The Five of Pentacles
[This “guest essay” was written for my friend Jianna Heuer’s Such a Good Listener Substack blog. Each essay subject is derived from a Tarot card; I selected the Five of Pentacles, hence the title. Per her description: “This card indicates isolation, worry, and potential or fear that financial instability is imminent. When this appears, it could also mean you are currently living in a scarcity mindset.”]
While I don’t believe that humility is the arrogance of the mediocre, I have chosen to forsake pride in my forties…with some exceptions. One allowance is that I have good taste. I’m convinced this is true even as I castigate myself for typing it.
If you know a record collector, you know albums are not just albums. They are memories and stories in physical form. Of the day they were found, of moments in time they soundtracked, and of the joy revisiting them brings. Unfortunately, there’s an “and yet”—the financial inconvenience to acquire them coupled with the spatial limitations of storing them. They are euphoria and they are an albatross. They are my life.
There are more than two thousand records in my basement, the multicolored rows of alphabetized spines having induced the awe of innumerable people who’ve exited the tunnel-like steps to discover almost every musical genre and subgenre in my archives. The collection is a visual representation of my mind: open while discriminating, detail-oriented, and overwhelming. I am in the top one percent of listeners, possibly in the top half of that one percent. However, declaring my love of collecting music as if it’s an achievement is meaningless. I have won no contests by vanquishing foes nor been lauded for my self-actualization, not that I should be. Instead, my devotion to being disciplined about something I regard as one of life’s supreme pleasures continues yielding apprehension and uncertainty, no aberration to the planet’s other eight billion people except the terms and conditions are vaingloriously mine.
Do I need this? Do I deserve it? Do I not have enough? Why don’t I get something more “useful”? What about moving? Who inherits this when I’m gone? Why does my greatest passion torture me whenever I indulge it?
Relying on my girlfriend, Sue, made collecting less problematic: “You’ll regret it if you don’t, Blebbz,” she’d tell me as I debated filing another arcane jazz LP. Any addict with a guilty conscience requires a friendly enabler. Now, I live alone and pre-worry like my mother did throughout my youth, one where she wasn’t poor but struggling mightily was a weekly theme. She ensured I had baseball cards and action figures, a yearly vacation and trips to the cineplex, but I knew gratification came at a cost. Pick one pack of cards. Sneak a Snickers into the theater. Her rarely treating herself. One friend has told me I am the most painfully self-aware person he’s ever known, a trait that began developing in grade school. Comprehending limitations and being called selfish as an only child led to constraining my own cravings. It always mattered more to avoid criticism than accept praise. I refuse to blame anyone—life impacts us all in our esoteric ways—but do ponder if my ontological obsession with pre-worrying is so inextricably linked to exaltation that something silly like collecting pinecones from my yard would prove tortuous, chastising myself for stealing provisions from hungry squirrels. I am my own omniscient narrator in perpetuity. I do not recommend it.
Or maybe, as I habitually do, I am over-thinking it. Perhaps what I should care about is simply wanting to kick out the fucking jams. It's not half-assed childhood nostalgia I’m after—music didn’t factor significantly into my pre-teen years—nor is it elitism. I loathe the snobbery and disdain often associated with record collectors, especially as someone who is, like the average teenage girl (or gay boy), a massive fan of mainstream female pop stars. I shun being dubbed a “curator,” at least in the Internet sense of the word (get your playlists outta here!), or a musicologist, uninterested in the bloviating that engenders my eye-rolls at academia, and would prefer to be seen as a gregarious librarian, a guy who has it all so there’s something for everyone. The surest way to determine someone’s company is worthless is if they dislike music.
Part of why I love music is its ineffability: I can’t see it or touch it, I have no clue how to play it, and unlike any other art form, it’s easier to engage with higher frequency while sometimes discerning my opinion of a particular piece has shifted considerably. Collecting records has additionally gifted me the sense of community others feel in churches or recreational leagues, a means to mingle with like-minded people who in our dynamic value preserving cardboard and swapping ideas about the subject as proof that capturing impermanence is paramount to a healthy, creative world. Inside a record store is the one place I will forever be “known,” an indispensable humblebrag guaranteed to fascinate my next girlfriend, or so I jest.
There is an urge to refine life down to its truest comforts, to reach an age where still being open to new things is essential, but to also focus on what most validates your existence as a lifeline to happiness. Record collecting is self-indulgent by nature but neglecting what may be externally denoted as extreme solipsism would be a dehumanizing form of anhedonia. The secret, it seems, is eschewing the trappings endemic to how we view any niche pursuits. Nobody will care a fraction as much about the singularity of your desires as you do. Worrying what others think might be meaningful in theory, but the practical application is self-destructive. If you are in control of the world’s core demands—your bills and ethics; watching cat videos and porn—there remains room for the freedom in your heart and mind to be whatever your imagination covets. Mine is to be a nerd, hopefully a cool nerd, but I try not to be greedy.
The clichés about music abound—its capacity as an alimentary force for the soul in particular—because of its pervasiveness and inexhaustibility. Any person can live a lifetime without giving a damn about sports or fashion or Tarot, but they will have a musical memory that changed their life, and not just about what song played when their virginity waved the white flag. Conversely, humans will write off strangers solely because of their perceived bad taste in music. If I see a pickup truck with a Pearl Jam sticker on it, I will automatically assume the driver has committed hate crimes each day of his adult life. But if that same man has a Johnny Cash tattoo (on his shredded calf muscle, no doubt), I will be tempted to reconsider my understanding of nuances. Due to this less-hypothetical-than-you-think guy’s insistence on broadcasting his butt rock bona fides, trusting him is nonetheless impossible. We all have a band we treat this way.
Living in the moment is life as an ideal. In my basement, I, a resolutely servile Mr. Hospitality, cede the comfortable chaise longue to friends while sitting on the firmer couch beside it. The wood-paneled walls and carpeting were the perfect interior decorating choices for an audiophile, the sound from the speakers at the opposite end of the twenty-foot-long room unimpeded when interweaving with conversation. Björk’s “Hyper-ballad” is the finest song about throwing batteries and cutlery off a mountain, but I bet you didn’t know that it doubles as the perfect backdrop when a friend tells you about parking by the airport earlier in the afternoon to watch the planes take off and land while eating chicken nuggets with her astounded two-year-old son.
“What’re ya gonna play next, Puddin’?” that same friend, Sarah, asked me later that night.
“I hate to put on something you already know, but you love this album and I don’t think you’ve heard it on vinyl,” I said.
A familiar acoustic guitar began being strummed as Sarah instantly recognized Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” an easy diversion to discuss our mutual fondness for Hope Sandoval’s sultry voice and smoldering stare before I recalled playing a used copy of the CD each time it got sold back by a different customer at the record store where I once worked. I’ve heard the album a hundred times yet can’t name half of the song titles, never mind recite each lyric. So what, who cares? The music we cherish activates a form of chain lightning within, warmth in the gut and buzz in the brain two sensations freer from the attenuation bound to other art forms. When stripped to its essence music is my symbiont, the invisible hand I hold whether loving or grieving or anything in between.
“How much is that worth?” a co-worker asked when I shared a photo of my record collection with him.
“More than the house I live in,” I exaggerated. Not by much, though.
“Are you not worried about, like, flood or fires and shit? Or some vinyl-eating bug created by China in a lab?”
“Can’t worry about it,” I lied. Well, sort of.
The house I live in was waterproofed several years ago, the reassurances of my landlord and his son comforting, so my general unease is more about losing memories. Sure, I update then email myself a document listing the titles I own each time I buy more, but if I replace my existing copy of that Mazzy Star record, I’ll be disappointed about how I didn’t buy the new copy with Sarah in tow after we’d split a pizza prior to howling throughout a stand-up comedy set. Perfect pitch may elude me, but I do have perfect placement: I remember how each one arrived in my collection.
Music has dual functionality for my memory: I recall when a close friend got married because it’s the same day my favorite work of art in the world, Exile on Main St., was released (May 12th), and each year I send him a YouTube link to the song “Loving Cup” to commemorate the day for us both as I spin the record, natch. Harry Styles’s Fine Line, Sue’s favorite album, will be played annually on November 11th, the day she died, to celebrate her life, not mourn it. September 11th is when I bought (and now carefully extract) my holiest grail, a first pressing of Tool’s Ænima, an album whose leadoff track details fisting someone’s asshole. You can’t predict where the music of your mind might take you.
How do I conquer the negative connotations I’ve ascribed to collecting records? As scarcity routinely increases prices, is there a way to let go? To credit myself for assiduously logging everything I purchase on a ledger stored in my wallet to prevent pleasure from outpacing necessity. Never have I had to remind myself that the collection needs a roof over its head too. Neurosis is a bedfellow of the collector, and so maybe the secret is to find an album that serves as a stopgap when skepticism encroaches. It could be a thematic choice (Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing) or a punishing one (Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music), either option reiterating the same basic point: Buddy, you’re doing fine. Just enjoy it.
Oddly, the greatest justification for collecting records emerged when my friend who got married on Exile Day disclosed the sum he was paying each week to put diapers on his son. Fifty bucks is a few records, I thought, as I realized that my diapers wouldn’t get soiled then trashed. Going forward my record collection, my babies, will be the diapers of my ears, and a fitting metaphorical place to dump my self-loathing while loving time the most satisfying way I know. Of course, I’ll then flash to my mother telling me how she covered my nethers in reusable diapers during one frugal phase, but that can be the anomalous stand-in for the times when I still, inevitably because I’m me, permit my archnemesis, future fear, to creep back in until I rush to put the stylus on the groove while repeating my safe word: pampers.
And then satiate in a fresh listen of Hope Sandoval cooing, “I wanna hold the hand inside you.” My third hand, the one that takes my insecurities and crumples them to dust as the lucidity fades into view.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Since this is a music nerd’s (and lifelong list maker’s) essay, I present my dozen favorite jazz albums:
World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (Luaka Bop 2017 – compilation)
John Coltrane, Interstellar Space (Impulse! 1974)
Miles Davis, Agharta (CBS/Sony 1975)
Duke Ellington, Far East Suite (Bluebird/RCA 1967)
Vince Guaraldi, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy 1965)
Herbie Hancock, Mr. Hands (Columbia 1980)
Clifford Jordan Quartet, Glass Bead Games (Strata-East 1974)
Hailu Mergia & Dahlak Band, Wede Harer Guzo (Awesome Tapes From Africa 1978)
Thelonious Monk, Monk’s Dream (Columbia 1963)
Sonny Sharrock, Ask the Ages (Axiom 1991)
Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil (Blue Note 1966)
The Horace Silver Quintet, Song for My Father (Blue Note 1965)