This weekend, the New York Times profiled the burgeoning market for rare, often folk, private-press releases, recorded in the '60s and early '70s, and produced "largely in runs of a few hundred copies and in many cases far less." The article describes the appeal to collectors ("But for music fans who celebrate obscurantist work, a rare gem is only worthwhile when it's properly aged, like a fine Bordeaux") and names a few labels trading in private-press records (Numero Group, Gear Fab, Drag City), but this fun fact is what grabbed us:
But (Gear Fab)'s Honus Wagner baseball card is Perry Leopold?s Experiment in Metaphysics, an album that sells for more than $3,000 on eBay in its original, shrink-wrapped vinyl iteration. Only 200 copies were pressed by Leopold, most of which were given away on a Philadelphia street corner one August afternoon in 1970.
Three thousand whaaa? We're looking for someone who's heard Experiment and would be willing to appraise it. Perry himself "doesn't think it's as good as people think it is," but then again, he was "on pot and acid and everything else" when he recorded it (i.e. Either he was too fucked to have recall, or too fucked to have played well.) So, we'll trust your word over his.
But in describing the "freak folk" phenomenon, the Times had to go and bring Joanna into it-- and trust us, she won't be happy. In explaining private-press market dynamics, NYT states:
Much of the demand is being driven by the alternative music scene known as freak folk. An entirely new genus of fan ? drawn to a very specific brand of pastoral, loopy acoustic music ? has coalesced around this movement, which is spearheaded by young singer-songwriters like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom.
True or not, better not say that Joanna's face. She recently told Billboard:
I think some people perceive me to part of a movement or something that I don't really associate myself with.I think there's a lot of fakery, a lot of monkeying and posturing, a handful of kids who just latched right onto what they saw as a scene, and set themselves industriously to the synthesis of a particular vibe, and I'm pretty insulted when I occasionally get credited in the press for having anything to do with the dissemination of that vibe... I'm not part of some epic, bracelet-clanking, eyes-rolled-back, blasé, nihilistic scenester cult or anything.I've seen some awful displays, let me tell you.I've gone to some shows that have left me feeling heartbroken about the state of music.A soulless, mindless, watered-down, image-obsessed, artless stab at John Fahey or Marc Bolan or Karen Dalton or Donovan or Vashti Bunyan is no less lame than, like, Nickelback or whatnot.There are so many kids who have this energy, you know -- you can tell they were into, like, electroclash five minutes ago, or whatever was big in Williamsburg or Berlin at the time, and now they've grown their beards out and they're doing this thing that they think they understand, but they don't understand at all, and I just find it exhausting to have to consider what they do "music."
Yeah, she can write a mean harp tune, but who knew our favorite Newsom gave such great sound bite? (For the record, she doesn't help her case by being signed to Drag City, but we argue not with such eloquent, scenester tongue-lashings.) Someone should ask her what she makes of this North Korea nonsense.
