I’ve been collecting things my whole life. It started with comic books. As soon as I could read I had a stash of comics that I refused to get rid of. I was physically incapable of throwing away a comic book. Like lots of kids my age I also got into Star Wars figures (and Adventure People and GI Joe but never Transformers) and baseball/football/basketball/hockey cards. I spent hours poring over price guides and classified sales ads daydreaming about the fortune I was sitting on and the various fortunes I’d soon have if only I could talk my mom into giving me a stamp for the envelope.
Last month I saw a tweet from Steady Sounds advertizing some soul and funk 45’s they had on eBay. I popped over to check them out and ran across this Lee Morgan LP whose price had been bid up over $550 for some reason. I get that some records are rare (not the music, but the particulars of the pressing or of the label or the sleeve or whatever) but this seemed like it was even further out than normal. The title of the listing had some abbreviations I didn’t understand, either (W 63rd RVG EAR DG), but I have enough collector dork experience to know that they are shorthand for something important to someone. My spidey sense (nerd reference! was tingling like crazy so I had to start poking around to find out what the hell these things meant. Searching and reading led me here and to here, which laid out the case pretty plainly. This Lee Morgan record hits all of the marks for a first-pressing of a Blue Note LP, right in the sweet spot for Blue Note LP collectors. Some more poking around showed me that this isn’t even terribly expensive for a record in this narrow band of interest.
I’ve gotten better about fighting off the urge to collect. I can recognize that sometimes wanting the thing feels better than having the thing. There was just something about seeing this record that set off some weird adolescent chemical reaction in my head. Really weird. Weird to the point that I was compelled to come here and write it down.