Play That Funky Vinyl

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First published in late 2001, the magazine has sped from a half-year lull between issues to quarterly to, at its current pace, bimonthly. But from the outset, its lush, full-page, full-color photography was suitable for framing. Torres figured that if he started low-quality, it would be tough to justify snazzing it up later, even if every issue cost him “tens of tens of thousands of dollars” to reproduce. Pounding out the first one required him to borrow money and declare nine dependents on his taxes. He also was fired from his job selling software at the World Trade Center a month before 9/11, partly due to the distractions of his new venture.

It comes a little easier now. Wax Poetics has 15,000 subscribers and a total circulation of around 65,000, Torres says, and he’s branching out. The magazine’s lawyer structured the business so the Wax Poetics brand could eventually make a smooth transition to publishing books and putting out records. Everyone found this hilariously far-fetched when the magazine launched, but the Wax Poetics record label has just put out its first release, East of Underground, a reissue of an extremely rare 1971 collection of songs played by U.S. Army soldiers who’d won a battle of the bands.

Even better is Torres’ first foray into book publishing: the hardbound Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1, a collection of articles and photos from the magazine’s first five issues. (Look for Volume 2, covering the next five issues, soon.) Finally, Torres is readying a digital-downloading hub on WaxPoetics.com; yes, he’ll be selling those impersonal, auraless MP3s, but he’s striving to make the site feel as though you’re sifting through a record collection.

To handle all this output, Torres presides over a small crew, no more than a dozen, convened in an airy loft nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge. Though the space doubles as a stockroom, stacked high with back issues, it’s clean and well lit and, naturally, a great place to do some light listening while you’re multitasking. A pair of turntables sit against one wall, one platter piled high with CDs, the other, on a recent visit, spinning a record playing warm, funky throwback soul. I walk over to read the label as it spins, figuring it’s some vintage ’70s obscurity, but an employee comes over and hands me my own copy—it’s something the guy’s own group just put out.

He gives it to me on vinyl, not CD, and I’m grateful, because there’s one other reason that vinyl will always be the superior medium: the album cover. Compared to the woeful postcard dimensions of CD insert art and the laughable thumbnails on our iPods, beholding an album cover, huge and bright and colorful and evocative, is like staring into the face of God. Wax Poetics fully exploits that appeal. You can read it for the articles—lengthy career-spanning essays on major artists, movements, and historical phenomena that shaped the music—or indulge in cheery, softball-tossing Q&As with lesser stars beloved among the crate-digger set. (James Brown sidemen are legion.)

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