Mid-vacation EXCLUSIVE Uncle Larry content, preceded by a dull, meandering prelude
It dawned on me just before how fortunate I am that, as a writer-type person who’s been freelancing for more than five years, I’ve only been screwed over once for work I’ve done. The culprit was a crappy little marketing publication called Ballyhoo that never got off the ground. They owe me $600. They’ll pay, in this life or the next.
Part of my good luck in this regard can be traced to my law degree and license, which invest me with the means to be more of a pain in the ass than the average freelancer. Not that I make a habit of threatening to sue! sue! sue!, because there are more intelligent ways to handle such situations.
See, editors and publishers inclined to welsh on their commitments are usually dumb. It’s been my experience that a well-mannered letter delivered via certified/registered mail prompts them to trip over themselves to cut a check. If you learn one thing from these sporadic dispatches, let it be this: People are terrified of certified/registered mail. They incorrectly believe that signing for such a missive makes them legally liable for its contents. If you need to get somebody to do something, put it down on paper and send it over certified/registered.
Anyway, while clearing off the PC desktop, I came upon a short story I wrote a few months back for Harp magazine. It was about that “greatest music collection” guy who got a bunch of press earlier this year. The guy, Paul Mawhinney, proved one of the most generous interviewees and genuinely decent people I’ve come across in my journalismisticish travels. His story deserved much more than the 450 or so words we gave him… which wound up being a moot point when Harp folded a few weeks after I filed.
I was bummed, mostly because Harp was one of the best music titles out there, but also because I like being paid for work I’ve done. I’m sort of finicky that way. Owing to the weeks that elapsed between when I wrote the story and when I learned it had been orphaned, I couldn’t find another publication willing to run the thing. Somehow, the canon of western thought is no poorer for its non-appearance.
So, because I don’t know what the hell else to do with it, here’s my little story.
*****
Most people would call a 160,000-strong record collection an extravagance. Paul Mawhinney called it a good start.
And so it was in 1968 that Mawhinney moved his records out of his house and into a 16,000-square-foot, climate-controlled facility. He quit his job as a salesman for the Morris Paper Company and, following an offhand suggestion made by his wife, opened up Record Rama in Pittsburgh.
Then, of course, he bought more records.
He bought them at flea markets, at high-end collectors’ klatches, from radio stations making the transition to CD, from distributors planning to leave them out with the morning trash. Forty years later, Mawhinney’s borderline intimidating collection – three million records and 300,000 CDs strong – went out to auction billed simply as The World’s Greatest Music Collection.
It’s hard to underplay the historical import of what Mawhinney, 68, has assembled and meticulously catalogued (he invented the Music Master database to keep track of everything under his roof). He estimates that only 17 percent of the music in the collection is available on CD, meaning that much of it could vanish into the aural ether before too long.
That’s part of the reason he’s selling. “I can’t support what I’ve done with my life any longer in this place. The retail end [of the business] is stone dead,” he says. Following a few false starts, Mawhinney had narrowed down the bidding to several potential buyers as of early March, all of whom would keep the collection intact (a prerequisite for any sale) and, eventually, digitize it. While “loathe” isn’t a strong enough word for Mawhinney’s opinion of digital music – “they kill the basses and they kill the highs, then they compress what’s left” – he nonetheless wants the music to survive for future generations.
There’s a lot for them to discover, by well-established acts and never-weres. The collection includes Elvis Presley’s first five Sun discs, which were only sold in Memphis and are worth $6,000. It boasts one of only 300 pressed copies of a mono Rolling Stones disc made for, and summarily rejected by, FM stations, worth around $10,000. It includes the first flat record (a collection of bugle calls by Chief Trunoeter Cassi of Roosevelt Rough Riders) and CD (Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”) ever produced.
The collection also comes with other incidentals: the SpinClean record-cleaning system, which he bought from accessory giant Recoton; the Discmist cleaning spray, CD Saver storage sleeves and Yellow Jacket archival sleeves that Mawhinney invented on his own; six publishing companies and eight record labels; all sortsa recording and listening devices, previously on display at the Vocal Group Hall of Fame Museum in Sharon, Penn.; and memorabilia, like a super-rare, six-foot-by-eight-foot Beatles promo poster from their 1965 visit to Pittsburgh.
Oh yeah – and it comes with Mawhinney himself, who hopes to remain attached to the collection as curator. He’s probably the only qualified person on the planet for that gig. Despite some health issues – diabetes has left him legally blind – he still catalogs and collects every day.
“It’s what I’ve done every day of my life,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was my life’s work until it was my life’s work, if that makes any sense.”
