Listening to the Wind: Encounters with 21st Century Independent Record Labels

By Ian Preece

Seek to get behind the scenes to the nitty-gritty of life in the more boutique, hand-to-mouth world of the independent music industry today? A world where the handful of vinyl pressing plants that still exist on the planet are creaking at the seams to keep up with demand; a world where middle-aged bearded hipsters and sixth-formers alike can be found thumbing through the racks buying (or re-buying) those classic Talking Heads, Can or David Bowie LPs; where copies of the new Tindersticks album on clear vinyl on City Slang are scarce; where a Nils Frahm LP is re-released by Erased Tapes a year or so on complete with a second LP of fan remixes; a world where you could fly to Europe in the time it takes to queue round the block on Record Store Day outside Rough Trade's Brick Lane shop. Part handbook for the hipster nation, part thoughtful probing of a semi-cottage industry that brings joy to millions, this is a celebration of sleeves, records, good taste, and all independent music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781787592100

Book preview

Part One

WEST COAST

1. MISSISSIPPI

I was supposed to meet Eric Isaacson at the Mississippi Records store as he opened up at 10.30. The night before, he emailed to say he’d forgotten that he was DJing in the morning – his only regular Portland gig, at an old folks’ home. They were having an ice-cream social; could we make it late afternoon? I had lunch with my family in the cool shade of the Chinese water garden in town. On the way out, it became clear that eating our takeaway sandwiches (from a nearby deli) in the Fish Pavilion had amounted to a grubby violation of the Garden of Awakening Orchids’ rules. (Still, less of an infringement than the guy who loudly answered his mobile phone in the Tower of Cosmic Reflections.)

At 3.15 Mississippi Records was still closed for lunch. I walked round the block, quiet houses baking in the Friday afternoon sun, nothing really happening on the streets of north Portland. Twenty minutes later I pushed the door open, tripped on the rug, and enquired at the counter if Eric was around. He’d be in shortly. I realised I was standing on a kid’s fluffy toy on a playmat, the kid himself was on his dad’s lap on a stool by the counter. I went to look around the racks of vinyl. Mississippi Records is a terrific shop – especially for blues, African music, jazz, folk and North American punk. The prices seem fixed in about 1992: $10–13 for many LPs, nearer the $20 mark for European imports. There are records everywhere; the striped awnings outside and a few large(ish) potted plants supply the only protection from the sun beating through the glass door. I clocked Jimmy Lee Williamson’s Hoot Your Belly on vinyl. Eric walked in wearing a cool, dark brown 1950s shirt, nodded and introduced me to Christopher Kirkley, the man at the counter with his son in his arms, and Chris’s wife, Karen, who was working the other side of the till. I should have recognised them from the Sahel Sounds documentary (see chapter 2). Christopher must have realised this was the Englishman who was due to interview him on Monday. We chatted about traffic, records, kids, until it was clear his son had had enough. He handed me a flyer for the Family Reunion Potluck Beach Hang that evening, out at Kelley Point Park on the northwestern fringe of the city: music at sunset by the Willamette River, featuring Mississippi Records recording artists Shelley Short and Dragging an Ox Through Water.

‘We’re gonna start with something a little uncomfortable, but that’s how you know it’s good,’ says Eric, introducing Philip Cohran’s ‘Tribute to Malcolm X’ on Portland radio station KBOO late one Friday night in June. Sun Ra’s ‘We Travel the Spaceways’ follows in a kind of half-hour bluesy astral jazz medley of Cohran/Ra tunes in tribute to the jazz legend who’d passed away a couple of days earlier. It turns out the trumpeter, band leader and Ra collaborator was a friend of Eric’s. They once spent six hours holed up in a bar during a snowstorm and Cohran took to quoting numerous philosophers, including Confucius: ‘the wise man uses music to strengthen the weaknesses of his soul; the thoughtless one uses it to stifle his fears’. ‘That really hit me,’ says Eric into the ether. ‘This is a heavy piece. I hope you’re in the mood for a heavy piece … I am,’ before queuing up Cohran’s ‘On the Beach’. The lovely earthy crackle of old vinyl, frankiphone/space harp melodies and tenor sax float through the night-time airwaves. I can’t imagine many things greater than sitting at home in your condominium with the lights dimmed, an ice-cold bottle of Pacific Rain, maybe some herb (legal in Oregon), flipping the dial then suddenly coming upon Eric’s Cohran tribute. He follows it with a couple of tracks from Zambia, one of which – Chrissy Zebby Tembo’s ‘My Ancestors’ – sounds like a mind-blowing Zambian fusion of Jonathan Richman, The Saints, The Feelies, Little Bob, Black Sabbath and Wreckless Eric.¹ Next up is Wreckless Eric, Michael Hurley, an excellent Link Wray cover of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash’s ‘Girl from the North County’, Françoise Hardy, then John Fahey’s ‘Sligo River Blues’. Softly spoken (when he does speak), Eric rarely interrupts the musical flow, just lets the music do the talking. Only three of these artists (Cohran, Hurley and Zebby Tembo) have been released on Mississippi Records, but in a way they’d all be at home there.

With the label and the shop to look after it’s understandable why Eric isn’t a full-time DJ on KBOO: ‘Yeah, I’m like a sub on KBOO: whenever somebody doesn’t show up for a shift, I step in. So if the Latin DJ doesn’t show up I’ll do the Latin show; if it’s the punk show I’ll do the punk show. Sometimes they’ll give me as little as five hours’ notice. I’m, Yeah, OK, I’ll be there. Luckily I have the store …’

Yet while he’s never short of records to spin, his only regular DJ spot is the one at the old folks’ home. Perched on the stool the other side of the Mississippi counter I ask how this morning’s gig went.

‘Oh, it was an outdoor dance party in the garden – real nice. I just play classic soul music. We had the 20-minute version of James Brown’s Sex Machine and everyone went wild and just danced.’

This is a residential care home?

‘Well, old folks aren’t as old as they used to be,’ reasons Eric. ‘If you really look at it, if you’re 77 now, then you were 30 in 1970 – you were hip, you were into James Brown, and that’s what you want to hear now. If I play Sam Cooke it’s too square or early for them, they want to hear later sixties or early seventies soul – Al Green, top 40 stuff. There’s some deep heads in the group, who know some slightly more obscure soul stuff, but I still like to keep it to top 40. Back then the top 40 was so good: Eddie Floyd, all the Stax records or the Motown records, Bill Withers, Etta James, you know, all the classic stuff. I get a little obscure with it sometimes – Aaron Neville, some New Orleans stuff – but not too, because the whole point is things that resonate, that they kind of know about. It’s great, I’m spoilt, I’m really privileged – it’s the best DJ gig in town: people cry for the ballads and dance for the hard songs. You play for the young whippersnappers in Portland and they’re all so disaffected it’s really hard to reach them and get them moving, or get them moved.’

It’s no surprise that Eric never plays Mississippi tracks at the old people’s home (though I’m sure they’d love Little Bob & The Lollipops’ ‘Stay’; Zebby Tembo too) – his canvas is larger than that, his generous spirit far beyond self-promotion. Ever since I’d seen a couple of Isaacson’s touring Mississippi slideshows at London’s Café Oto (evenings consisting of film footage, live music and Eric’s sagacious take on cultural imperialism, lost folk, blues and African artists) – ever since this book had been fermenting – I’d been keen to pin him down. The label, set up with Warren Hill², grew out of the shop (originally a block away on Mississippi Avenue). In the early 2000s Mississippi’s distinctive cardboard sleeves – appealingly simple blocks of colour, drawings and cool lettering exuding a kind of weatherbeaten grace – started appearing in racks. The vinyl within contained obscure, often crackly recordings that jemmied open a cornucopia of lost sounds from Africa, India, Georgia, Turkey, Mississippi, Georgia, Armenia … wherever. They seemed to speak to open-eared music lovers not totally at ease with the ‘world music’ set-up of super-pristine CDs and dancing jerkily in the aisles at a Latin festival. You’d never find a Mississippi side that was too clean, too polished or too produced: no download codes, no CDs; serviceable black vinyl only – and plenty of throat-clearing and coughing³, mumbling and laughing, children playing, and raw guitar and piano. Displaying such authenticity, the records sold in serious numbers, not least out of Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road, London’s finest international, or ‘outernational’, music shop, which provided an invaluable portal.

‘Oh, yeah,’ enthuses Eric, ‘Honest Jon’s – so cheap there, they make barely anything on their records. They’re like good Samaritans. I don’t know how they do it. Their mark-up is incredibly low. And they really did a lot for us, especially in our early days. I think they might have been the first people to contact us wanting to distribute our records. I don’t know how they even heard about us – I’m still confused by that – but we just got a note from them one day. On our first two releases they were like, Wow, we want to stock these. I thought they’d want ten copies, but they were, Well, we’ll take 200 of this one, and 200 of that one. I was, Oh my god, we only pressed 500! Who are these guys? God bless ’em. So they were very early adaptors, who were really great to us and kind of introduced us to the whole of Europe. And they were heroes of ours too, because their labels started before ours, and I was a really big admirer of their labels.’ Eric cites the Sprigs of Time: 78s from the EMI Archives LP as a particular favourite. But almost as crucial is keeping everything cheap in this day and age of rampant vinyl hyperinflation: ‘For me, that’s the most important statement that Mississippi is making right now – Honest Jon’s too – and not many other labels are making it. The one thing that sets us apart is we’re cheaper than everybody else, and I think that’s something that’s important: to make records an actual viable part of people’s economy, instead of just being a boutique item, just for specialists, which I don’t really like the idea of.’

I need little convincing of this philosophy (by the end of the afternoon I’m a hundred bucks down – the Mississippi till is famously cash only – but enriched immeasurably in blues history). There’s no question that if the records are cheaper you’ll buy more, take more risks. ‘Yeah, exactly, you don’t lose anything – if you do it correctly,’ agrees Eric. ‘For me, it seems smart. But there’s this understanding amongst consumers, I think – at least in America; I won’t speak for Europe – in America if people see a cheaper price tag they automatically assume it’s a lesser project [adopts Homer Simpson-type voice]: Well, this $18 blues record must be $6 better than this $12 blues record – which is totally the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard in my life, and yet I think that’s the mentality of the majority of American consumers in all things – and it’s a real bummer. I think our cheap price tag actually sometimes hurts our sales in America, crazy as that sounds.’

I remember when I first moved to London in 1989 and vinyl was ‘dying’, hanging about in Honest Jon’s basement picking up Wayne Shorter, Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane Blue Note LPs for £2.99 a throw.

‘Wow, amazing,’ says Eric, himself no stranger to the vinyl surplus at the dawn of the CD. ‘I think those days are gone – but they’ll come back. There’ll be a vinyl crash, is my prediction, because there’s been an oversaturation on reissues, so the market’s not going to hold. I’m looking forward to it. We’re like cockroaches [at Mississippi], we’ll keep with it and pick up all the scraps.’

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio the previous Easter, Eric said he’d been on his shift five hours before he remembered it was Record Store Day.

‘They’ve taken it [RSD] too far, too fast – you fly that close to the sun you’re gonna get burnt and fall. They’re just trying to create a hype, and it’s not a sustainable industry. It’s a shame, for I would love for it to be a sustainable thing – cheap, but available – but instead you’re getting this fad: Vinyl, $30, yadda yadda. It’s burning people out.’

A particularly appealing aspect of Eric’s Mississippi slideshows at Café Oto – aside from Marisa Anderson’s magnificent, wide-open American guitar⁴, Lori Goldston’s wintry cello and some tremendously watchable late-seventies Alan Lomax footage of electrified blues and kids dancing – was Isaacson’s wholesale dismissal of modern media. In the early eighties Lomax was ranting about cultural communication no longer being a two-way thing, more a case of the rich few with transmitters inculcating the vast poor, who were merely receivers. Eric in his talk noted how hundreds of indigenous cultures on the West Coast of America alone have been extinguished in the last 150 years; ‘culture’ becoming a mulched mainstream diet spewed out by a handful of networks – something Joseph Beuys must have been getting at with his proto fatberg, the huge lump of beef tallow, Unschlitt.

‘That was always the most shocking part of those shows for people,’ Eric reckons. ‘When I’d say there are almost seven billion people in the world and only two billion of them are on the internet. Like, who’s not on the internet? The poorest and the oldest. And who makes the best art and music? And who has the best culture? The poor and the old – and they’re offline. Our label is good proof of that. Ninety per cent of the stuff we put out has never been online before we put it out on a record – and it’s cool stuff. I think the internet has this illusion of being all inclusive when in fact it’s extremely bourgeois and extremely limited, and that was kind of the focus of that first show, to slap people around a bit.’

It reminds me of my days in publishing: for every bad book that gets published there are three good manuscripts in the recycling bin, certain voices getting pushed closer and closer to the margins.

‘Well, yeah, it’s the history of the world,’ says Eric. ‘People in power want you to have the illusion of unlimited choice – and freedom – but really, in the case of America, through capitalism and technology, the culture is very narrow. You’ve seen politically what’s happened here because of the narrowing of the avenues of communication: 35 per cent of Americans rely on Fox News and Breitbart to tell ’em everything that’s happening in the country, and they don’t listen to anything else, and that’s emblematic of a lot of things. Musicians can’t crack that code either. In the sixties a revolutionary musician like Bob Dylan could get himself on the radio, get himself into the ears of people – but that’s not really happening now, it’s more a case of pretty closed-off channels.’

I mention my staring out of the window during meetings at work, wondering how a label like Mississippi could get an album like 100 Moons: Hindustani Vocal Art, 1930–1955 – a record full of exhilarating moments but, over two sides, a fairly challenging listen for unaccustomed Western ears – into shops all over the world, while I couldn’t get a history of electronica off the ground in book form.

‘Well, that’s the thing, you’re maybe not answering to the dollar as much [with independent record labels] – more an immediate community around you that wants things. In the case of Mississippi, the label is actually customised for my tastes, but also for the customers coming into the store. So a small community of people determines what comes out because I know what they’re into. And we have a subscription club, and I kind of know their taste – so making things for a limited audience of 2000 people really frees you up. If you only have to sell 500 to 2000 copies of something, that’s pretty liberating.’

Just before flying to Portland I’d heard a stream of Shelley Short’s new album on Mississippi. Warm, folky and sparsely beautiful, Pacific City was recorded in Peter Broderick’s Oregon studio while the fog and rain of the Pacific enveloped the coast outside. Some tracks, like ‘Book under a Tree’, have a faint ring of early Laura Veirs; on others – ‘Death’, ‘Simple as That’ and ‘Wagoner’s Lad’ (a traditional song) – Short’s voice sounds ancient, an echo from the days of steamboats and the Yakama tribe fishing for salmon up the Columbia River Gorge. Eric has spoken in interviews of Peter Buck’s ‘commercial suicide’ in signing to Mississippi.⁵ It seems perhaps Mississippi are moving towards doing a few more contemporary releases again.

‘I’ve done a few over the years, but they’ve failed miserably,’ Eric sighs. ‘We’re the worst label that a contemporary artist could ever be on because we do no promotion, no tour support. We have nothing to offer an artist except for, you know, er … they get good distribution in stores around the country, and around the world. But other than that, we’re terrible. With old reissues we do really well because we have a built-in fanbase – history has confirmed them as important records somehow, and people trust our taste, to a certain extent. But then when we try to do modern stuff, people think, Ah, just some friend of the label’s or something. It’s not going to be good. Shelley actually lives in my house,’ Eric laughs. Brian ‘Dragging an Ox Through Water’ Mumford (‘a good guy’) helps out with Mississippi graphics too. ‘So every time I put out a new thing, it hasn’t worked out as well as I want it to – but I do it anyway. If it’s a local act, and I think somebody needs to do it, then, All right, I’ll pitch in for this. It’s worth doing, but they sell very modestly.’

So it’s still mostly reissues and archival stuff?

‘Yeah, but even with those it’s hit or miss. It’s changed a lot over the years. We had our 15 minutes of fame, where it seemed like anything we put out we could sell a few thousand of, sometimes as many as 8000 of a single release, which is insane for vinyl, especially in the early 2000s.⁶ But we kind of had the market cornered: nobody else was putting out the type of African records we were, the type of blues records … all these genres that were really important, that people really wanted, and record stores wanted to stock, but there just wasn’t much out there reissue-wise. Until about 2005–06, when suddenly there was a million reissue companies, so now we’re knocked back. And since we have no social media presence or internet presence we’re at a disadvantage, so we kind of survive on reputation and good distribution alone.’

I enquire as to what the researcher/compiler Ian Nagoski is up to these days. A few years back he too delivered a riveting talk in Dalston where he sat down and just played a bunch of recordings from Turkish, Armenian and Middle Eastern émigrés to New York in the twenties and thirties, and spoke between the records about the tough lives of the Ottoman diaspora in Manhattan in the inter-war years. Haunted, crackly shellac(ed) voices filled the near darkness of Café Oto, usually followed by some tale of woe relating to the singer or musicians.⁷ To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman–American Diaspora, 1916–1929 is a mostly lugubrious but occasionally furious collection of songs for violin, cello and oud – a kind of klezmer Anthology of Ottoman-American Folk Music, full of longing for Anatolia and the loss brought about by the Armenian genocide. Performed by the waiters, peddlers, fruit and coffee merchants of 8th Avenue and Little Armenia, the set was initially released as a three-CD collection on Tompkins Square Records before appearing on vinyl courtesy of Mississippi. Nagoski was also responsible for another fine Mississippi compilation, Brass Pins and Match Heads, a second volume of International 78s co-released with Nagoski’s own Canary Records. Side two opens with a run of three tracks that glimmer with a ghostly beauty: Hagami & Mohni’s fragile but infectious folk dance ‘Ghumar’, recorded in Rajasthan, north-west India in the mid-1920s; followed by the massed choral yodel of Jodlerklub Thun’s ‘Alpufzug’, which slowly builds in intensity as barking dogs and the rhythmic clatter of clanking machinery are woven into the melody. It sounds like a rattling tram – or at least that’s a fair assumption given that lead vocalist Jakob Ummel worked as a machinist and tram conductor before achieving international fame as a yodeller – but the cacophony is probably cowbells: Nagoski in his sleevenotes describes the track as being ‘a wordless depiction of the ritual procession of cattle up the Swiss Alps in spring’. Either way, it’s a hair-raising piece of music that somewhat pre-dates alchemists like Arthur Russell and Ian William Craig. The third track is a Persian lute solo by the dexterous Colonel Ali-Naqi Vaziri, which fades away beautifully into a rumble of static before Django Reinhardt kicks in. There’s Jelly Roll Morton on the LP, and fado from the lovestruck Amalia Rodrigues, born into poverty in Lisbon, the daughter of an unemployed cobbler and part-time trumpet player. Vaziri might have had titled military connections, but by and large this is an album of downtrodden dignity, a music of the people full of yearning. Back in 2011 it felt like both compilations heralded a new (very old) dawn. Ian Nagoski’s sleevenotes are excellent too.⁸ On records like these it feels like Canary out-Mississippi Mississippi. It’s been a while since the last Isaacson– Nagoski hook-up.

Eric laughs, ‘Ostensibly we have a five-LP set that’s supposed to come through pretty soon, but Ian’s funny. He’s one of these guys who’s working with no academic backing, no corporate backing; nobody’s funding Ian now, he does this out of love and passion for stuff. So for him to find the time and energy to do these projects … He’s meticulous. He masters the records himself, he’s pretty hardcore, so I don’t bug him. I just let him work at his own pace, then hopefully he comes with something for me one day. He just makes proposals for me, and I take most of ’em. I’ve passed on a couple, though.’

I press Eric on exactly what.

‘He came to me with one that was just laughing records – records of people laughing – and I was like, No way. And he came with another that was just bird records – you know, 78s of bird sounds. I said, Ahhhh, I don’t think so. They’re great, but maybe not anything people need – maybe an MP3? Or you can download ’em from a website. He had a gospel one – Ian, I’ve got plenty of gospel. I think he was really insulted I didn’t take the gospel one, but generally speaking I like everything he does and I really appreciate his liner notes. Ian’s too deep for his own good sometimes, but it’s great to work with him. I love working with guys like that, who know a thousand times more than me on something – it’s an education for me, a nice window into things, and such an advantage to have someone like that who’s willing to work with you. And we have a nice thing where I do the artwork for all those records and he’ll be really hands-off: Whatever, man. And I like that, and I get hands-off with letting him do the liner notes and sequencing. It’s a nice way of working.’⁹

The artwork for the Mississippi–Canary productions is sparsely beautiful too: the coloured-marble pinheads and the sulphurous cloud-like match-head of Brass Pins … ; the cool shades of green and blue in the slightly faded retro pop art of 100 Moons, Kesarbai Kerkar and Khansahib Abdul Karim Khan.

I ask Eric if he has another speaking tour planned.

‘I have to come up with a new presentation and I’ll probably come back. But that was a kind of weird fluke – I never intended to do that. Qu Junktions, a company in Bristol, it was their idea – well, it was Liz Harris [of Grouper]’s idea. She’s a good friend, and she was just watching me get kind of mouldy, sitting around at home, not leaving town, and she knew that in Europe people would be excited to hear what I have to say, and she was booked through Qu Junktions, so she mentioned it to them: Like, hey, call Eric at the record store and offer him to do something.’

They did call, and Eric bluffed his way with a sketchy outline of a film and slideshow thought up on the spur of the moment: ‘They said, That sounds great, we’ll book ya. I hung up and was like, Oh god, I have to come up with something now. I did, and those tours were shockingly successful – we sold out Café Oto four times in a row on the first tour. I think subsequent times we sold it out too, so, yeah, pretty great, pretty wild – and other places around Europe as well. I did a three-month tour the first time, 80 shows or something. It was insane,’ he laughs.

It must have been taxing, presenting A Cosmic and Earthly History of Recorded Music According to Mississippi Records pretty much every night for three months across three continents (the tour eventually reaching Australia)?

‘Ah, for me it was invigorating because at that time I had total radio silence. I’d never talked to the press, I’d never really done anything in terms of promotion for Mississippi, and on top of that I’d never been to Europe – oh no, that’s not true, I was in Paris once – but other than that I’d never really travelled that much outside of America. So it was thrilling not only to go to these cities but then be treated really well, and get to go and talk to people. I was always shocked that people would listen and enjoy it. I thought, This is crazy, because, you know, that’s not my vocation. Since I’m not a traditional academic or a traditional speaker – or a traditional archivist of any sort – my presentation is based on my limitations and this weird vision of how that should be. Then when I did it I found out, Oh, wow, this isn’t how everyone else does it. But limitations create innovation. I have strong ideas and strong opinions about everything, but the way I present ’em is definitely goofy and off. It works out though,’ he shrugs. ‘I had so much energy on that tour. I never got tired, I was just happy the whole time.’

Another tantalising aspect of the show was the revelation of just how much archive material Eric is, if not exactly sitting on, then at least has access to. There seems a never-ending supply of travelling Southern one-man band Abner Jay recordings. Then there’s Tony Schwartz, who was a kind of Alan Lomax of the streets of New York, armed with a microphone and 14lb open-reel tape recorder, hell-bent on picking up traffic noise, voices, songs, rain, sirens, the subway, fairgrounds, ships in the Hudson River, the Columbus Day Parade down 5th Avenue – sound pictures from the sidewalk right up to the top of the Rockefeller Center. Schwartz amassed hundreds of thousands of hours of the stuff, some of it from overseas, all of it currently sitting in the archives of the Library of Congress. Folkways have released several Tony Schwartz records, including An Actual Story in Sound of a Dog’s Life in 1958 (there’s a lot of barking) and New York 19 from 1954, which features grocers, flower-sellers, the proto rap of children’s ring games, Moondog taped on the sidewalk and someone digging up the road with a very rough-sounding pneumatic drill. I can see a beautiful vinyl taster on Mississippi: The Street Music of New York.

‘For every hundred projects I pursue, and for every hundred things that people say are gonna happen, I do maybe ten,’ says Eric. ‘But that’s pretty good. The Schwartz – that’s up in the air. I mean, that’s another massive archive, almost rivalling the Lomax archive: 3000 hours of audio. The Library of Congress is really cool about letting you go in and transfer stuff and deal with it, but I don’t have the time or energy, and I don’t have a project manager who’s excited enough about Tony Schwartz to do it. A lot of people have come to me about it [adopts excited breathy voice]: I wanna handle that Tony Schwartz project. ‘I’m like, Great, you have to go to where the Library of Congress is [Washington, DC – a fair schlep from Portland] and spend a month there working through the archives. Ah, well, on second thoughts … So that’s lingering in the wind.’¹⁰

Then there’s the not so small matter of the Lomax archive itself. At the time I spoke to Eric another five-LP box-set was in the works, being compiled by Nathan Salsburg, the guitarist who plays with Joan Shelley and curates the Lomax haul (along with Alan’s daughter Anna Lomax): ‘The late seventies, early eighties material that’s never been released. Really cool stuff that’ll have a book and everything.’

I wonder if there’s a book in Lomax’s endless notation.

‘I don’t actually like Lomax’s writing, I’ll make no bones about that,’ says Eric. ‘But I like his concepts and he’s a smart as hell guy, great at what he did, but the writing is not his strong suit. He’s written a couple of things I like, but most of it, I’m, Oh, jeez … It’s very, like, heavy-handed – purple is the word I always use.’

A far cry from Shirley Collins’s America Over the Water.¹¹

‘Oh yeah, that’s great, so good. She is great, so tuned in, and that’s such an honest book. It’s amazing, I love that book. She’s a real unsung hero – she really did a lot for that field-recording trip, was a huge participant in it and doesn’t get enough credit. I’ve never met her, but she seems great.’

The Lomax archive itself is endless. ‘It’s about 5000 hours of audio; 400 and something hours of film,’ relates Eric. ‘I don’t even know how many photographs – I want to say thousands of photographs too. He was such an obsessive guy, was recording non-stop until his eighties, and it’s intimidating looking at his stuff, what he’s done – you feel like a slacker, no matter what you’re doing. And he kept contemporary in his own way. People like to pigeonhole him as this kind of traditionalist, but he liked Prince and Michael Jackson – he was keeping up, he had a very open ear. Unfortunately he sort of craved the praise of academia – that was important to him – and I think that’s the kind of thing you never get, and I think that kind of messed him up a little. But his legacy is nuts, because it’s hard to wrap your brain around.’

So there’s always plenty more where Root Hog or Die came from, the six-LP Lomax centennial box-set?

‘Ah, yeah, that’s the curse of our label. We’re dilettantes – there are these little interests that we have, but we can’t do everything that needs to be done. Luckily, the Lomax archive is active with another bunch of people and they release stuff themselves online, so it’s not being represented by just us. If it were just us we’d be doing a criminal injustice to the archive because we wouldn’t be releasing nearly enough. But it takes a lot of people – there could be 20 companies dealing with that archive, and we still wouldn’t get it out there. Nathan is cool, because he understands the archive is immense, and he’s willing to work with other people. He’s very open to whoever comes with ideas: Yeah, go ahead, we can do that – but do it right.

‘The Library of Congress is getting pretty good at weeding through it,’ says Eric. ‘They’re making a lot of records: they’re doing a Native American record at the moment; Jalopy did Lost Train Blues, John and Alan Lomax, and other field recordists from the thirties and forties.’

Lost Train Blues, culled from the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, is an album Eric rates highly – ‘really good stuff … a killer’ – and I leave the shop with a copy. It’s a brilliant collection: there’s an early rap from East Harlem fish peddler Clyde ‘Kingfish’ Smith, some high-octane fiddle and plenty of wistful country folk and blues recorded behind the walls of various state farms – prison camps – mostly in the 1930s. Jalopy Records released it on vinyl in 2015, but it was manufactured and distributed by Mississippi. Much of the Library of Congress material is handled by Folkways, though. I ask Eric how he got into all that stuff.

‘Folkways was a huge influence on me,’ he says. ‘The Folkways thing was insane, because there was 2300-something records, so I just became obsessed with seeing and hearing each one of ’em before I died. Back then you could find Folkways records for two or three bucks, even the really good ones, all the time – nobody wanted them, so I amassed at least 400 or 500 Folkways records and I never paid more than $5 for a single one of ’em. I was making piles of these. I came up in the golden age when everybody was trading in their vinyl for CDs – the late eighties and throughout the nineties, really, in the Bay Area especially – it was insane what you could find. I never spent more than $5 on a record until the early 2000s.’

Along with Sun Ra’s El Saturn, Sublime Frequencies and Honest Jon’s, Eric cites the early country, jazz and blues purveyors Yazoo as a label he was consumed by (‘they had different compilers working on the label – Bernard Klatzko was the main guy and he was New York – but they did amazing, amazing records that are still available’). As well as ‘this label called OJL, which not a lot of people know about: the Origin Jazz Library. Ridiculous name, but they were the first label to really put out country blues, and they would make these really kind of crude covers. But the records are still, to this day I think, the best sequenced records for that kind of music; amazing records, and when I found those that was the game-changer – solid, top-to-bottom records.’ He lists Really the Country Blues, Really the Country Blues Again and The Country Girls as key compilations. ‘They did a Charlie Patton set that was great – In the Spirit, One and Two – and they had three volumes of Mississippi blues. There are a few others, but those were the ones that destroyed me. I couldn’t believe it. I just got obsessed, and the homemade packaging … I was very impressed with that – it looked like something I could have maybe drawn, and yet it was more beautiful, you know, these black-and-white pasted-together covers.’

Those sound something of a direct influence?

‘Oh yeah, hugely. I even ripped off the arrows for the I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore record from one of those.’

Eric was scouring Bay Area record bins while escaping his own lonely childhood – his dad had died when he was 13; he didn’t get on with his mum. He hated LA (his birthplace), systematically worked his way through the works of Philip K. Dick, the beatniks, Hermann Hesse and Jerzy Kosiński (‘the canon of alternative American literature … I read anything that was put in front of me’) and ended up living in Portland with his Aunt Natalie and Uncle Paul. But at one point Eric experienced the massive thrill of discovering that Jesse Fuller had recorded San Francisco Bay Blues, about his own tough life in the boatyards and on the railroad, just a couple of blocks from where the young Isaacson was living in Oakland. Fast forward a few years and Eric must have felt a warm glow putting out his own Mississippi 10-inch of Fuller’s earthy one-man-band folk blues, Working on the Railroad, with sleevenotes by Val Wilmer?

‘That’s his first recording. I just love that record. But that’s a record that just totally bombed – it hasn’t sold well at all. Maybe because it’s a 10-inch, I dunno, but to me that’s top-notch, there’s nothing as good as that. The liner notes are really good on that record, but that’s the kind of record which can really bum me out, because I think it’s as good as any record in the world almost and, you know, you’re lucky if you sell a thousand copies.’

Eric would love to release more Jesse Fuller at some point – ‘there’s more music from that session, but I don’t think it’s as good as the music that’s on that 10-inch’ – but goes on to relate how Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label was funded on the back of the Country Joe & The Fish song ‘Fixin’ to Die’, was the source from which Mississippi licensed their George Coleman (Bongo Joe), Fred McDowell and Reverend Louis Overstreet and his Four Sons records, and was recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institute (Folkways).¹²

Unfortunately, another tributary from the source looks like it might be running dry. An archive to match Lomax’s is that of folklorist and field recordist George Mitchell. ‘I’ve been obsessed with the George Mitchell stuff from pretty early on,’ says Eric. ‘And I was within a hair’s breadth of getting the whole archive, but Fat Possum, er, got it before me, so I license stuff through them. But George Mitchell is in the mix, he’s great, still around, just as enthusiastic about everything. He teaches photography in Georgia. He was never a scholar, or a professional or anything like that – he was just an enthusiast who’d go out and collect stuff. He just happened to have a really good ear and he’d go out and hit areas – him and Dave Evans hit places in Georgia that nobody else did – everybody else was hitting Mississippi. George managed to find whole genres of blues in Georgia that might have disappeared; one man stood between that disappearing and it being preserved. And some of it’s my favourite blues stuff.’

Sticks Over My Shoulder¹³ is an essential compilation of electric blues from the Mitchell archive. It features the slightly eerie high-note picking of left-handed bottleneck guitarist and Houston County plumber John Lee Ziegler, peanut and watermelon farmer Jimmy Lee Williams’s ‘Hoot Your Belly Give Your Backbone Ease’ and a couple of James Davis instrumental wig-outs.¹⁴ In 1980, when the tracks first surfaced, Davis was still performing every week in a rickety old schoolhouse in Perry, Houston, with his dad Ulysses and fellow bluesman William Robertson insistently pounding the kettle and bass drums (the crowd pumped up on shots of vodka and bottles of beer, which could be purchased for 75 cents apiece). A couple of the numbers – Williams’s ‘Have You Ever Seen Peaches Grow on a Sweet Potato Vine’ and Ziegler’s ‘If I Lose Let Me Lose’ – have been covered and adapted on Jake Xerxes Fussell’s recent albums for Paradise of Bachelors (see chapter 23). Fussell first heard ‘Peaches …’ when he was a kid – his father, Fred Fussell, being a field-gathering companion of Mitchell’s – and the tune stuck with him.

Before Sticks Over My Shoulder, Mississippi released the Troubled Waters collection, which also included James Davis (the blues surf of ‘Instrumental #1’) and the electric groove of R. L. Burnside’s ‘Goin’ Down South’, alongside Jessie Mae Hemphill’s unadorned rap ‘I Want to be Ready’. But Fat Possum records of Oxford, Mississippi (logo: ‘We’re trying our best’), have now started releasing full albums from individual artists in the Mitchell collection – ‘So that might be the end of our involvement with that archive, because they are covering everything pretty carefully,’ laughs Eric. ‘They just put out something like 12 records of Mitchell stuff, so we’re kind of, "All right …" But they’re really nice about working with us. They understand the value of having our comps out there too, because they kind of complement the series – they get people into it, move people towards what they’re doing – so we were pretty good with them, but that series … we might have to stick a fork in it.’

Way back, the scene in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity where the vinyl nut, at a loss to find anything else in a record shop, ends up rifling through the blues section, felt true to life. But, as I’ve grown older (and increasingly less likely to be employed in an office), I’ve spent many a lunchtime blowing on hot soup while the rain lashes against the kitchen window, listening to the plaintive swing of Mississippi collections such as Last Kind Words, or the trampled-upon lives of I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore. Especially, too, the devastatingly sad 2008 collection Fight on, Your Time ain’t Long, a record that also features its fair share of arrestingly beautiful female vocal performances: Louise & Joseph’s ‘Won’t That be a Happy Time’, Blind Mamie Forehand’s ‘Wouldn’t Mind Dying’ and Bessie Johnson’s ‘Great Reaping Day’ – even if Bessie, at times, roars like a pub landlady with a stick in her hand at closing time (which stops you in your tracks, but not quite as much as Kate McTell’s vocal delivery on ‘Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Round’ from Last Kind Words, where Blind Willie’s wife sings like a fox with its head trapped in a bucket – something that compulsively forces the listener to keep replacing the needle at the start of the track). Still, overall, the sheer desperation thrums through the crackle on a collection like Fight on … I ask Eric if he’s always been drawn to sad, minor key music – blues, and things like Gurdjieff’s Improvisations, where people apparently spontaneously burst into tears on hearing the pre-Second World War Russian harmonium player’s mournful chord arrangements.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he says. ‘Gurdjieff would invite people into his parlour, sit ’em down, look deep into their eyes, figure out what chord would make them cry just by looking at them, then he would play an improvisation based on that chord and just watch ’em burst into tears – and they’d be, er, purified after the experience. That’s heavy stuff but, yeah, I’m always attracted to the minor chords for whatever reason – sad-sack stuff. I don’t really like music as entertainment. Sure, I like dance music as frantic music and mad music¹⁵, but mostly I’m attracted to the downtrodden.’

And field recordings and the lo-fi – before any fragile, nascent beauty gets suffocated by coats and layers of studio gloss, or studio craft.

‘Yeah, I don’t do that stuff. I don’t deal well with studio recordings in general – it’s an artificial atmosphere. There are beautiful recordings made in the studio – I love The Beach Boys, and I love The Beatles – but it’s a limited palette, and people abuse that palette. Just like recording at home is a limited palette, but at least it’s a bit more of an honest palette. You’ve got better chances of success, I think, doing a home recording than a studio recording.’

In an old Vinyl Factory interview Eric outlined the two main criteria for Mississippi issuing a record: 1) there has to be an emotional heft to a release, and 2) the artist is someone he’d want to have a beer with.

‘Yeah, that’s really important to me. If it gets past that, passes my muster of someone I want to have a beer with, someone who hits me in the heart with the intensity of their music, then I can still test it on a few people locally, and be like, Ah, what do you think of this? and just look at their emotions. I’m not looking for if they’re going to buy it. I’m just looking at if they’re affected by it. A good example of that – you can ask Chris [Kirkley] about this too – is when Chris bought back that Mammane Sani record, and I remember we were both a little mystified by it, because it was so different from everything we’d ever done and heard. I was almost ready to pass on working with Chris on it; he was, Maybe I’ll do a 7-inch. We hadn’t quite clued into it yet – now we both love it, think it’s great – but when he first got it we weren’t sure, and I was playing it in my room and my girlfriend at the time busted into the room and was: What is this that you’re playing? I said, Ah, it’s this weird guy from Niger in 1978 and his organ. And she was, This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard you play. – "What?!!" So I sat with it a bit, and that opened my mind to it, and I wound up kind of excited by it, and it ended up being a big hit.’

Mississippi are also carefully excavating gems from the vast, rich library of recorded African music. However, ‘as an archivist, I’m pretty lousy’, maintains Eric. ‘I’m pretty minor league – there are so many people who go so much deeper than me. My talent lies in … I notice things that are missing in the landscape and I’ll tap the shoulder of someone who knows a lot about it and have them give me the pieces I want. But then I get very picky about the pieces that I think should be out there. I’m more of a curator than an actual researcher or academic. I’m not very well versed in anything. I’m a dilettante, I take a little bit of this, I know a little bit about that, but I do read a lot about stuff. If I’m producing a record from Kenya then I’ll read every book I can find on music from Kenya and get into it. And in the case of the Lomax stuff, sure, I think I’ve read every book Lomax wrote, every book about him – but that doesn’t make me an expert.’

In autumn/winter 2017, Mississippi (with Raw Music International and Olvido Records) issued three essential LPs of Kenyan guitar: the blues of wandering Lake Victoria troubadour Olima Anditi, recorded in a concrete slum in Kisumu on New Year’s Eve, 2010; a compilation of the father of Omutibo guitar (bass, rhythm and lead all on a single battered acoustic) George Mukabi; and a beautiful collection of modern day recordings, Usiende Ukalale (Don’t Sleep): Omutibo from Rural Kenya – largely cheery, hopeful acoustic songs from a genre that blossomed on Kenyan independence in 1963. On the latter LP the gruff, close-mic’d vocal of Jimmy Bongo brings to mind an East African Johnny Cash circa American Recordings. Johnstone Ouko Mukabi, son of George and a gardener on British estates living in a tin shack near Eldoret, features with the groovily infectious snaky guitar lines of ‘Kwetu George (I, George)’ and ‘Nili Kwenda Safari (I Went for a Journey)’. The pervasive happy vibe here belies the songs’ troubled content pertaining to the murder of Mukabi’s father by his in-laws in 1963 after a domestic dispute got out of hand. The subsequent ‘series of curses and counter-curses’, writes Cyrus Moussavi in the liner notes, ‘spread madness and despair among the families involved’. Before the track ‘Dickson Omuranda’, Fanuel Amimo, like Anditi and Bongo, blind (from glaucoma and diabetes), struggles to clear his throat and ready himself for the recording. ‘Sorry to give you trouble, man,’ says compiler–producer Moussavi. ‘Don’t mind, don’t mind. It’s part of life,’ laughs Fanuel.

Eric did make it to Jerusalem to meet Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the self-same Honky Tonk Nun of the 2016 BBC Radio 4 documentary – a riveting half-hour broadcast, but an oddly titled one given its subject has lived devoutly barefoot, composing piano pieces in a tiny room in the monastery of the Ethiopian orthodox church in Jerusalem for the last three decades. ‘They called her the honky tonk nun?’ queries Eric. ‘Oh, that’s weird.’

A friend of Eric’s first played him some meditative piano pieces of Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – an Éthiopiques CD (from the series made famous by Jim Jarmusch’s use of Mulatu Astatke’s cool seventies Ethio-jazz in his film Broken Flowers). ‘I got obsessed with it,’ says Eric, ‘and, fortunately, Francis Falceto, who runs Éthiopiques, I could work with him to license it, so I just went straight through him.’

How was Emahoy? And did he get to see the vast archive of unreleased piano music – endless scores stuffed into crumpled Air Ethiopia carrier bags, dusty reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes stacked high on her piano?

‘Yeah, I got to hang out with Maya [Dunietz, the Israeli composer who has set up the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation to help disadvantaged Ethiopian kids acquire musical instruments and let music into their lives] and see those scores and unreleased recordings. Emahoy was great. She was 90 when I saw her, and she speaks five languages. She’s brilliant: she’s sharp as a tack, a very erudite, with-it person. Very humble too; she lives in this Coptic Christian monastery in a tiny little room with a piano in it and some paintings she painted and not much else. Unfortunately the church, because she’s a woman, won’t let her play in the actual cathedral, which is criminal. They have this organ, and they won’t play her compositions or anything – it’s such a shame. But she’s very spiritual about it, and very humble, sort of takes it as it comes. But, yeah, she has a crazy story.’

Born into nobility and coming of age as part of the swinging set in 1930s Addis Ababa, Emahoy, when not racing a horse and trap around the city, was often found playing piano for her cousin, Emperor Haile Selassie.

‘She was one his favourite cousins to hang around with,’ continues Eric. ‘So when it came to leave [to study music abroad], he was like, No. I like having you around. I don’t want you to go. And she was so distraught that she went on a fast of starvation to prove how unhappy she was: she was stuck in Ethiopia, she wasn’t allowed to play music because she was a woman, and there was no classical music she could study. She really wanted to go back to Europe [she had discovered music at boarding school in Switzerland before the war] but the Emperor wouldn’t let her leave, so she did this fast and during the fast she saw these religious visions and sort of decided she had to get closer to God and become a nun.’

During her fevered visions Emahoy also decided to forsake music. She lived barefoot, devout in prayer, residing in a mud hut on the holy mountain of Guishen in the north of the country. But by the 1960s she was studying Ethiopian church music in the ancient city of Gondar and, after witnessing the plight of destitute young pilgrims sleeping outside her monastery, decided to utilise her gift for music in God’s name.

‘She kind of slid out of the country – as a nun – to go to a monastery in Germany and there she got to record her records in the sixties,’ says Eric. Spielt Eigene Kompositionen was released as a mono 10-inch EP in 1967; Mississippi reissued it on vinyl in 2012 – before bringing out a second eponymous LP of the remainder of the Éthiopiques 21 CD in 2016, complete with a beautiful gold and dark blue tip-on laminated jacket. My original scrawled notes read: ‘a dreamy fusion of Chopin and afternoon tea dance (you can also catch a hint of church music, as well as the open plains of something like I’m Going to Leave Old Texas Now in the track Homesickness)’ – a suspect frame of reference that would no doubt appal Emahoy who, Maya Dunietz relayed in between performing selections of Tsegué-Maryam’s music in Café Oto one warm June evening, considers herself in the classical tradition. (Apparently she didn’t take too kindly to her well-known number ‘The Homeless Wanderer’ being described as ‘jazz’. ‘She can sometimes be a bit of a drama queen,’ laughed Maya Dunietz. While her music can be uplifting and serene, Dunietz noted that Emahoy’s compositions tend to fall into four categories: largely unrecorded homages to Ethopia; laments to various departed members of her family; religious music; and music that sprang from her loneliness. A lot of this is solemnly beautiful, but, aside from a vague bluesy pull to ‘The Homeless Wanderer’, you wouldn’t exactly describe this music in terms of swaggering boogie-woogie or ragtime. ‘Honky tonk nun – that’s terrible,’ sighs Eric, shaking his head. ‘I don’t think she’d like that very much.’

The afternoon sun is moving round. Behind the counter in the Mississippi shop Eric gets up again to change the vinyl – side three of The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, Volume 2 (Barbès Records, out of Brooklyn). It sounds terrific on the shop hi-fi, more woody and resonant than the CD of Volume 1 I have at home. We’ve been interrupted periodically by people making vinyl purchases – Eric routinely rounding the price down – as well a couple of deliveries of boxes of potential second-hand albums for the store. A young woman in sunglasses seizes the moment to grill Eric on a few technicalities to do with her new record, self-released, which is ready for the pressing plant. The main issue seems to be whether to press a thousand copies or 500. ‘Ask for estimates on 500 and a thousand just to see the difference,’ says Eric, ‘and it’ll blow your mind. A thousand: 70 cents each; 500: 90 cents each.’ The conversation moves on to barcodes. Eric would never contemplate fouling up his artwork with such defacement, even if it might mean certain stores won’t take the records. If someone wants to put one there, get ’em to print a sticker, is the gist. Out of politeness, I turn the tape recorder off. Eric turns to me and says, ‘This is hardcore, you should be getting some of this.’ So I turn it back on again. The conversation moves on to adding a little gloss to the finish of covers to really bring out the contrast in black-and-white photography – and the grade-school mistake of not stuffing the sleeves yourself (‘that’s, like, 50 bucks you don’t need to spend’). There are three steps to getting a vinyl record made: mastering, cutting the lacquer, ‘then they take the lacquer in for electroplating where they make a reverse imprint of the original lacquer, and for that they make metal plates, and those metal plates are then used to press the actual vinyl’.

I ask how often test pressings sound just wrong.

‘It happens, maybe, one out of 75 times, which is kind of a lot. I don’t like those odds,’ says Eric. ‘If you don’t get a test pressing you’ve got no recourse with the pressing plant – you can be screwed out of hundreds of dollars and time. With the test pressing you can go back and forth with the master – make sure it sounds how it’s supposed to sound. It’s worth doing: weird stuff happens sometimes, it’s a very delicate process. If there’s something wrong with the test pressing then everyone will blame each other, nobody will take responsibility. Oh, it’s the electroplating. Then the electroplating guy will say, Oh, it’s the lacquer … Oh, it’s the metal plates, etc., etc. Oh, right, well, let’s just start over from the beginning again.’

And is it really true that coloured vinyl can mean diminished sound quality? Surely that can’t be so these days, given the sheer number of coloured discs? Is clear vinyl really the Holy Grail?

‘If people know what they’re doing, it shouldn’t make a difference,’ reasons Eric. ‘Certain compounds can fuck things up, yeah, but generally most people know what they’re doing now, it’s not affecting anything as much. Supposedly clear vinyl is real good; that’s the best.’

Kendall Core, the local musician who is asking all the pertinent questions, wonders if Eric always goes for a thousand copies of all his releases.

‘No, it depends on the record – sometimes as low as 500, or as high as 2000; sometimes 2500 if I think something’s going to be hot – but that almost never happens.’

‘What about Michael Hurley’s records?’ Kendall wonders (of the now Portland-based folk legend on Mississippi).

‘Oh, two thousand.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah, his records sell. Two thousand off the top, and I’m usually repressing, so I end up selling three to four thousand. He’s popular.’

A customer walks up to the counter with a Latin-looking LP and drawls, ‘I’m going to get this one for the cover alone.’

Kendall turns to me. ‘So, you’re in the middle of an interview?’

I explain about the book. Eric finishes chatting with the customer and turns back to us: ‘So now you know about the manufacturing process. What about the emotional process? I’m getting over the fear of printing a thousand records. You just have to go and do it, knowing you’ll probably lose money.’

‘Yeah, it’s not just the money part – it’s having all these physical things, the holding space,’ says Kendall.

‘Well, you’re a lifer, right? Music will always be there, and you’ll be stoked when you’re, like, 80, and you’ve got this thing. I’ve watched time validate everything,’ says Eric, sounding 82 rather than 42. ‘I’ve put out a lot of records that I’m still sitting on tons of copies of, but if it’s one that I love, one that I believe in, then I don’t care. You know: I have 500 of this thing, nobody wants it – great, well, fuck you, I think it’s great, and one day the world will catch up to it.’

Kendall asks, ‘What about licensing?’

‘It’s case by case, but if it’s an artist who’s alive, they get 50 or 60 per cent of all the profits, then I take 40 or 50; or they can have copies if they prefer that. Michael Hurley loves copies of his records, so if we do 2000 copies, he gets 500 of them and he sells ’em, 15 bucks each, whatever – pretty good money. A lot of old stuff, people who are dead, we make deals with their families, sometimes with archives, just depends. BMI¹⁶ – I don’t mess with all that stuff, most of my contracts have all that wrapped up into it. I own the catalogue for a few artists, Abner Jay and a few other people, on behalf of families if they don’t want to deal with it, but I don’t like that shit – owning other people’s music makes me feel a bit disgusting. I rarely do it, and if I do, it’s because they refuse to take care of it themselves. I own very few artists’ catalogues – three, or something – and it’s always because the families couldn’t handle it. I’m always trying to sign it back to them, and they’re like, Uh-oh. Keep it. But I