Last time we talked about Jen Matson over here it was to call attention to some early 90s writing she did in Writer’s Block #7. She also helmed her own indiepop fanzine in the 90s called Nonstop Diatribe, and through it all to the present day doing a radio show/podcast, she’s quite clearly someone with the record collecting disease. Check The Record #1 is an analog celebration of the analog sickness, done up in such a bright, breezy manner that you’d be forgiven for thinking that collecting records had somehow been very healthy and to be encouraged all along.

I actually suspected this whole thing was going to be Scottish records only, an ode to “Edwyn” and “The Shoppies” and whatnot, but it’s a more generalist whirl around her collection and how it came to be. Like the price stickers piece is totally great: photographic evidence of non-removable price stickers on various records she’s bought, along with the story of acquiring that record and the trade-off involved when she came to realize that peeling the thing would cause more damage than it was worth. Let me say it right now, for all of us: I’ve been there. 

The Scottish piece is great too, total thrill-of-the-hunt stuff, maybe not as mind-boggling as that Fŏrdämning piece “The Dirty Year”, but I was right there with Matson as she relays being taken to the “special basement” at Edinburgh’s Avalanche Records to have her pick of whatever treasures she wanted. I still have dreams like that, and I don’t even collect records anymore. There’s also a humility-first advice column about putting information into the crowdsourced Discogs, and about the creeps who sometimes populate the site and try to one-up these free laborers. 

Her partially facetious (I think) ode to the CD long box is really the ultimate glass-half-full paean to something that I remember being hated from the first day they appeared. In the late 80s I asked my parents for Coltrane’s A Love Supreme LP for Christmas, and I got it, except that my father somehow thought that the CD long box version of it was a 12” record. Dad…!!! I recently spent an hour at his house helping him set up his “cellular phone” (totally baffled), his laptop (he couldn’t get past the login screen) and even showing him how to find the Xfinity On-Demand channel so he could pick movies to watch. He’d told me and my sister that “Comcast changed the channel on me” and we totally shared a good laugh, thinking he’d sat on the remote or something and knocked his cable service offline. Turned out Comcast actually had changed the channel, and after showing Dad how to use the buttons on the remote to browse the guide, he was fully back in the business of entertaining himself.

Anyway, after my Coltrane long box fiasco – I brought it back to Rainbow Records in San Jose to exchange it for the LP, and they didn’t have the LP – I wouldn’t actually buy my first CD for another three years, until 1992. And I’m soooo proud of what it was: Monster Magnet’s abysmal Spine of God, sold back to a used store before the week was up. I’d forgotten all about long boxes until Matson’s piece, so there you go – she just spurred me to tell a couple of uninteresting stories in the service of talking about her new fanzine. See what yarns you can spin about your own record experiences by grabbing Check The Record #1 here.