nickname, indicating she had Gullah roots, or was a descendant Of West African slaves brought to South Carolina and Georgia via Charleston and Savannah). Wiley played with a guitarist named Elvie Thomas, and they recorded six sides for Paramount between 1930 and 1931. Beyond that, there wasn’t even significant conjecture about her Life—who she loved, what she looked like, how she died. Wiley was A specter, fiercely incorporeal, a spirit suggested if not contained by Shellac. King thought that was part of her appeal—that we could project Whatever we needed onto her—but “Last Kind Words Blues” is also so Odd and chilling an accomplishment that it effectively transcends its Own mythology. Or at least renders it mostly subordinate Wiley’s lyrics and phrasing aren’t idiosyncratic, exactly, but they’re Rhythmically baffling in a way that makes her performance feel singular If not entirely unreproducible—to the extent that it almost makes Sense that the record itself is so rare. In his essay “Unknown Bards,” John Jeremiah Sullivan called the song “an essential work of American Art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other But is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle,” and the confusion Sullivan references—the psychic disorientation stirred up by Wiley’s Performance— Is maybe the only quantifiable thing about it. King Chided me about my inability to articulate precisely what it was about “Last Kind Words Blues” that I found so undeniable—why it worked on Me; why, by the time she arrived at the “What you do to me, baby / It Never gets out of me” bit, I was half-breathing and glassy-eyed—but that Mystery was a fundamental part of its allure. In “O Black and Unknown Bards,” the James Weldon Johnson poem that gave Sullivan’s piece its Title, Johnson wrote of his own bewilderment regarding the composition Of certain spirituals, presenting the only useful question one can Really ask of Wiley: “How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” “Last Kind Words Blues” was the first record I ever asked King To play for me, and I suspect it’s the one most people request if they Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 37 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 38 Ever make it past his front door and get a chance to start demanding Things. There’s even an online video—shot by the 78 Project, a pair of Brooklyn-based Filmmakers who traveled around recording new artists To blank lacquer discs on a 1930s Presto Direct-to-Disc recorder—titled “Christopher King Plays Geeshie Wiley,” which is, incredibly, just that: Three and a half minutes of King spinning “Last Kind Words Blues” On a turntable and looking uncomfortable. At one point he scratches His nose If Wiley is an enigma, Blind Uncle Gaspard is a wisp. The guitarist And curator Nathan Salsburg sent me an MP3 of “Sur le Borde de L’Eau” one October, after I told him I’d never heard it; to his credit He included fair warning (“The end of [the] side sounds completely Like he’s choking up and can’t go on and thank God the record’s over He’s probably just got a frog in his throat . . . But it sure as shit doesn’t Sound like it, reaching through the years and kicking you in the face.”) Gaspard was born in 1880 in Avoyelles Parish in Dupont, Louisiana Recorded a handful of Cajun ballads and string-band songs for Vocalion Records in two sessions in the winter of 1929 (one in Chicago, one in New Orleans), and died in 1937. I’d heard “La Danseuse,” the Gaspard And Delma Lachney track the collector and producer Harry Smith included On The Anthology of American Folk Music, and I thought it was a Very sweet guitar and fiddle tune, but “Sur le Borde de l’Eau” is something Else entirely. I don’t know what Gaspard is going on about (I Don’t speak enough French), but I’m certain the payoff isn’t narrative His voice is so saturated with longing that it seems to hover midair, a Helium balloon that’s lost too much gas. It is tenuous and malfunctioning And then it disintegrates entirely, like the best/worst relationship You’ve ever had, like a ghost disappearing into the mist King acquired a copy in a trade with a collector he will still identify Only as “Paul” (“It sounds more Mr. Arkadin–esque that way . . . Jeez, I Don’t want to give up all my secrets!”) in late 2012. When I visited him In November of that year, a few days before Thanksgiving, he didn’t Make me wait very long to hear it. We decamped to his music room Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 38 4/28/14 5:29 PM 39 Do Not Sell at Any Price With tall glasses of Turkish iced tea and he let me have the good chair The one behind his desk, the one that faced the speakers. I made him Play it for me again several hours later, right before I left, and I sat and Stared at the turntable, watching the record spin, feeling flabbergasted Anew that anything so alive-sounding could be carved into a slab of Shellac. I had sipped some stronger drinks by then, but still: the entire Experience was so disorienting that I lurched off into the icy Virginia Night without my coat and scarf King is well regarded as an engineer—he’d been nominated for six Grammys and won one in 2002, which he now stores in a cardboard Box labeled ACCOLADES—and his ability to wrangle usable sound from Gouged and battered records was astonishing. It was so astonishing, in Fact, that I periodically questioned both its origins and its manifestations What did King hear when he listened to his records? What did I Hear? Those discrepancies, when and if they existed, were they physical Or metaphysical? Had I just blithely annihilated my eardrums via a Catastrophic combination of punk-rock records and shitty headphones An end-of-day blaring ritual that had eased me through several years Of life and work in New York City? Or was it more complicated—was It a function of need? Did King hear more because he needed more? “I can hear stuff that’s on a different frequency than a lot of other People,” King said. “It’s also really irritating. I can be in the living room Reading with fans going and Betty could be in the library lying on the Floor, but I can hear her heart beating. She’s a small dog. I have an intense Acute sense of hearing. It’s selective; I can turn it off when people Are talking. Is it a form of autism? I don’t know.” What was certain was that his work required a great deal of ingenuity The turntable in his music room was littered with oddly sized bits— Matchsticks, tongue depressors, little plastic ice-cream spoons—that He used to weigh down the tone arm based on assumptions he’d made Or things he’d learned regarding certain studios or recording sessions He accommodated for factors like ambient humidity, or a tilt in the Floorboards, or a distraction on the part of the original engineer, who Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 39 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 40 May have been daydreaming or hungry or new at the studio. When he Was working on remastering records for Revenant Records’ Screamin’ And Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, an epic, seven-CD Compendium of Patton’s work, he managed to suss out a second voice On Patton’s “I’m Goin’ Home”—a whole other person, singing along From a different room. “It’s definitely there,” he shrugged. “No one Knows who the hell it is.” What King did, in these instances, was something akin to translation And it was useful, generous work. Sonically speaking, 78s can be Intimidating—the music they contain is often ancient sounding, so Obscured by years and circumstance that it becomes too distant, too Historic, to be properly felt. Shrouded by mythology and crackle, it’s Easy to forget that Charley Patton sang about fucking and heartbreak And shit that pissed him off—all the same stuff people sing about now King humanized and demystified the performance by isolating a breath A foot stomp. Some goon waiting outside Sometimes King’s mission had to do with how a record was played And the shape it was in when he got it. Was the Victrola crooked, were People dancing so vigorously that the needle kept jumping, was the Record stored in a damp basement or a drafty attic? Mostly, though, he Was compensating for the shortcomings of a then-nascent technology (most records weren’t recorded precisely at 78 rpm, and some weren’t Recorded anywhere near that speed). The same night King played me His Gaspard we also listened to Robert Johnson’s “Hell Hound on My Trail,” a song I’d heard hundreds of times before, only it sounded different Clearer, more vigorous. I asked King about it. He smirked. When I looked at his turntable, I saw it was spinning at 79.4 rpm and that He had placed a Popsicle stick on top of the stylus. It felt like a magic Trick. A conjuring I’ve since consumed several of the most gluttonous meals of my adult Life with King, a dubious gastronomical streak that began in the front Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 40 4/28/14 5:29 PM 41 Do Not Sell at Any Price Seat of King’s Volkswagen, then parked outside Dudes Drive-In in Christiansburg, Virginia. The aftermath was bleak, spiritually speaking “I feel like I just ate a small child,” King announced. The remnants Of a hamburger steak sandwich quivered in his lap. I squirted more Ketchup packets onto a cardboard boat of tater tots, which I’d strategically Positioned on the dashboard for continued ease of access A typewritten track listing for Mama, I’ll Be Long Gone, a collection of Songs recorded by the prewar accordionist Amédé Ardoin and recently Reissued by King, was Scotch-taped to the glove box. I was careful not To smear it. “I’m gross,” I mumbled to no one in particular. I took a long Pull of Coke. My mouth was still crammed with cheeseburger. King had Warned me about the culinary limitations of our destination—the way He put it was, “If you flew over at night, the area would be illuminated With the lights of a thousand deep fryers”—but we didn’t try especially Hard to circumvent that proclamation. Cursory consideration was paid To the barbecue restaurant next door, but their evening’s scheduled Entertainment (a pair of longhairs strumming the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall”) had functioned as an instant appetite suppressant For King. I could see that much on his face A few weeks earlier, I had convinced King to let me tag along on a Junking mission—the procurement of records from people who don’t Know or care to know their worth, financial or otherwise—to the Hillsville VFW Flea Market and Gun Show in Hillsville, Virginia, a sleepy Little town in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about Twenty miles from the North Carolina border. King had been lucky There before, although he also warned me that it might be a tremendous Bust: “I’ve gone almost every year for fourteen years,” he wrote in an E-mail. “Some years I’ve done quite well . . . Scored a [Charley] Patton Once, several Henry Thomas records another, a Reeves White County Ramblers another, a large stack of Polish string bands another. Last Year I came back with nothing . . . It’s just like that. But it is a stinky Dusty, terribly early trek (you have to hit it, and hit it hard, early on Friday just as the sun comes up).” This, I knew, was how good records Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 41 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 42 Got found—not by belatedly stopping by the Jazz Record Collectors’ Bash in suburban New Jersey. And while I wanted to watch King work I also wanted to see what sorts of things I could find for myself On the Thursday before the market opened, I met King in his office At County Records. Getting to Hillsville on time required driving the Two and a half hours from Charlottesville to Christiansburg, spending The night, and waking up before six to finish the trip. King was a good Traveling companion, not above friendly ribbing (he immediately gave Me shit about the size of my duffel bag—which I still contend was reasonable— As he hoisted it into his trunk), amenable to frequent stops (in part so he could smoke), and prepared to discuss, at length, all the Grand failings of humankind, both as they related to our individual lives And to the whole of the species. (“It seems like I only enter into an Abysmal depression every year and a half or so, and it’s usually because Of having to go to Whole Foods.”) We also talked about records. King had developed a marked disdain For collectors who issued compilations of their finds but failed To procure the necessary support documents—the ones who didn’t Provide meaningful context for the music they were promoting. As far As King was concerned, collectors should embrace research, and the Ones who refused to were dilettantes. “They don’t feel like they need To fill in any information, and so it creates this imaginary, artificial Mythology,” he said. “It’s a pretense that covers up a banality that they Don’t want to reveal to others. ‘We just like this—we don’t want to tell You about it.’ The people who impress me are the people who become So obsessed with the music that they do everything in their power to Get the best-condition copies of the discs, and then find out everything They possibly can about some really obscure, arcane musician or type Of music. Then they provide it. They don’t withhold it.” I still hadn’t quite worked out how I felt about most 78 collectors’ Obsessive desire to contextualize—in the worst instances, to synthesize Spotty research into quasi-academic narratives—and I still wanted to Believe that these records were significant on their own merits, inde- Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 42 4/28/14 5:29 PM 43 Do Not Sell at Any Price Pendently of any applied historical heft. It was music, after all. Why Distance ourselves from it? Modern listeners, I insisted, didn’t have Many chances to experience art in a vacuum, devoid of cultural currency And freed from the constraints of time and place. Wasn’t it an Opportunity? A thing to treasure? He didn’t say as much, but I’m fairly certain King thought I was Being naïve, if not willfully oblivious. There were some eye rolls. I Brought up Wiley. Didn’t he believe “Last Kind Words Blues” was good Enough to devastate a roomful of, say, rural Swedes who didn’t know Anything about the country blues or Mississippi or rare 78s? Who hadn’t Yet engaged in a spirited debate about whether she says “bolted meal” Or “boutonniere” or “broken will” at the end of that early verse? He Made a face at me. “There’s just too much richness to be derived from The context of the original recording,” he said. “Reckon it makes me a Pessimist or killjoy, even though I’m a true believer in the redemptive Power of Geeshie.” Ultimately, King and I would end up spending more time bickering About this than anything else—I had taken to arguing that Wiley could Destroy anyone, anywhere, regardless of what he or she knew or didn’t Know—and a few months after I got back from Virginia, when I started Up about it again, he sent me the following e-mail: “Here’s a thought-experiment. Rather than the 78 being presented To a bunch of rural Swedes, Albanians, or Greeks, why don’t you have The actual Geeshie Wiley show up in Albania and [the Albanian clarinetist Violinist, and singer] Riza Bilbyl show up in Jackson, Mississippi? Do you think that the reaction of a bunch of rural Albanians To Wiley’s music or a bunch of sharecroppers in Mississippi to Riza Bilbyl in the 1930s would differ from their reaction right now? If so Why? Now, remove Geeshie and Riza and replace them with a battered Only-known copy of their respective 78 but retain the two different Date spreads . . . would the reaction to their greatness be diminished Or intensified by the introduction of this base artifact rather than the Real thing?” Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 43 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 44 I mean, he was right: time and circumstance shape our understanding Of art in substantial ways. But what I still couldn’t unpack—probably Because I often caught myself conflating the two—was whether my Subjective context (the fact of me, where I live now and when I was Born, my understanding of heartache and what I ate for lunch) can or Should be trumped or augmented by a more objective context (the fact Of the song, of how and where and why it was made). I remain a staunch Believer in the subjective experience, but I am skeptical, sometimes, of Objective significance. As an engineer, King was tasked with balancing All contexts: what he wanted to hear, what he was supposed to hear What was actually audible. John Muir’s famed assertions of interconnectedness—“ When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that It is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken To everything in the universe,” he wrote in his journal in 1869—felt Applicable That Thursday night, after we’d arrived in Christiansburg and scrounged Supper at Dudes, King and I commandeered a pair of beige-colored $49-a-night beds at an Econo Lodge near the highway. The hotel was Set up like an old motor inn, with two levels of rooms emptying onto Concrete balconies. A fleet of cable repairmen were tailgating in the Parking lot, slapping wads of hamburger meat onto hibachi grills and Emptying endless cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. I entertained a handful Of cheery solicitations while wandering around with a plastic bucket Hoping to ice the bourbon I’d brought from Charlottesville. When the Timbre shifted from jovial to menacing, I darted back to my room, piled All the unbolted furniture in front of the door, unwrapped a plastic cup Poured myself a drink (neat), and fell asleep horizontally with all of My clothes still on King and I had agreed to meet up in the lobby at six A.M. sharp Before I’d left New York for Virginia, I’d asked King if I needed to Bring anything in particular with me. He’d sent this advice, which I was Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 44 4/28/14 5:29 PM 45 Do Not Sell at Any Price Tempted to print out and tape to the inside of my closet door, like Joan Didion in “The White Album”: So, you should pack: A) water-bottle B) knapsack C) comfortable shoes that you can burn afterwards (I’ve read that Ladies in New York do this all the time, so this is more of an Afterthought) D) handkerchiefs (viewed from the moon, Hillsville at noon would Appear to be a dust storm, as if it were over the Sahara) E) change of clothes or two (I even offend myself after three or Four hours at the market) F) a disbelief in what humanity can bear It seemed comprehensive—and applicable to a variety of reporting Scenarios. I dressed in a pair of cutoff Levi’s, a white tank top, and my Old Converse sneakers. I filled my water bottle from the bathroom Tap, secured it in my backpack with my cell phone, notebook, pens And recorder. I pulled my hair into a knot on top of my head. I rubbed My eyes. I felt like I was preparing myself for battle, or for indoctrination Into some brotherhood of shared trauma. I dragged the furniture Away from the door, strapped on my backpack, and walked outside and Toward The lobby The moon—a blue moon, incidentally, which felt portentous even From the Econo Lodge parking lot, typically a romance-obliterating sort Of place—was still sunken and teeming in the sky. Despite the lack of Sun it was already hot, or maybe just moist; every time I inhaled, I felt Bloated, sticky from the inside out. While I waited for King to appear I poured myself a cup of tepid coffee from the lobby pot and watched The local news on TV. A skinny teenager named Levi Moneyhunt was Being interviewed regarding his participation in something called the Catawba Farm Fest, which seemed to involve him playing “old-time Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 45 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 46 Music” on a yellow Flying V electric guitar. I was underlining the words “Levi Moneyhunt” in my notebook when King arrived. He was dressed In jeans and a tucked-in brown T-shirt. His leather-and-canvas rucksack Contained an antique record-carrying case, complete with cardboard Separators, where he could stow and protect his purchases Following a brief consultation, we decided to take breakfast at the Waffle House on the other side of the parking lot. I ordered a plate of Fried eggs and smothered hash browns. The toast—wheat, a concession That now strikes me as absurd—was so thoroughly saturated with Butter that it could no longer ably support itself. I gobbed a tiny tub of Grape jelly on top of it and shoved it into my mouth anyway. It seemed Smart to renew our resources, bank some energy. While we forked our Eggs, King outlined his plan for the day. We’d head directly to a record Dealer he’d had luck with before—a guy named Rodger Hicks who Trekked to Hillsville every year from Forest Hill, West Virginia, a couple Hours north. King knew where his table was typically located, and he Knew we needed to get there early. After that, we’d walk around for as Long as we could stand it, looking for records concealed amid other Relics. I asked King what I should expect, broadly speaking. “You’ll want To take a picture,” he said. “You’ll be stunned. By how many people How thick the people are, how thick the tents are, how big the whole Thing is, and I guess by how disgusting it is.” I told him I’d seen some Pretty grody displays in Brooklyn, like this one time a guy in track pants Vacated his bowels on the sidewalk outside my apartment. I received An eye roll. We tossed down some cash for our meal, climbed back into The Volkswagen, and sped off King and I approached Hillsville from the north, rolling through Miles of bucolic countryside, up and down, smoothly, like a surfer Straddling his board at sunrise. There is a moment in late August, in The South, where the landscape gets nearly obscene—overfed and cognizant Of what comes next—and unleashes a final, boasting parade of Virility. Abundance was in the air. Just a few miles outside of town the Yard sales started, driveways and porches crammed with junk. Out-of- Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 46 4/28/14 5:29 PM 47 Do Not Sell at Any Price Towners were coming, with cash, in pursuit of they-ain’t-sayin’-what And anyone lucky enough to own property along the primary artery To the market was taking full advantage of the sudden influx, luring Shoppers off-course with renegade wares. Entire houses appeared to Have been turned inside out. Traffic slowed. There was some aggressive Browsing. People were caffeinated. King, for his part, was stoic Unswayed by the siren call of unregulated product, and by 8:40 A.M. we Had parked at a lot in town (five dollars to the man in the overalls) and Were marching, briskly, toward Rodger Hicks’s tent, past the vendors With fanny packs of small bills, past the women tearing open packages Of gas station donuts and unleashing tiny puffs of powdered sugar. The Air was airless—heavy and close, like a wet sheet Tramping through a flea market with Chris King is oddly thrilling Like getting tied to the back of a heat-seeking missile, or being RoboCop As we moved steadily toward our target, King scanned various tables And booths, pointing out any vendor with a gramophone—to King, the Most obvious signifier of a potential shellac windfall. I can’t overstate How good he is at this; he can turn a corner and point out a Victrola in About 1.5 seconds. I, meanwhile, was distracted by nearly everything (“Oh, I had this exact Alf doll when I was a kid!”), and for each whiskey Decanter shaped like the Great Chicago Fire that I paused to admire King discovered another sagging box of old media tucked inside a teak Midcentury buffet. At this point, he was only making mental notes of Spots to revisit. We needed to get to Hicks by nine A.M., when the flea Market officially opened and vendors could begin selling their goods By the time we found Hicks’s booth, there were already a few shoppers Milling about, including a collector King recognized—a soft-spoken Older gentleman with a mustache and a buttoned-up shirt named Gene Anderson. After I introduced myself, Anderson let me flip through his Want lists, which he’d slipped into clear plastic pages and assembled In a binder—based on the contents, he had what appeared to be a solid Collection of prewar country and blues records on his shelves already King, meanwhile, nodded hello to Hicks—a middle-aged man with Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 47 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 48 Thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a pair of tiny, oval-shaped Sunglasses—leaned over a box of 78s, and began thumbing away. On a Piece of cardboard, someone had written GOOD 78S BE CAREFUL, but Rivulets of dew had already dripped through the tarp Hicks had strung Up, saturating the sign. King snorted and pushed it aside Most of the tent was filled with used rock LPs, 45s, and CDs. Rodger Hicks seemed to have some passing sense that certain old 78s were Worth something, although he also hadn’t really bothered to follow That thread to any logical pricing conclusions. The bulk of his 78s were Marked at just a couple bucks, although a few in especially good condition Were randomly priced at $100 to $300. Some negotiation was Expected. Almost immediately, King nudged me and handed over a Paramount Pressing of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “That Black Snake Moan,” Which he already owned and wasn’t interested in—it was marked $250 Which was probably about $100 more than most collectors would pay It’s a powerful, groaning song—the black snake, in this case, being Both exactly what it sounds like and a useful metaphor for Jefferson’s Fear of everything he couldn’t see—but was also popular, meaning an Awful lot of copies were pressed. I was tickled by the idea of having It in my clutches, but I wasn’t particularly seduced by the song or its Price. I set it down King chatted amicably with Anderson and kept on pulling out records I stood a few feet away, jotting impressions of the crowd in my Notebook (“A woman in a visor holding an LP and yelling, ‘Jim, look Steve Miller!’ ”) and occasionally peeking over King’s shoulder. I felt Acutely aware of wanting to stay out of his way, lest I complicate a Delicate acquisition process. At some point, King faux-casually asked Anderson what he’d picked up so far, then appeared relieved when Anderson showed him his selections. (Watching two collectors interrogate Each other about recent—or, in this case, ongoing—purchases is A little like watching two high-achieving middle school students warily Prod each other about a grade: “What’d you get?” “What? What’d you Get?” “What?”) Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 48 4/28/14 5:29 PM 49 Do Not Sell at Any Price Finally Anderson paid for his records and ambled off, and King Showed me the 78s he’d pulled, which included two notable rarities: Eddie Head and His Family’s “Down on Me” / “Lord I’m the True Vine” (one of two, maybe three known copies; it was priced at two dollars) And Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Blues” / “Guitar Rag” (less rare, but in Notable condition—an E copy, which would replace King’s E-minus Copy). After a bit of gentle bargaining, King paid Hicks $100 cash for A total of nine 78s. He knelt down in the grass and gently tucked the Records into his case. He was pleased. I picked up a few of King’s castoffs Including 78s from Stick McGhee, Washboard Sam, and Blind Boy Fuller, and a stack of Victor pressings of early Carter Family tunes. I Paid around forty dollars for all of it. I was beaming. King was proud Before we walked away, King stopped to ask Hicks what else he’d Sold that morning. Although vendors weren’t technically supposed To open for business before nine A.M. on Friday (those hours would Change to seven A.M. the following year), many had been camped out in Hillsville for a couple days already. With the profit margins on hocking Old shit hovering somewhere between slight and undetectable, you Couldn’t really blame a guy for entertaining early offers. While readjusting His shorts, Hicks, already gloriously sweaty, unpinned a grenade: He’d sold $1,600 worth of “blues records” to “someone from Raleigh” Earlier in the week—probably Wednesday. He’d been in the field since Sunday. He didn’t recall the specific titles. King, I could tell, was ruffled Not miffed, exactly, but disturbed. Hours later, when we stopped for a Late lunch and several gallons of sweet tea at the Blue Ridge Restaurant In Floyd, Virginia—King ordered “country ham” and I ordered “city Ham” and we both got the brown beans and fried squash—he brought It up again. “I won’t sleep for several weeks,” he sighed. I couldn’t tell if He was being serious. For now, though, the information was filed away We trudged off, once more unto the breach In retrospect, it occurs to me that if one was interested in compiling The world’s most comprehensive collection of sweat-soaked T-shirts The Hillsville VFW Flea Market and Gun Show would be an unqualified Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 49 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 50 Mecca. Here, the gradual darkening of preshrunk cotton mirrors a darkening Of the soul. It is unconscionably hot and crowded, and attendees Are forced to contend with several miles of gently used detritus, all The bits and bobs—a thousand riffs on colored plastic—humans have Designed to ease our long, slow crawl toward death. Surrender is required Or else you will crumple under the weight. When a portly man Sporting strained cargo shorts and an orange GUNS SAVE LIVES sticker Unleashed an epic, undulating belch a couple inches from my face—we Were both digging, somewhat frantically, through a mound of stateshaped Refrigerator magnets—I found myself not only not repulsed But almost wanting to shake his hand Hillsville allows for (and perhaps even encourages) sudden reinvention And you could probably outfit an entire one-bedroom apartment Here for $500, particularly if you subscribe to the “odd old stuff” Aesthetic (which seized Brooklyn, at least, several years ago, and to Which I continue to shamefully adhere). But even if you don’t, there Is copious bounty to be ravaged: hand-carved Victorian bed frames And kitschy Atomic Age knickknacks and gold-and-ivory pocketknives Are plentiful, but so are dented Ikea nightstands and used Cabbage Patch dolls and Duracell batteries of unknown origin. It is a feast of Accumulation, presented without judgment or categorization. I was Instantly reminded of Donovan Hohn’s “A Romance of Rust: Nostalgia Progress, and the Meaning of Tools,” a 2005 Harper’s essay in which The author visits the barn of an antique tool collector and is struck by How zoological his collection appears. “Divorced from usefulness and Subjected to morphological classification, they looked like the fossils Of Cenozoic mollusks or the wristbones of tyrannosaurs,” Hohn wrote Of his subject’s prizes There is no sense of genus or species at Hillsville—everything is Everything—but product, detached from both its intended use and The codified retail experience, becomes ungrounded, ill defined, and Increasingly absurd: all parts and no corresponding whole. After less Than an hour of browsing, the merchandise at Hillsville resembled a Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 50 4/28/14 5:29 PM 51 Do Not Sell at Any Price Word I’d said too much—as if I’d accidentally subtracted all meaning Via blind repetition, as if it had never had any meaning at all. Particularly Upsetting were objects of recent vintage: piles of video games From 2011, hardcover installments of Harry Potter, an unopened Cuisinart Panini press. Hohn, at an estate auction, remarked how an ink-jet Printer, still in its original box, had “already passed into that limbo of Worthlessness that exists between novelty and nostalgia,” and, looking Across the fields, I recognized that vast and endless void—the terrain Of the freshly outmoded, of that which is neither useful nor evocative Obviously, none of this slowed us down. Existential duress has no Place at Hillsville; it is softened or eradicated by the consumption of Deep-fried foodstuffs. Available at one tent near the entrance were Deep-fried Reese’s peanut butter cups, Oreos, Twinkies, Milky Way Bars, Snickers bars, Three Musketeers bars, and—for dessert—“frozen Cheesecake hand-dipped in chocolate.” Near the gun section of the Market (an old VFW hall overloaded with every kind of assault weapon Imaginable, some in shades of pink for the lady in your life), a scrum Of hunters in tank tops were selling taxidermy and assorted sundries (dustpans, bathroom scales, plastic nativity figures) from the back of a Pickup truck. I paused to admire a white-tailed deer head mounted on A slab of oak, a steal at twenty dollars, and scratched it behind its ears Until King gave me a look that said, “Don’t do that.” Later, he did nod Approvingly when I purchased an old puzzle, copyrighted in 1981 and Called Feelings. It consisted of five wooden cutouts of a young girl in Varying throes of emotion—Sad, Afraid, Angry, Happy, and Love—and Required users to match her face with a corresponding title. Still, as I Was paying, he couldn’t resist this: “That would be so much better if it Had been made in 1975.” We also looked for 78s—in Victrola cabinets, under piles of John Denver LPs, wrapped in sheets of yellowed newspaper, in the backseats Of vendors’ cars, shoved under tables, in blue Tupperware bins labeled OLD RECORDS, stacked indiscriminately in the high, bleating sun—but Despite several hours of thorough digging, little else of note emerged Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 51 4/28/14 5:29 PM Amanda Petrusich 52 From the fields. There were good records there—commercial country Like Hank Williams; Little Wonder discs, which are just five inches in Diameter and contain a minute or so of novelty music—but nothing Of immediate consequence for King. So goes junking. The Eddie Head And Sylvester Weaver records were enough to make the trip worthwhile For him We began hiking the five thousand miles back to King’s car. I had Started to register several unsettling smells. Of particular impact was The aroma set free each time someone stumbled out of a Porta-John Freeing its cooked contents—that vile steam—into the air. I experienced An overwhelming urge to both wash my hands and to dry-heave My hair had mostly loosed itself from its bun and was sticking to the Sides of my face in new and interesting ways. The Volkswagen, when We arrived, felt like a life raft I collapsed inside, and we zoomed out of Hillsville and toward Floyd, where we stopped to visit King’s coworkers at the County Records Store, and then, several hours later, to Charlottesville, where King Deposited me at the airport, but not before making sure my records Were properly packed with cardboard and bubble wrap. At the security Checkpoint, I got pulled aside for extra screening—“Miss, what’re These?”—but eventually made it to my gate, where I sat doodling in my Notebook and wondering if I should go back to the bathroom and toss Another fistful of cold water on my face. Every few minutes, I unzipped My bag and checked on my records. I got excited just looking at them I flew back to New York City feeling intensely satisfied, if unclean That feeling wouldn’t last Petrusich_DoNotSell_TX_PTR.indd 52 4/28/14 5:29 PM