Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  In a print advertisement for the record, Paramount’s copywriter boldly extolled its virtues: “Everyone who has heard this record says that ‘HIGH WATER EVERYWHERE’ is Charley Patton’s best and you know that means it has to be mighty good because he has made some knockouts. You’re in for a real treat when you hear this record at your dealer or send us the coupon.”

  Even though he was a commercially viable blues artist, a physical record of Patton’s work has not endured, or at least not in its purest form (the same goes for nearly all of Paramount’s blues artists). As Edward Komara wrote in the notes to the Revenant set, “Listening to Patton’s records today is challenging, given the battered state of many of the surviving discs, the provincial nature of Mississippi before World War II, and the changes in music since his 1934 death.” Consequently, exactly how many copies of “High Water Everywhere” were pressed, how many were sold, and how many remain is tough to definitively ascertain. Richard Nevins guesses there are about fifteen copies still in existence. All anyone knows for sure is that if you find one, you’d best hold it close to your chest.

  Between 1929 and 1932, a slew of scout-recruited blues singers, including blues giants like Son House and Skip James, trekked to the Grafton studio from small towns in the South. The company was fading, but Paramount’s final three years were arguably the most fruitful, creatively speaking, of any American record company in history. Paramount’s discography from this period—from Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues” through James’s “Devil Got My Woman” and Patton’s “Moon Going Down”—is astonishing.

  Still, Paramount remained notorious for its poor sound fidelity and shoddy pressings, and it wasn’t terribly surprising when the company issued its final recordings, the Mississippi Sheiks’ “She’s Crazy ’Bout Her Lovin’ ” / “Tell Her to Do Right,” in 1932. By then, J. Mayo Williams had left Paramount for Brunswick Records and been replaced by the white, Port Washington–based executive Arthur Laibly, who didn’t know much about blues music or its audience. As Filzen notes, “the firm was becoming a dumping ground for mediocre or unknown artists.” By the following year, the label had been swallowed up whole by the Great Depression, remaining dormant until it was purchased and briefly revived by the collector John Steiner in the late 1940s. When the Grafton plant closed, some of its remaining dead stock was sold off in wholesale lots and some was offered to retailers at a deep discount, although exactly what happened to the bulk of the company’s records—and their metal masters—is unclear. Rumors abound: some folks claim that the factory burned 78s for fuel or used them to patch holes in the walls, but the reigning theory is that disgruntled Paramount employees, upon hearing of their termination, furiously hurled stacks of records into the Milwaukee River.

  When I called up Alex van der Tuuk and asked him what he thought might have happened to Paramount’s metal masters, he was ready for my question. “In 1944, when the company closed, all the metal masters had either been sold or scrapped to a local junk dealer in Milwaukee,” he said. “They did that because there was a lot of corrosion on the metal masters, and the building where the metal masters had been stored didn’t have any insulation. Pigeons came into that building and you can imagine what a bird does on a metal master.”

  The ones that weren’t corroded or caked with guano were eventually hauled to a storage facility in Port Washington. They sat there until 1942, when the War Productions Board launched a massive scrap-metal drive with the goal of gathering seventeen million tons of metal for Allied use in World War II. Most of Paramount’s masters were subsequently melted down, but a batch of about a hundred were leased to the Chicago-based producer Jack Kapp, who would eventually helm an American subsidiary of the British label Decca. After he purchased Paramount, John Steiner contacted Decca to reclaim the remaining masters. “He called up Decca,” van der Tuuk explained, “and he said, ‘You have metal masters that belong to me. Ship them back.’ And much to his own surprise, they did, and he kept them in his house up until his death in 2000.”

  Those masters—the only ones left—are supposedly archived with the rest of Steiner’s papers in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, although when I wrote to Julie Gardner, head of reader services at the Special Collections Research Center, she sent me the following reply: “While we have lists of various Paramount metal masters, I have not been able to locate the physical masters themselves. For instance, Box 33, folder 12 of the John Steiner Papers has a folder with a list of metal mothers for Paramount masters, 1931–32, but not the actual masters. Similarly, Box 46, folder 1 has photocopies of index cards listing the masters, but again, not the physical pieces. I am sorry we could not be of greater assistance to you.”

  I felt a little twinge. Of exasperation, maybe, but also of narrative possibility. What did it mean?

  Paramount ephemera is hard sought, and in 2006, the PBS television series History Detectives, following a tip from a local historian and blues fan named Angela Mack, decided to direct a professional scuba-diving team to the bottom of the Milwaukee to scour the silt for precious Paramount remnants. They dug for a while (and somewhat indiscriminately) but came up empty.

  Paramount’s blues 78s—particularly records by country blues singers like Patton, James, and Son House—are now extraordinarily rare, trading among collectors for preposterous, life-changing sums of money. In late 2013, the collector John Tefteller paid $37,100 for a copy of Tommy Johnson’s “Alcohol and Jake Blues” / “Riding Horse” (Paramount 12950) after an anonymous seller who may or may not have known its potential worth posted it on eBay. It was one of two known copies; the other, which Tefteller had also previously purchased, was found in what he described as “hammered condition.” This one, though, he called beautiful.

  Although I understand that Paramount 78s are prized because they’re nearly impossible to find (and, in fact, some have yet to be found at all), I also believe that whatever mysterious, inexplicable thing happened in that Grafton studio has something to do with their particular pull. Were these performances inadvertently fueled by the discomfort of displacement—having been recorded, as they were, by rural southern singers in an unfamiliar northern city? Could those performers have felt the incertitude of recording for a company so clearly on the brink of dissolution, and then responded to it with incredible fearlessness?

  I also couldn’t help but think about the records possibly deteriorating at the bottom of the Milwaukee, providing shelter for crawfish alongside crushed Schlitz cans and rusted car parts. It seemed eerie and surreal—a cold, watery death for the hottest music on earth. Nearly everyone who had worked in the pressing plant in the late twenties and early thirties was gone, and while a handful of researchers—Calt and van der Tuuk in particular—had worked tirelessly to gather first-person accounts through the 1990s, few revealing stories had emerged. According to John Tefteller, the game of Frisbeeing records into the river wasn’t even unique to the day the factory closed. “When they had excess plates or excess recordings that were going to be thrown away, what they would do is take them out and sail them into the Milwaukee River,” he told me. “It was the employees having fun on their lunch hour. They didn’t do it against the wishes of their bosses or anything like that. It was just excess material they didn’t need.”

  Well, I thought. That’s pretty interesting.

  / / Six / /

  We Are Not Drowning

  Scuba Diving, Claustrophobia, Money, Goonies, the Milwaukee River

  I had a sense, by now, that if you were around in the first part of the twenty-first century and wanted to assemble a 78 rpm record collection of moderate consequence, you needed to start praying for a windfall. The records would not emerge organically. Things were spoken for. All the obvious routes had been exhausted. All the less obvious routes had also been exhausted.

  Only preposterous routes remained.

  If you’ve never cold-called a scuba shop in Wisconsin with the intention of convincing the gracious Midwestern str
anger who answers the telephone to personally accompany you while you scour river silt for a pile of old, brittle records that may have been hurled into the Milwaukee River eighty years ago, and that, yes, you do want to dig around for them in shallow water while wearing a rented wet suit and rig, but no, you don’t know where, exactly, they were thrown from, and no, you’ve never been scuba diving before because you live in New York City, and actually, you’re really not all that athletically inclined, and also, this one time you were medically treated for debilitating claustrophobia?—honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it.

  I assembled a list of every scuba shop in the greater Milwaukee area, prepped a rousing speech that omitted certain damning details, and started dialing. After a few humiliating misfires (“You’re looking for what? Records of what?”), I was eventually given the phone number of a sea captain I’ll call Lenny—an old salt, to borrow a bit of sailing parlance—who led diving tours of shipwrecks in nearby Lake Michigan. He politely tolerated my long-winded introduction. As I continued talking, I was mortified to hear my voice growing progressively higher. I was basically squeaking; it’s possible he believed he was speaking to a small child. “Diving in the river is not something people do,” he finally said. “But.”

  I wouldn’t necessarily categorize what followed as a unilaterally positive response, but it wasn’t a definitive denial, either. He told me to call him again a few weeks before my trip and said good-bye before I could make any more high-pitched demands. The click of the receiver felt like a mercy bullet. I sighed.

  I had a tenuous lead, but I needed training. I figured scuba instruction would take an afternoon or two. I’d been to tropical resorts, I reminded myself. Tourists in silly shorts sign up for a ten-minute lesson on the beach and then plunge nose-first into the reef! Thousands of people do it every day! It could not be that grand of an investment.

  This was the first in a long string of idiotic assumptions about scuba diving. Learning how to dive is not particularly easy, nor is it cheap. (I was later reminded of John Heneghan’s fears about his own descent into collecting: “I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.”) Scuba certification is a grand, multifaceted endeavor requiring many hours of classroom instruction, a few full days of confined water training (usually in a swimming pool), and four open water dives (those can be completed over a period of one to two years). I was spooked by the commitment, but I convinced myself to carry on. I wanted records.

  Scuba diving is not a pastime typically associated with New York City, but this being a place that readily fulfills misguided fantasies, a cursory Google search revealed a handful of Manhattan-based dive shops that also offered lessons. I picked Pan Aqua, on Forty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue, and signed myself up for a three-night intensive class. The course would cost $295, I was told, and I would also be required to purchase a $65 textbook, a $38 DVD (the most expensive story ever committed to film), and around $225 worth of scuba equipment. Those prices did not include the open water dives (they run around $160 per day, plus gear rentals), which would also require traveling to a place—any place—more amenable to underwater exploration and spending at least two full days propelling myself down and back up.

  Prior to this particular moment, I’m not sure it’s even possible to overstate how uninterested I was in scuba diving. I panic in confined spaces. I find the texture of sand unpleasant. And while I pride myself on not being an especially hysterical person, if a fish swims within twelve inches of my exposed skin, I’ve been known to stage the kind of epic meltdown typically reserved for two-year-olds on airplanes. Although I can appreciate the athletic prowess involved, I’m so aggressively dispassionate about “extreme” sports that I shudder when confronted with an open bottle of energy drink. I am not a thrill seeker. I realized quickly that I couldn’t do this alone.

  I presented my case to my husband, Bret; it ended with my favorite argument-winning bon mot (“In conclusion, I will probably die”). He gave a spirited retort—pointing out that I was becoming worryingly delusional, consumed by nonsense, et cetera—but ultimately conceded to join me, in part because I think he half believed the part about me dying. I now had a reluctant partner.

  The afternoon I went to pick up the training materials and equipment at Pan Aqua, New York was in the midst of a weeklong springtime downpour—an ominous sign, but I persevered in earnest. Squishing back to the Times Square subway station in the warm, whipping rain, trying my best to balance an inverted umbrella, a bag of textbooks, and two three-foot-long mesh sacks (each stuffed with a mask, scuba booties, a snorkel, and fins) while also mentally calculating how many peanut butter sandwiches I would be required to consume as meals in order to justify the amount of money I had just spent, I felt the quick creep of doubt. And as I stumbled into a wall of wet tourists huddling near the subway stairs, bags slipping off my shoulder, bangs plastered to my forehead via a toxic paste of sweat and rain, I panicked fully. What the fuck was I doing?

  Here’s what I knew: the chance of actually finding any playable Paramount 78s or metal recording masters at the bottom of the Milwaukee River was essentially zero. Had I fully explained my plan to any close friends, I suspect every last one of them would have told me there wasn’t enough potential for success to justify the emotional, physical, and financial expenditures. But collecting isn’t a rational man’s game, and I had immersed myself in a community of single-minded men who’d dedicated their entire lives to improbable ventures, channeling vast amounts of time and cash and brainpower into their respective quests. At this particular moment, the only thing I had going for me was a willingness to do idiotic stuff. And, I hoped, a body still pliable enough to tolerate it.

  I practiced meditation techniques the entire way back to Brooklyn. I practiced the same meditation techniques while watching the endless instructional DVD, which I paused every few minutes so I could compose myself. (Apparently, even a video of someone breathing sixty feet underwater is enough to spur an anxiety attack in more delicate viewers.) I practiced additional meditation techniques the night before our first class, after I reminded Bret that he would have to meet me at a swimming pool after work, wiggle into a borrowed wet suit, perform inhuman acts until 11:30 P.M., get back on the subway, journey the forty-five minutes home, eat a slice of cold pizza, sleep, and do it all again the next day (twice more, actually).

  The morning of our first class, I received the following e-mail from my mother: “How’s the scuba diving?????? Are you ready? Good luck with it. Maybe someone will throw records in the pool.” I was a kid in a dunce cap, hunched in the corner, being laughed at by her own mother.

  The training itself—we spent the first half of each night in an empty day-care classroom and the second half in a health-club lap pool adjacent to the shop—was led by an uncannily serene man named Tom who handled my periodic breakdowns with seasoned aplomb. The first time I assembled and strapped on all my gear—a seven-millimeter wet suit, scuba booties, fins, a life vest–like buoyancy control device known as a BC, a forty-pound air cylinder, a mask, a regulator hose, a twelve-pound weight belt, and a snorkel—and stood, trembling, at the edge of the pool, I felt like Houdini, shackled in handcuffs and chains and preparing to leap off the Weighlock Bridge. Wet suits squeeze and compress your chest and limbs in ways I previously thought physically impossible; scuba masks completely seal off the top half of your face, including your nostrils. With a breathing regulator blocking my mouth, I was so claustrophobic I could barely stand to keep any of it in place (“Amanda, put your mask back on!” became a refrain familiar to my classmates). My fingers were numb. My throat was arid, scratchy. My panic response—talking as much as possible to anyone within earshot—kicked in. I needed a magical intervention. I turned to Bret, but he was sporting a similar look of distress, which only made me feel guilty on top of terrified. How had I gotten us here, swaddled in neoprene, cowering beside a swimming pool in midtown Manhattan at eleven on a Tuesday night?


  I took a clumsy breath of canned air, pressed my mask to my face, extended a lone fin, and stepped in. Fifteen seconds later, I climbed back out. Intellectually, I understood how a regulator works—it converts pressurized air into breathable air via a mechanical system of one-way valves—but inhaling underwater for the first time is a deeply disconcerting experience, like sticking your bare hand into an open flame and holding it there. I gave myself a stern pep talk invoking gods and expletives, tumbled back into the water, and gripped the side of the pool. I closed my eyes. I bit my regulator. I went down, and I forced myself to stay underwater.

  After a series of half-tentative, half-frantic breaths, I was able to temporarily retrain my body—WE ARE NOT DROWNING—and almost immediately, diving became significantly easier (although still not fun). All I could think about was getting air. In and out: a muffled sucking sound, a stream of bubbles. We are not drowning. I took a tentative tour of the pool, distracting myself from the facts of my situation by counting the lost hair ties congregating by a drain. Finally, Tom signaled for us to gather around him, and we began moving through the exercises outlined in our textbooks. Soon I was doing absurd things like removing my regulator from my mouth while sitting cross-legged in the deep end (a scene rendered more preposterous by the health-club patrons swimming after-work laps twelve feet above me). Eventually, I even let Tom turn off my air supply so that I could tug an alternate regulator off the front of Bret’s BC, clear it of water, cram it between my lips, and swim slowly to the surface while holding his air tank, thus saving my own life for what I hoped would be the last time.