Record fairs and borrowed nostalgia

It was a rainy, habagat-swept afternoon. Dark clouds hovered ominously over the country’s financial district. On the second floor of Makati Square, once a haven for collectors of pirated DVDs, it was all sunshine and good vibes all around. A different set of collectors have taken over. If there was a brewing storm outside, no one seemed to care. 

The place hummed with light conversation over music, vinyl, audio gear, and beer. The participants in this quarterly gathering mingled and merged as an obscure Pinoy disco hit from the ’70s blasted from the house speakers.

Twentysomethings, trentahin titos and titas, senior citizens, punks, jazzers, metalheads, city pop connoisseurs, all going through the rituals of record flipping, reading liner notes, checking the vinyl, haggling, putting their purchases in the ubiquitous tote bags. The event was the 50th staging of “Kagatan,” the quarterly record fair that has grown from record swap meet to a cultural touchstone.

To describe “Kagatan” as a celebration of community is to add a beauty filter to what is, at its barest, a gathering of addicts getting their vinyl fix, a dopamine collective shot in 45 and 33 1/3 rpm. Sure, a few kids were there for the scene and the IG content. They are forgiven. You can easily spot the serious diggers, which is to say, almost everyone.

You see them hunched over crates or kneeling to check out the cardboard boxes of used singles on the floor. You can inhale the intensity and vicariously share the joy of finding an excellent Shuggie Otis or Edgar Mortiz album, discovering a rarity for cheap or a grail find, or just a better copy of scratchy placeholder records. No music police here, no uptight self-proclaimed taste arbiter (plenty of those on Facebook), thumbing down on your acquisition. Michael Cretu? Cool find.

We are an obsessive lot, record collectors, touched by a bit of madness and resigned to the reality that our obsession will only be challenged by the onset of arthritic knees and hearing loss. We obsess over artists, producers, engineers, genres, even session musicians and album cover designers. A lot of us are completists, striving to acquire, by all means necessary unless it lands one in jail, a favorite artist’s entire discography, or all the pressings of a favorite album. How many pressings of Steely Dan’s “Aja” can one possibly own? A lot, it turns out. 

Record collecting is a personal, irrational human endeavor. That’s an admission against interest or an insanity plea. It lets you inhabit a private space of chosen decades, genres, or artists. It’s also a vow of self-inflicted poverty. And there are collectors who consider it their mission to  rescue artists and their works from cultural oblivion, a record collector being a curator of memories and a keeper of pop culture artifacts, both popular and obscure. In the normal world, it’s called hoarding. 

Sure, there’s the nostalgia factor. At 64, I have plenty of nostalgia to feed my record obsession. 

From the ’70s until the early ’90s, I was a classic rock fascist. Today, my choices are more catholic, inclusive, a bit weird for some. I have developed a love for disco, which I loathed back then, as well as radio-friendly pop, old-school R&B and funk, hard bop, and artists nearly forgotten like Nick Drake and Karen Dalton.  

The good old days

There was no need for record fairs back in the ’60s and ’70s. Vinyl records were available everywhere. Aside from stand-alone record stores you can buy records in department stores and supermarkets. In college, flush with moolah from my allowance as a campus paper editor, I frequented a store in Quiapo selling used rock albums, all imports. For cheap local pressings, the go-to place was the Mareco record label warehouse on the ground floor of a pre-war building in Escolta.

By the ’90s, stocks were drying out at a time  when I had disposable income. Vinyl records were becoming collector’s items. The  few stores that sold them were Rastro in Greenhills (where I scored a Canadian-pressing of Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira”) and Shop and Lift owned by Ricky Lee.

Ricky Lee’s corner shop was a crash course in the classics. Memorable finds: A UK-pressing of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” with a misprint of Jon Landau’s name; “His Band and Street Choir” and “St. Dominic’s Preview” from Van Morrison which I have until now. Makati Cinema Square was already the place to go for record collectors, but geographically inconvenient for an often-hungover working stiff from Quezon City. 

Other than a few record stores, you can only find vinyl records in garage sales, flea markets, and thrift shops. These were pre-owned, ungraded records you buy blind. You just hope that the previous owner was that rare owner who cared for his or her records and didn’t use them as beer coasters. Those dirt-covered, worn-out records? They may just need thorough cleaning, especially out-of-print classics like “Samba Song” by Bong Peñera.

Thrift shops often sold crates of sealed local pressings for P50 each. Unsealed ones went for P25. When the budget’s tight, I end up looking for small tears in the plastic cover and  pull it halfway when the salesperson wasn’t looking. Like I said, by all means necessary and not illegal.

The industry by that time had declared vinyl officially dead as a music format. The entry of Tower Records opened a mouth-watering selection of albums reissued on compact discs. Out went my vinyl records and the turntable (I know, I know) and in came CDs, lots of them. Everyone was raving about the clarity, the extensive catalog, but no one bothered about the barely readable liner notes, the sound compression, the so-called digital distortion, the listening fatigue.

Apostles of digital hailed CDs for the crystal-clear sound reproduction. Vinyl, they said, had surface noise. The British radio DJ John Peel had a perfect retort: “Somebody was trying to tell me CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise.’” 

Borrowed nostalgia

I can’t place the exact date, but sometime around 2013 or 2014, something triggered my return to vinyl. Perhaps it was a music player app on the early iPad models that added scratches to the audio. You can even adjust the level of surface noise. It even had this graphic of a needle drop on a record. I started with the few vinyl records I still kept and bought a portable player, much hated by audiophiles, before upgrading to a decent turntable and amp a few months after. There was no turning back.

The local vinyl community did not just survive the official declaration of the format’s demise but had grown. There were more sellers, more physical stores, institutions like Bebop Records, Erick’s Records, NEC, Stereofiles Audio, Backspacer Records, Treskul, Profound Audio and online sellers like Red Records and Frederick Magat. More record fairs like “Kagatan” and local albeit unofficial stagings of Record Store Day. More collectors, new and returning prodigal sons and daughters. 

With it came the demand, and over the years, with vinyl emerging as the leading format, came jacked up prices for second-hand vinyl, pricey reissues, and new releases that sound like rubbish. The industry bigwigs and some greedy sellers, having a gold mine handed to them by consumers, are out for a cash grab, choking the very medium that is keeping music and vinyl alive. Sorry for the old man rant. 

As a member of the analog generation, I welcome the analog revival among Gen Z. I understand the yearning for the tactile, the touch and feel absent from the sensory experiences of a generation raised on streaming and the dictates of algorithms that rob a person of personal agency. There is genuine satisfaction in seeing younger collectors buying albums from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, a generation with no actual nostalgia for it, just a hunger for the culture and the music.

I had just paid for a copy of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Raw Power” when I felt a presence hovering over my shoulder, not intrusive, more curious. I turned and saw a young lady, tote bag on her shoulder, one hand holding a paper bag, smiling and nodding at my acquisition. I guess that means OK boomer. – Rappler.com