It all started with the pants on the living-room floor.
That struck me as odd. I don’t usually keep my pants on the living-room floor. In fact, a lot of things struck me as odd when I came home from work one day last fall: the opened dresser drawers with their contents thrown everywhere, the jimmied-apart window, the back door standing wide open. I don’t think I quite understood until I got to the shelves that previously held my CD collection. Empty. Dust where hundreds of albums used to sit, the detritus of college radio DJ geekdom and years of collecting. I put my hands out to touch the vast nothing that had settled upon the shelves. The idea that all that my music had disappeared was unfathomable. You’d have an easier time voluntarily separating me from my spleen.
I think the first person to say the word “burglary” was the 911 dispatcher.
The thing about having your record collection stolen is that when you tearily confide this to your music nerd friends, they are not sympathetic. Oh, no. They stare at you with rank envy. Apparently, music nerds secretly desire to scrap their entire collection and start over. What could be better than casting off those records you keep only for sentiment’s sake, all those youthful buying mistakes, the albums you only listened to twice, or the ones with only one good track? Then, they say, you can rebuild a better collection, as pure as diamond, as precise as Swiss timing.
In theory, it doesn’t sound bad at all. But what happens when somebody decides to scrap your record collection for you?
Let’s go back to that night when it was just me, the pants, and the empty shelves.
It is cold. The dispatcher has warned me not to touch anything until the police get there, so the wind blows through the still-open window and back door. And just in case the scene is not yet creepy enough, while prowling through the backyard to see if the burglar had accidentally dropped anything of mine on the way out, I discover a fairly large knife lying in the bushes. Nice. It gives me something to think about while waiting for the cops.
For the record, that night’s call response time:
Domino’s Pizza: Twenty minutes
Oakland Police Department: 7.5 hours
Seven and a half hours is a long time to spend alone envisioning your brutal stabbing death. Luckily, I had previously made other plans for the evening. In a tremendous stroke of irony, a friend and I had chosen that night to double our collections by burning each other’s CDs. There’s an analogy to be drawn here about whether burning copyrighted materials constitutes a thievery only slightly more subtle than breaking into someone’s house. But the moment my friend arrives with his laptop, all I can think about is how desperately I want to fill the enormous void that has suddenly appeared in my life.
We go ahead with our now slightly surreal plan. Waiting for the OPD, we pirate away. We copy Erlend Øye, Lemon Jelly, Señor Coconut, Smokey & Miho. It is like throwing stones down a very dark well.
The cops take so long to get there that we run out of discs to burn; my friend goes home, and our bootlegging operation avoids detection. Once they arrive, the police are terribly nice about everything. They dust every shiny surface in the house for fingerprints that don’t materialize, and provide helpful hints to prevent future break-ins. They fill out a report and estimate the monetary damages. But music is not money.
For the next few days, people keep asking if it’s scary to live in a recently burgled house. (This is after they are done openly salivating about wiping out and rebuilding their own record collections.) Not really, I tell them, although there are sneaker tread marks on my bedroom door, which I have gotten into the habit of kicking open in case anyone is hiding behind it. Instead, I am developing a low-grade anxiety about what has become of my favorite albums. Although I am fairly certain that they have actually been disposed of at the flea market, I imagine my burglar listening to them around his house and totally failing to appreciate them. Would he know to play both discs of Dusk at Cubist Castle at the same time? Is he using the Tigermilk case as a coaster because it has a picture of a naked girl on it? Does he know that the 2 Many DJs albums are imported all the way from Belgium?
I spend a lot of time staring at my empty shelves. I console myself with the idea that a music collection is not an object; it’s just the physical manifestation of your own personal tastes and hard-won knowledge. It is, essentially, all in your head. And because you always have the blueprint with you, it can be rebuilt.
A clever friend suggests that I try to recoup my collection from local record stores where the burglar might try to resell it. Most record stores have a theft recovery policy: Bring in a list of what’s missing, and if someone comes in to sell a used collection that looks suspiciously like yours, they’ll buy it for bottom dollar, then sell it back to you for the price the store paid. “There’s a ring in hell reserved for people who steal record collections,” the guy from Streetlight promises in comradely fashion when I give him my list.
Okay, maybe not everyone is so nice. When I call Amoeba and list some of the missing albums, a buyer snarks, “You’re better off without the Superchunk.”
Within days, Rasputin reports it has recovered sixty of my CDs. I practically sprint to the store. There they are, nearly in the order they were taken off my shelf. I have missed them so! I don’t even feel chumpy shelling out the $40 it takes to buy back my own records, including some albums that, truthfully, I never liked and some I have not listened to in ten years. I attempt to hug them, their pointy jewel cases stabbing me in the sternum.
I eagerly thumb through the recovered CDs and come to this conclusion: Burglars hate the Softies. Or perhaps it’s just that electronic music and hip-hop discs are easier to resell without the aid of a record store. So while a chunk of my rock albums turn up, after a week or two of fruitless calls to every store in town, it’s clear that everything else is gone forever.
It is time for the insurance claim. People: Renters’ insurance is awesome.
I fill out forms and make a list of the missing titles, worried that the insurance claims guy will think I am making them up. Seriously, who names an album Burningn’n Tree?
But it’s no problem. Within days, a check arrives, along with a note to the OPD alerting them that if my music is ever recovered, it is now the property of the insurance company. I picture my claims adjuster sitting at his metal desk in a gray suit and tie, hands neatly folded, listening to my Invisibl Skratch Piklz albums. A fantastic thought.
Even more fantastic: I have been given the mind-mangling sum of $2,000 to replace my missing records. You can guess what I did next.
Panic.
Yep, that’s me, bright and happy a few days later, at the music store with two grand to kill. But within five minutes I can tell this is a horrible mistake. It is too soon. All of the albums in the resale bin look eerily familiar. I am certain that they have somehow slipped past a buyer who forgot to consult my missing record list and put them all back on the floor. Fully squicked out, I buy the first five albums I see that look vaguely interesting (and appear to not have been formerly owned by me), and then flee.
It takes me another two months to go back to the record store and do any significant buying. Okay, there were reasons. Like, it was Christmas, and everyone is busy at Christmas. Also, I was buying a couch from IKEA, which is a process slightly less complicated and time-consuming than actually going to Sweden and building it yourself.
But the real reason is that reconstructing my collection hadn’t been as fun as I’d thought. It’s much easier to add to the edges of an existing collection than to start over from scratch, with all the pressure to do it right this time. No more dud albums! No more sentimental favorites that actually sort of suck! I begin to realize that there’s a substantial part of my old record collection I don’t miss at all. Now, as I contemplate buying those albums a second time, some of them just seem like filler. Some of them are downright embarrassing. (Barcelona? Why?) I discover an enormous disconnect between what I thought I liked and what I actually listened to.
I have no idea where to begin again. So I ask for advice. A survey of random music collector friends yields these delightfully helpful suggestions:
- Buy two wildly divergent categories like Thai pop and death metal, just to see what happens.
- Buy the entire discography of a terrible yet massively popular band like Boyz II Men and listen to a track a day until you get what the fuss was all about.
- Buy only vinyl, which will thwart future burglars by weighing one zillion pounds.
- Buy chronologically, starting with the entire discographies of influential bands, and work up to the present day.
- Buy a few old favorites and burn the rest from friends, and then sink the rest of the money into new and risky purchases.
- Scrap the whole music thing, and spend the money on a vacation somewhere quiet.
More confused than ever, I take refuge in that mainstay of geeky inaction: extensive listmaking. In addition to the List of Missing Albums generated for the insurance company, I also churn out the List of Albums to Definitely Rebuy, the List of Albums to Maybe Rebuy If I Can Find Them Used Somewhere, the List of Albums That I Didn’t Own Before But Really Want Now, and the List of Albums to Burn from People Who Originally Burnt Them from Me.
These are lists that I color-code and highlight. Using a ruler. Truly, I am pathetic.
And then one day, the time has finally come. I go to the biggest record store I can find. I have brought the lists, and have memorized my friends’ recommendations. But within moments, I realize I am doomed. The record store is opulent, full of a million albums I want to hear. I will never stick to a plan. I do not have the patience to track down the entire discographies of seminal bands before I can buy the albums they influenced.
I don’t want what I should want.
Screw the lists.
Instead I am a kid in a candy store on a sugar high, my arms loaded out to my elbows with treats. I buy back the MC Solaar, DJ Shadow, Red Snapper, and Streets albums I lost, because I missed them terribly. I rebuy a Playgroup album because even though I’ll be sick of it in two months, I’d only listened to two tracks before it was stolen, and I wasn’t done with it yet. I buy a Restiform Bodies album because I’m curious about it. I buy the new Lamb album because Louise Rhodes’ voice is like a woolen blanket on a cold day. I buy the Shins because they somehow remind me pleasantly of the Beatles during their goofy years. Even though I haven’t liked their recent albums so much, I buy the most recent Belle & Sebastian because they are a sort of lilting yet unstoppable cultural force you ignore at your own peril. I buy the Stephin Merritt-scored Pieces of April soundtrack with great self-loathing, because although it is product from a Katie Holmes movie and half of it is simply rereleased material, I am a sucker for the Magnetic Fields. I buy albums I have never seen before, and ones that are old and familiar. I buy them because they call to me. I buy them because my house has been quiet for way too long.
By the time I make it to the cash register, I have only just dented the $2,000, and my fledgling new record collection is already a mess. It’s sloppy and sentimental. It’s all over the map and probably full of mistakes. But I don’t care. I am happy.
It turns out I was right about one thing. My record collection was never really missing. It was always in my head, and as sloppy as that place may be, it’s impossible to burglarize.
