Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett (review)

Vinyl records as carriers of recorded sound have been described as a dying format for several decades. While their mainstream popularity may have waned, they are far from extinct in some quarters. Vinyl Freak, a relatively compact and intriguing book, is billed as "love letters to a dying medium." A mixture of a loving commiseration for a declining format and a discovery tool for uber-enthusiasts and curious listeners, the book stands out for its individuality, quirkiness, and authority.

Duke University Press published several of Corbett's other writings about sound recording (Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein [1994]; Microgroove: Forays into Other Music [2015], and "Ephemera Underscored: Writing around Free Improvisation" [in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (1995), pp. 217–42]). The author is also a musician, record producer and reissuer, adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and former columnist and now staff writer for Down Beat magazine. He draws on many of his Down Beat columns from 2000 to 2012 for this book.

Initially, I struggled to connect with Vinyl Freak. As I flipped through the paperback version, it yielded what appeared to be a formulaic design with an abundance of LP covers. At the end, however, there was a surprise (I overlooked the announcement on the front cover): a limited collector's edition, bright orange flexi-disc affixed to the back cover containing an unreleased recording of It's a Good Day by Dave Barbour and Peggy Lee, in a piano-vocal performance by Sun Ra (American jazz composer and experimental music guru). Even before getting into the stride of "track" one (chapters are called "tracks"), I was hooked, and the book became a literary version of an audio earworm—and a worthy read.

Though many of the artists and their rare, out-of-print LPs will be unfamiliar, most readers will enjoy the journey, learning something about Corbett, his interests and musical exploration, and bits about various artists and their musical output. It was all from a distant time, when life was a lot slower and collecting could be more arduous, often requiring patience and a lot of detective work. (I understand the collector's bug and desire, even though I may seek to deny it to my wife, who wonders what I will do with the piles of phonograph cylinders, transcription records, and other desirable collections that fight for space, cataloging efforts, and auditory attention.)

Attempts to reproduce previously published magazine columns, even with slight updates or postscripts, rarely works well, but on this occasion (though without comparing the book to the magazine directly), it seems to be wholly appropriate and relevant. As well as giving readers the potential to discover unknown or forgotten music, the book also underlines the problems of recorded sound going out of print and thus made inaccessible.

This is a particularly serious issue for the older (analog), less-popular, or nonmainstream music. Sometimes a particular version or release was well received, but because it was poorly distributed, it is found now only in disparate archives and private collections, if even that. What are the options if you want to do the right thing, but matters such as copyright laws and myriad of regulations stand in the legal way of rerelease? Hoping to discover a poor-quality dub, transiently uploaded to a video or music-sharing site without permission, may be an option—possibly the last option of choice—but it is hardly a responsible and enduring way of seeing that the music lives on for future generations to discover, access, and enjoy. For the recordings highlighted by Corbett, the reader is informed about its wider availability (or unavailability). In extremis, vinyl audiophiles resort to crate digging, auction or sale-site searching, and the broader collector's networks buoyed on by...