The title ‘Wax Trax and Vinyl Treasures’ was first used by British music journalist Tom Hibbert, a contributor to Q and Smash Hits, in a Reference Hibbert1982 book published by Proteus with a rather voluminous title: Rare Records, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Aural Nightmares of the 60's and Beyond: A Perverse Guide for the Record Collector. This is a ‘perversely’ entertaining account of the way that often obscure 1960s pop recordings had become collectors' items in the 1980s: ‘Prices have spiralled, governed by rarity in combination with other stupid factors … Nobody gives a damn about what the bloody records sound like; it is the prestige factor and value quotient that governs [sic] the collectors’ actions' (p. 5). Hibbert even offers a consumer's price guide for 45s and 33s, ranging from A (£1.50–£2.50) to J (£50), for items such as Hughie Green and Monica Rose's single ‘Cuddle Up Baby/Clap You Hands’ (A) to Mr Gaffer and the Weirdos' Surfink! (C), to Kenny and the Kasuals' Impact (J). The book's value is augmented by the tongue-in-cheek cynicism and mockery that Hibbert expresses towards nerdy, middle-aged male music nostalgists, including himself.
Hibbert's target audience is epitomised by the photo of bearded, bespectacled 1970s collector Barry Simcoe, whose record collection has cost him his car and a room in his house, featured on the cover of Shuker's book. Curiously, Shuker doesn't reference Hibbert's book, although he does cite another book by Hibbert, also published in 1982, The Perfect Collection. He then proceeds to index Hibbert as ‘Hilbert’, perhaps confusing him with the US author Robert Hilbert, compiler of an auction price guide for jazz and blues 78s. Hilbert's guide no doubt includes the extremely rare Black Patti 78 recordings by African American artists made famous by collector Joe Bussard, which Shuker refers to as ‘Black Platties’ (p. 20). On page 91 James Clifford is approvingly quoted: ‘The good collector is tasteful and reflective. Accumulation unfolds in a pedagogical, edifying manner. The collection itself – its taxonomic, aesthetic structure – is valued, and any private fixation on single objects is negatively marked as fetishism’ (Clifford 1988, p. 54). If this is the case, I am proud to be a ‘bad collector’, because fetishism, in both the Marxist and Freudian senses, is precisely the reason I value and collect records; their tactile, quasi-erotic, idolatrous, conspicuous, totemic appeal is what turns me on. Unlike a number of Shuker's collectors, however, I refuse to pay ridiculously inflated prices for vinyl, or to use eBay or consult the drearily pedagogical, taxonomic consumer guides such as Goldmine and Record Collector in which this book is saturated. Shuker's and my compatriot, avant garde noise artist and founder of the Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum record labels Bruce Russell, is in apparent agreement about records as fetish objects, when he refers to his dependency on them in the 1970s: ‘We knew what we wanted to do, we wanted to participate in cultural production in a young and globally peripheral country – and that meant making records. Lessons that you learn young, you learn the best. I still make records because they are fetishes, magical talismans – like the ‘mojo hand’ – that symbolise and legitimise the work we do as artists' (Russell Reference Russell2009, p. 106).
Russell's use of the term ‘records’ includes CDs and cassettes, but Shuker completely misses the retro-fetishism of cassettes as repositories for mix tapes, rare and obscure recordings of Japanese noise music, early hip hop, and avant garde music such as Russell's which has been celebrated in books like Thurston Moore's Reference Moore2005 edited collection Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. Images and evocations of cassettes abound in contemporary music culture, from the cover design of Yo la Tengo's 2009 album Popular Songs, to a number of recent groups such as Cassette Kids, NZ alt-country band Cassette, the Washington steam punk quartet Cassettes, and New York instrumentalists Cassettes Won't Listen, whose website elicited the response ‘dear indie bands, please stop using the word “cassette” in your band name’.
As a reliable account of the ‘social practice’ of record collecting, Shuker's book leaves a great deal to be desired. He ultimately succeeds in making record collecting sound dull, with a continual focus on the importance of prior knowledge of collectable items, which takes all the fun out of the far more creative, anti-canonic joys and surprises of discovering something one didn't know existed. This is an important feature of eccentric Canadian film-maker Stefan Zweig's infinitely more fascinating study of record collectors, Vinyl. Shuker's questionnaires for his informants cover such mundane aspects as collection sizes, first acquisitions, preferred formats, frequency of purchases, music taste, cataloguing and organising storage space, and his focus is on strictly Anglophonic collectors. In contrast, by far the best book I have read about record collecting is still the late Lise Waxer's Reference Waxer2002 account of the ‘vinyl museums’ of the salsotecas in her wonderful The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia, which is not even mentioned here.
In addition, Shuker's use of the ‘High Fidelity Stereotype’ is something of a misnomer, given that there are three distinct types of collector portrayed in Nick Hornby's novel and film, astutely identified by Will Straw in Reference Straw and Whiteley1997 – in what is still one of the best pieces of writing on record – as the dandy, the nerd and the brute, collecting. And given the number of typos and grammatical errors throughout this book (including ‘Tropicala’ for ‘Tropicalia’, and on page 77, the student howler ‘complimentary’ instead of ‘complementary’) and its hardback-only price tag of £55.00, it is certainly unlikely ever to become a ‘collector's item’.
