I used to experience a specific sort of melancholy while flipping through records at the record store. There was just so much stuff, just moldering there. Somehow seeing the covers made it worse, since so many were just ugly vestiges of a long-discredited aesthetic. Imagine what the music must’ve sounded like.But last night, I was at Milk Gallery in Chelsea, and the least-cool of the uncool record covers were on the walls. It was a party celebrating the release of a photo book called Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992, which collected the covers and comes paired with a compilation of music. The outsider artist’s forgotten and unheralded work had come to Chelsea—the ultimate cove of the insiders—as victors.
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The line to get in stretched around the corner. People couldn’t wait to drop 65 bucks on the book and get the record. Right before his band Endless Boogie began to play, Paul Major, whose record catalog was the foundation for the book, gestured to the walls and eloquently noted over the mic, “The cream of reality rises to the top.”
The exhibit, book, and music ("Ah, music!") hit right in the zeitgeist’s sweet spot: something old, something weird, something immediately funny to look at, something—wait for it—authentic.
Even Major’s artist statement describes these musicians—the nuns, the organists, the family bands, and Spanish-speaking ventriloquist acts—as “real people.” That’s fair I guess, since everyone but the ventriloquist dummy was or is a real person, but then so is Prince, so is Lady Gaga, so is Justin Bieber. They’re real. You can touch ‘em.
Furthermore, several of the record covers vary only by text they carried, hinting at a sort of “record-by-the-numbers” business as mercenary as the one Rebecca Black went to.
I don’t know why I bring this up, other than to clear the air of this whiff of “noble savage” that I caught last night. These are amateur performers, but they are performers nevertheless. That ripple of authenticity that comes from their lack of polish, the assurance that this wasn’t focus grouped into existence, comes from the revelation that out of everything these people could do to perform, this is what they chose.
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With this in mind, the book and exhibit are even more of a celebration of the variety and colorful creativity displayed. Recording a record used to be hard! These people paid for studio time, got it down on tape, got that tape professionally pressed onto a record, paid for packaging. This is their triumph, and the march of time can’t take that way from them.Time’s passage can, however, bring out the humor of the covers, and man, some of them were funny. Humanity is, of course, hilarious, so I don’t think it was untoward to have a chuckle or two at a record cover like, “Possessed By Jesus.” I’d like to think that when we laughed, we were laughing out of recognition, like laughing at an old yearbook.
Just like an old yearbook, some covers carried notes and signatures that varied from the charming—“Anyone who could sit there all night and only have two drinks is pretty weird, but then I like weird people”—to the creepy: “Call me when you turn 18 years old I’ll be waiting, Lewie Wickham.” It’s a reminder that this physical media has taken a literal journey to get to Chelsea, passed hand-to-hand, and also a reminder that musicians can be creeps.
After New York psych-rock legends Endless Boogie succeeded where rock has failed for almost 40 years and got the room dancing, we checked out one of the listening stations where you could spin some self-released vinyl. Listening did not disappoint.
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I popped on a strident sounding pianist only to find that even though the artist was the same, the record didn’t match the sleeve. It was evidence that someone—at sometime—owned two Sylvia records and was sloppy about it. Physical media tells such fascinatingly incomplete vignettes, I marveled while listening to Sylvia pound out a Beatles medley.
I also listened to a live recording from a Miami Beach comedian named Tubby Boots, which opened with him singing “Hallelujah I Just Love Her So,” before going into his jokes. The cover promises that the record is “For the mature-minded adult,” and it delivered, provided you think, “What’s the closest thing to Silver? The Lone Ranger’s balls,” bespeaks of maturity.Elevation to the level of art comes with some alienation though, something I pondered while watching Endless Boogie rip through guitar solos. I leaned over to the guy next to me and asked if we were seeing Lower East Side scuzz-rock elevated to bizarre cultural artifact in Chelsea right before our eyes. The guy laughed and said probably, and I trusted him, because as a former Rolling Stone rock writer, David Fricke probably knows something about changing relevance.Such is culture I guess. It goes from proud creation, to superfluous to embarrassing to detritus and, if it makes it, to veneration. I told Fricke there are worst fates than Chelsea. The experience was more enjoyable than I had even hoped.MOREIf you're curious about how the book was made and want to see more pictures, Christian Storm interviewed Enjoy The Experience's editor back in April for Vice.Also, if you want more from Paul Major, he contributes over at Noisey.If you want a steady stream of this author, follow him @a_ben_richmond
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