Over-the-top record collecting mania is so often also accompanied by a sense of shame, of failure, of waste and want and paths not taken. Not with Jen Matson and her Check The Record fanzine, the second issue of which has just come out. She’s in the hardcore record accumulation racket for good, and her fanzine’s a celebration of all the foibles and follies that this passion – shared by many of you, I’ll surmise – entails.
Check The Record #2 leads off with a piece about how her Seattle house may or may not have been in the process of being severely damaged by the weight of her record collection, and how she called in a structural engineer to assess the situation. There’s never really a thought given to purging her collection; it’s more “how do I keep my records, and ensure my top floor doesn’t collapse?”. All this piece did was stress me out about homeownership and the visible ceiling crack on our lower floor, even though at least I know it’s not caused by my embarrassingly small record collection. (However, I will wistfully point out that had I kept every or even most records I’ve purchased since the early 1980s, I’d have one hell of a collection, especially since I had so many of the landmark hardcore punk 45s at one point. Now I have memories and a whole lot of CD-Rs).
There’s what amounts to an advice column on how to care for flexidiscs, along with a piece about the time the Television Personalities had their career to date summarized in Record Collector in 1991. As in Check The Record #1, Matson’s wide-ranging taste eventually zeroes in on an immense love for both Scottish pop and the Flying Nun/New Zealand discography.
The piece that resonated the most with me details the many times she bought the wrong record that was put out by a band with the same name as her desired band. So, buying a single by “The Wipers” instead of Greg Sage’s Wipers, or by a shout-scream band called Camera Obscura instead of the lush Scottish pop Camera Obscura. Since she’s bought probably 20x more records in her lifetime than I have in mine, I don’t have as many stories springing from gotta-have-everything mania. There was the time at age 14 when I went record shopping in Berkeley, as recounted in this thing I wrote here:
…Being a kid, and therefore having limited allowance money to spend, I bought two 45s that first day that I’d been hearing on KFJC: “Antmusic”, by Adam and the Ants (yeah!), and X’s “White Girl”. Such was my musical cognitive dissonance at the time, though I suppose it’s not as far a leap as it might once have seemed. Trouble was, I thought when I bought “White Girl” that I was actually buying a frantic, female-fronted punk rock song I’d heard on the radio once before, which was “100% White Girl” by San Francisco punk band THE VKTMS. Expecting that song, but instead getting Exene’s whiny, nasally voice and the methodical pace of the original “White Girl”, I was thoroughly bummed as I listened to it late that night, after my grandparents had gone to bed, of course. When you only have $6 to spend, and you “waste” $3 of it on one of the best days of your young life, it can be pretty crushing. Of course, now I love X‘s song, and I wish I’d held onto the Slash Records 45. Never did end up buying the Vktms record, either….
These are the stories of our lives, my people. Like sands through the hourglass. Jen Matson gets it. If you want to check out her fanzine, issues #2 and #1 are both available here.
Fanzine Hemorrhage 