Play That Funky Vinyl

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The magazine also has the exhilarating visual sweep of National Geographic, deifying vivid oddities like 1978’s rare picture disc for Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair, featuring vivacious funk godfather George Clinton—wearing fur chaps and a cowboy hat, with a boom box held to his ear—grinning wildly as he glides across the ocean, holding the reins of the dolphins strapped to his feet.

The best writing in Wax Poetics concerns the collector just as much as the collected: Anthology highlight “Make Checks Payable to Charles Mingus,” written by Karl Hagstrom Miller and reprinted from the first issue, details the ultimately failed efforts the domineering jazz bassist made to establish his own mail-order record label. A rarely discussed, facinating history, it’s bookended by the surprisingly affecting saga of Karl himself discovering three Mingus releases in a junk shop in Catskill, New York. Though he’s thrilled at his find, he’s also honest about when money trumps nostalgia: The piece ends when Karl sells all three exorbitantly priced records and buys a laptop.

Letting go is important in this business. Torres says he owns about 3,000 records, and that’s after paring down quite a bit—his wife and children now permit him to display them in their living room. As any music lover knows, deciding what stays and what goes is an arduous process, but he’s got a good guideline for identifying a keeper: It has to be a record he might enjoy as his grandfather once enjoyed his records.

Rob Harvilla is music editor of the Village Voice. Adapted from an article published in the Village Voice (Oct. 30, 2007). Subscriptions: $99/yr. (52 issues) from Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834.

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