Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  King acquired a copy in a trade with a collector he will still identify only as “Paul” (“It sounds more Mr. Arkadin–esque that way . . . Jeez, I don’t want to give up all my secrets!”) in late 2012. When I visited him in November of that year, a few days before Thanksgiving, he didn’t make me wait very long to hear it. We decamped to his music room with tall glasses of Turkish iced tea and he let me have the good chair, the one behind his desk, the one that faced the speakers. I made him play it for me again several hours later, right before I left, and I sat and stared at the turntable, watching the record spin, feeling flabbergasted anew that anything so alive-sounding could be carved into a slab of shellac. I had sipped some stronger drinks by then, but still: the entire experience was so disorienting that I lurched off into the icy Virginia night without my coat and scarf.

  King is well regarded as an engineer—he’d been nominated for six Grammys and won one in 2002, which he now stores in a cardboard box labeled ACCOLADES—and his ability to wrangle usable sound from gouged and battered records was astonishing. It was so astonishing, in fact, that I periodically questioned both its origins and its manifestations. What did King hear when he listened to his records? What did I hear? Those discrepancies, when and if they existed, were they physical or metaphysical? Had I just blithely annihilated my eardrums via a catastrophic combination of punk-rock records and shitty headphones, an end-of-day blaring ritual that had eased me through several years of life and work in New York City? Or was it more complicated—was it a function of need? Did King hear more because he needed more?

  “I can hear stuff that’s on a different frequency than a lot of other people,” King said. “It’s also really irritating. I can be in the living room reading with fans going and Betty could be in the library lying on the floor, but I can hear her heart beating. She’s a small dog. I have an intense, acute sense of hearing. It’s selective; I can turn it off when people are talking. Is it a form of autism? I don’t know.”

  What was certain was that his work required a great deal of ingenuity. The turntable in his music room was littered with oddly sized bits—matchsticks, tongue depressors, little plastic ice-cream spoons—that he used to weigh down the tone arm based on assumptions he’d made or things he’d learned regarding certain studios or recording sessions. He accommodated for factors like ambient humidity, or a tilt in the floorboards, or a distraction on the part of the original engineer, who may have been daydreaming or hungry or new at the studio. When he was working on remastering records for Revenant Records’ Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, an epic, seven-CD compendium of Patton’s work, he managed to suss out a second voice on Patton’s “I’m Goin’ Home”—a whole other person, singing along from a different room. “It’s definitely there,” he shrugged. “No one knows who the hell it is.”

  What King did, in these instances, was something akin to translation, and it was useful, generous work. Sonically speaking, 78s can be intimidating—the music they contain is often ancient sounding, so obscured by years and circumstance that it becomes too distant, too historic, to be properly felt. Shrouded by mythology and crackle, it’s easy to forget that Charley Patton sang about fucking and heartbreak and shit that pissed him off—all the same stuff people sing about now. King humanized and demystified the performance by isolating a breath, a foot stomp. Some goon waiting outside.

  Sometimes King’s mission had to do with how a record was played and the shape it was in when he got it. Was the Victrola crooked, were people dancing so vigorously that the needle kept jumping, was the record stored in a damp basement or a drafty attic? Mostly, though, he was compensating for the shortcomings of a then-nascent technology (most records weren’t recorded precisely at 78 rpm, and some weren’t recorded anywhere near that speed). The same night King played me his Gaspard we also listened to Robert Johnson’s “Hell Hound on My Trail,” a song I’d heard hundreds of times before, only it sounded different, clearer, more vigorous. I asked King about it. He smirked. When I looked at his turntable, I saw it was spinning at 79.4 rpm and that he had placed a Popsicle stick on top of the stylus. It felt like a magic trick. A conjuring.

  I’ve since consumed several of the most gluttonous meals of my adult life with King, a dubious gastronomical streak that began in the front seat of King’s Volkswagen, then parked outside Dudes Drive-In in Christiansburg, Virginia. The aftermath was bleak, spiritually speaking.

  “I feel like I just ate a small child,” King announced. The remnants of a hamburger steak sandwich quivered in his lap. I squirted more ketchup packets onto a cardboard boat of tater tots, which I’d strategically positioned on the dashboard for continued ease of access. A typewritten track listing for Mama, I’ll Be Long Gone, a collection of songs recorded by the prewar accordionist Amédé Ardoin and recently reissued by King, was Scotch-taped to the glove box. I was careful not to smear it. “I’m gross,” I mumbled to no one in particular. I took a long pull of Coke. My mouth was still crammed with cheeseburger. King had warned me about the culinary limitations of our destination—the way he put it was, “If you flew over at night, the area would be illuminated with the lights of a thousand deep fryers”—but we didn’t try especially hard to circumvent that proclamation. Cursory consideration was paid to the barbecue restaurant next door, but their evening’s scheduled entertainment (a pair of longhairs strumming the Statler Brothers’ “Flowers on the Wall”) had functioned as an instant appetite suppressant for King. I could see that much on his face.

  A few weeks earlier, I had convinced King to let me tag along on a junking mission—the procurement of records from people who don’t know or care to know their worth, financial or otherwise—to the Hillsville VFW Flea Market and Gun Show in Hillsville, Virginia, a sleepy little town in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about twenty miles from the North Carolina border. King had been lucky there before, although he also warned me that it might be a tremendous bust: “I’ve gone almost every year for fourteen years,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Some years I’ve done quite well . . . Scored a [Charley] Patton once, several Henry Thomas records another, a Reeves White County Ramblers another, a large stack of Polish string bands another. Last year I came back with nothing . . . It’s just like that. But it is a stinky, dusty, terribly early trek (you have to hit it, and hit it hard, early on Friday just as the sun comes up).” This, I knew, was how good records got found—not by belatedly stopping by the Jazz Record Collectors’ Bash in suburban New Jersey. And while I wanted to watch King work, I also wanted to see what sorts of things I could find for myself.

  On the Thursday before the market opened, I met King in his office at County Records. Getting to Hillsville on time required driving the two and a half hours from Charlottesville to Christiansburg, spending the night, and waking up before six to finish the trip. King was a good traveling companion, not above friendly ribbing (he immediately gave me shit about the size of my duffel bag—which I still contend was reasonable—as he hoisted it into his trunk), amenable to frequent stops (in part so he could smoke), and prepared to discuss, at length, all the grand failings of humankind, both as they related to our individual lives and to the whole of the species. (“It seems like I only enter into an abysmal depression every year and a half or so, and it’s usually because of having to go to Whole Foods.”)

  We also talked about records. King had developed a marked disdain for collectors who issued compilations of their finds but failed to procure the necessary support documents—the ones who didn’t provide meaningful context for the music they were promoting. As far as King was concerned, collectors should embrace research, and the ones who refused to were dilettantes. “They don’t feel like they need to fill in any information, and so it creates this imaginary, artificial mythology,” he said. “It’s a pretense that covers up a banality that they don’t want to reveal to others. ‘We just like this—we don’t want to tell you about it.’ The people who impress me are the people who b
ecome so obsessed with the music that they do everything in their power to get the best-condition copies of the discs, and then find out everything they possibly can about some really obscure, arcane musician or type of music. Then they provide it. They don’t withhold it.”

  I still hadn’t quite worked out how I felt about most 78 collectors’ obsessive desire to contextualize—in the worst instances, to synthesize spotty research into quasi-academic narratives—and I still wanted to believe that these records were significant on their own merits, independently of any applied historical heft. It was music, after all. Why distance ourselves from it? Modern listeners, I insisted, didn’t have many chances to experience art in a vacuum, devoid of cultural currency and freed from the constraints of time and place. Wasn’t it an opportunity? A thing to treasure?

  He didn’t say as much, but I’m fairly certain King thought I was being naïve, if not willfully oblivious. There were some eye rolls. I brought up Wiley. Didn’t he believe “Last Kind Words Blues” was good enough to devastate a roomful of, say, rural Swedes who didn’t know anything about the country blues or Mississippi or rare 78s? Who hadn’t yet engaged in a spirited debate about whether she says “bolted meal” or “boutonniere” or “broken will” at the end of that early verse? He made a face at me. “There’s just too much richness to be derived from the context of the original recording,” he said. “Reckon it makes me a pessimist or killjoy, even though I’m a true believer in the redemptive power of Geeshie.”

  Ultimately, King and I would end up spending more time bickering about this than anything else—I had taken to arguing that Wiley could destroy anyone, anywhere, regardless of what he or she knew or didn’t know—and a few months after I got back from Virginia, when I started up about it again, he sent me the following e-mail:

  “Here’s a thought-experiment. Rather than the 78 being presented to a bunch of rural Swedes, Albanians, or Greeks, why don’t you have the actual Geeshie Wiley show up in Albania and [the Albanian clarinetist, violinist, and singer] Riza Bilbyl show up in Jackson, Mississippi? Do you think that the reaction of a bunch of rural Albanians to Wiley’s music or a bunch of sharecroppers in Mississippi to Riza Bilbyl in the 1930s would differ from their reaction right now? If so, why? Now, remove Geeshie and Riza and replace them with a battered, only-known copy of their respective 78 but retain the two different date spreads . . . would the reaction to their greatness be diminished or intensified by the introduction of this base artifact rather than the real thing?”

  I mean, he was right: time and circumstance shape our understanding of art in substantial ways. But what I still couldn’t unpack—probably because I often caught myself conflating the two—was whether my subjective context (the fact of me, where I live now and when I was born, my understanding of heartache and what I ate for lunch) can or should be trumped or augmented by a more objective context (the fact of the song, of how and where and why it was made). I remain a staunch believer in the subjective experience, but I am skeptical, sometimes, of objective significance. As an engineer, King was tasked with balancing all contexts: what he wanted to hear, what he was supposed to hear, what was actually audible. John Muir’s famed assertions of interconnectedness—“When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe,” he wrote in his journal in 1869—felt applicable.

  That Thursday night, after we’d arrived in Christiansburg and scrounged supper at Dudes, King and I commandeered a pair of beige-colored, $49-a-night beds at an Econo Lodge near the highway. The hotel was set up like an old motor inn, with two levels of rooms emptying onto concrete balconies. A fleet of cable repairmen were tailgating in the parking lot, slapping wads of hamburger meat onto hibachi grills and emptying endless cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. I entertained a handful of cheery solicitations while wandering around with a plastic bucket, hoping to ice the bourbon I’d brought from Charlottesville. When the timbre shifted from jovial to menacing, I darted back to my room, piled all the unbolted furniture in front of the door, unwrapped a plastic cup, poured myself a drink (neat), and fell asleep horizontally with all of my clothes still on.

  King and I had agreed to meet up in the lobby at six A.M. sharp. Before I’d left New York for Virginia, I’d asked King if I needed to bring anything in particular with me. He’d sent this advice, which I was tempted to print out and tape to the inside of my closet door, like Joan Didion in “The White Album”:

  So, you should pack:

  a) water-bottle

  b) knapsack

  c) comfortable shoes that you can burn afterwards (I’ve read that ladies in New York do this all the time, so this is more of an afterthought)

  d) handkerchiefs (viewed from the moon, Hillsville at noon would appear to be a dust storm, as if it were over the Sahara)

  e) change of clothes or two (I even offend myself after three or four hours at the market)

  f) a disbelief in what humanity can bear

  It seemed comprehensive—and applicable to a variety of reporting scenarios. I dressed in a pair of cutoff Levi’s, a white tank top, and my old Converse sneakers. I filled my water bottle from the bathroom tap, secured it in my backpack with my cell phone, notebook, pens, and recorder. I pulled my hair into a knot on top of my head. I rubbed my eyes. I felt like I was preparing myself for battle, or for indoctrination into some brotherhood of shared trauma. I dragged the furniture away from the door, strapped on my backpack, and walked outside and toward the lobby.

  The moon—a blue moon, incidentally, which felt portentous even from the Econo Lodge parking lot, typically a romance-obliterating sort of place—was still sunken and teeming in the sky. Despite the lack of sun it was already hot, or maybe just moist; every time I inhaled, I felt bloated, sticky from the inside out. While I waited for King to appear, I poured myself a cup of tepid coffee from the lobby pot and watched the local news on TV. A skinny teenager named Levi Moneyhunt was being interviewed regarding his participation in something called the Catawba Farm Fest, which seemed to involve him playing “old-time music” on a yellow Flying V electric guitar. I was underlining the words “Levi Moneyhunt” in my notebook when King arrived. He was dressed in jeans and a tucked-in brown T-shirt. His leather-and-canvas rucksack contained an antique record-carrying case, complete with cardboard separators, where he could stow and protect his purchases.

  Following a brief consultation, we decided to take breakfast at the Waffle House on the other side of the parking lot. I ordered a plate of fried eggs and smothered hash browns. The toast—wheat, a concession that now strikes me as absurd—was so thoroughly saturated with butter that it could no longer ably support itself. I gobbed a tiny tub of grape jelly on top of it and shoved it into my mouth anyway. It seemed smart to renew our resources, bank some energy. While we forked our eggs, King outlined his plan for the day. We’d head directly to a record dealer he’d had luck with before—a guy named Rodger Hicks who trekked to Hillsville every year from Forest Hill, West Virginia, a couple hours north. King knew where his table was typically located, and he knew we needed to get there early. After that, we’d walk around for as long as we could stand it, looking for records concealed amid other relics. I asked King what I should expect, broadly speaking. “You’ll want to take a picture,” he said. “You’ll be stunned. By how many people, how thick the people are, how thick the tents are, how big the whole thing is, and I guess by how disgusting it is.” I told him I’d seen some pretty grody displays in Brooklyn, like this one time a guy in track pants vacated his bowels on the sidewalk outside my apartment. I received an eye roll. We tossed down some cash for our meal, climbed back into the Volkswagen, and sped off.

  King and I approached Hillsville from the north, rolling through miles of bucolic countryside, up and down, smoothly, like a surfer straddling his board at sunrise. There is a moment in late August, in the South, where the landscape gets nearly obscene—overfed and cognizant of what
comes next—and unleashes a final, boasting parade of virility. Abundance was in the air. Just a few miles outside of town the yard sales started, driveways and porches crammed with junk. Out-of-towners were coming, with cash, in pursuit of they-ain’t-sayin’-what, and anyone lucky enough to own property along the primary artery to the market was taking full advantage of the sudden influx, luring shoppers off-course with renegade wares. Entire houses appeared to have been turned inside out. Traffic slowed. There was some aggressive browsing. People were caffeinated. King, for his part, was stoic, unswayed by the siren call of unregulated product, and by 8:40 A.M. we had parked at a lot in town (five dollars to the man in the overalls) and were marching, briskly, toward Rodger Hicks’s tent, past the vendors with fanny packs of small bills, past the women tearing open packages of gas station donuts and unleashing tiny puffs of powdered sugar. The air was airless—heavy and close, like a wet sheet.

  Tramping through a flea market with Chris King is oddly thrilling, like getting tied to the back of a heat-seeking missile, or being RoboCop. As we moved steadily toward our target, King scanned various tables and booths, pointing out any vendor with a gramophone—to King, the most obvious signifier of a potential shellac windfall. I can’t overstate how good he is at this; he can turn a corner and point out a Victrola in about 1.5 seconds. I, meanwhile, was distracted by nearly everything (“Oh, I had this exact Alf doll when I was a kid!”), and for each whiskey decanter shaped like the Great Chicago Fire that I paused to admire, King discovered another sagging box of old media tucked inside a teak midcentury buffet. At this point, he was only making mental notes of spots to revisit. We needed to get to Hicks by nine A.M., when the flea market officially opened and vendors could begin selling their goods.