Institute of Contemporary Arts

Rare grooves

Date: 3 January 2007

Luaka Bop's Yale Evelev and his record collection

There are people who love music, and there are people who love collecting. This is the main distinction between lots of the customers and vinyl collectors that we are encountering on our travels.

There are those who will head for the store on new releases day, attend listening preview parties and play their new record 100 times over in order to soak up layer upon layer of new sounds, subtleties of production, and change in musical direction from their favourite recording artist. Then, there are those who will sit at their computer through the night, upping their Ebay bid systematically, in order to be the owner of the hardest-to-find, pre-stereo, analogue-recorded rare groove, with the gate-fold sleeve still in pristine condition, and a slight colour defect on the label, which means that only 3 of this precise format exist, and it might be a bit risky to actually play it. These two breeds are pretty different species, but each is fired up by the prospect of picking up something unusual and inspiring, albeit it an emotional thrill from the opening bars of a new track, or the realisation that the limited edition, first pressing 45 you're holding actually matches the the criteria outlined in your Record Collector manual.

But either way, as we've interviewed store owners, DJs, musicians, label staff and distributors about their own perspectives on vinyl and the current state of the industry in terms of the way music is consumed and exchanged, we've also had the privilege of looking at lots of private collections - walls of vinyl delight, full of prized joys, rarities, first ever purchases, and a glorious array of colourful designs.

The music itself might be the first and last raison d'etre for these striking 12 inch squares, but there's a whole lot that sits in between, and the cover art is a major part of the appeal and seduction, housing those shiny black grooves in jackets of myth, fantasy, energy and exilhiration and making them the objects of desire that infuse additional value, history and memory into the music.

Amongst the personal treasure troves we've infiltrated - from Bronx DJ Bazooka Joe's old school hip hop joints, to shelves of American hardcore belonging to writer and filmmaker Steven Blush, it's the collection of Yale Evelev that has so far excited me the most. Yale runs the record label Luaka Bop, owned by David Byrne (Talking Heads) and houses his impressive collection of vinyl in his apartment in Soho, New York, where he has lived for 30 years. Luaka Bop celebrates music from all over the world, with Yale's theory that 'anywhere I could find at least one record on vinyl that excited me, that's where I was happy to release music from' - and that has taken him across the continents, from North Africa to China, Louisiana to Brazil.

This means that his collection is somewhat diverse, but his energy about his records lies in the cover designs, unusual formats and hand-made covers, as much as the music (which is definitely not relegated below aesthetics, let's make that clear!). Paper-cut early Negativland covers sit alongside day-glo transparent Talking Heads releases, Chinese folks songs and a novelty miniature vinyl box-set. But the moment my jaw dropped to the floor was when he explained that he'd grown up in Philadelphia, in the same town that Sun Ra had lived before moving to Chicago, and promptly revealed a pile of psychedelic hand-made covers, complete with bits of shower curtain glued to the front, that he'd picked up locally - all pre-Chicago (when the covers started to be printed by machine), one of a kind, and little pieces of history by the man from Saturn.

Since we've been in the USA, the most unlikely and remarkable story has emerged, which pretty much symbolises every crate digger and collector's idea of a holy grail (or wet dream, if we're going to get prosaic), when it comes to making a mythic find. The story is, that a record collector called Warren Hill was going through a box of records in Chelsea, New York, that someone was flogging on the sidewalk, and he'd picked out a couple of good bargains, when he came across another one, looking pretty raggedy, with a yellowed label reading 'Velvet Underground' on it, alongside the date '1966', and the words 'Attn. N Dolph'. It cost him 75 cents. Several phone conversations to fellow-collector friends and some more serious research time later, he discovered that what he had actually come across, was indeed the first 'finished' version - and only surviving copy - of the LP that Andy Warhol had touted to Columbia Records. Much hype and media mysteria later, it just sold on Ebay for over $150,000. How's that for a five minute trawl through a dusty old box and the price of a bus fare?