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My dad died in June of 2023. As proceedings can take some time after that fact, my family spent this past weekend beginning the process of distributing his worldly possessions to those that he wanted to have them.
This has led me to reflect on my own such possessions, carefully collected over 30 plus years of roaming around the underground. I once described it to a friend like so: imagine that every time you go out, you pick up a marble. When you get home, you place it in a box in a closet. Then, one day, after many times out and back, you try to pick up the box. You can’t, as it is too heavy to lift, and boy you hope the box does not “spring a leak”.
I don’t want to just collect and depart, leaving behind a mess. I don’t collect for financial gain, although that is a big part of the energy and interest around the first pressing of an album or an early demo.
But I do have this tendency to accumulate. When interviewing music folks for my book which will be named after this column, I can usually pull out pretty much every physical release that they have appeared on for them to inspect. This sometimes triggers memories, which is the hope. Sometimes they remark on their knowledge that this particular version of this particular release is worth a lot of money. Sometimes it gets awkward, as they reveal they don’t have a copy of that album or demo. Do I give it back to the artist who created it or continue to keep it among my posessions?
Regardless, that physical object will cease to function or exist eventually, especially without proper archiving. When an opportunity arose to donate my collection of flyers and show posters to a library, I took it. Along the way I learned something; books printed after the American Civil War use a paper stock that contains an acid that eventually will likely destroy the book. MICA’s Decker Library is now in charge of keeping my flyer/poster collection alive for as long as it can, paper-based as it is. I am happy to report that it has recently helped students with research projects.
Another person would have begun auctioning off this collection, freely accumulated over years of Sunday mornings (when the flyers are often “dead” as the show is over). That person is not me. Commerce and market value is always going to be a part of this, but it is not why I do what I do. This implies I understand why I am the way that I am. I don’t entirely. Of all the reasons, I think the desire for order and control seems to top the list of potential motivations.
And, yes, one day, someone will be dealing with my worldly possessions and deciding that to do with them. In the meantime, I am hoping that my collection can serve to suggest to the person whose work is chosen for it that what they did mattered, was seen, was heard, and was worthwhile in doing. I’ll keep it for now and hope to use it to remind someone of this fact when the time is right. That person could be you.
