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Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium
From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published June 20, 2017
7 people are currently reading
597 people want to read
About the author
John Corbett
85 books20 followersJohn Corbett is a writer, curator, and producer based in Chicago. He is co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey, an art gallery. Corbett is the author of several books, including Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Duke U. Press, 1994), Microgroove: Forays into Other Music (Duke, 2015), A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium (Duke, 2017), and Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (University of Chicago, 2019). As an essayist and reviewer, Corbett has written for numerous academic and commercial publications, including DownBeat, The Wire, The Chicago Reader, The Chicago Tribune, NKA, Bomb, LitHub, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Corbett has edited or co-edited many books, including several on the musicians Sun Ra and Peter Brötzmann, as well as the 125 books and catalogs that his gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey, has produced, and he has contributed to major museum monographs on artists including Jim Lutes, Charline Von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and Sadie Benning, and essays on artists Rachel Harrison for the Art Institute of Chicago and Bob Thompson for the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Corbett’s work as a music producer includes his label, the Unheard Music Series, which existed from 1999-2006, and Corbett vs. Dempsey, an ongoing label issuing CDs of new and historical jazz, experimental music and improvised music. In 2002, Corbett was invited to be guest artistic director of JazzFest Berlin, and he co-produced the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music as well as a weekly series of concerts at the club of the same name. He has organized many musical events and festivals, most recently a series at the Art Institute of Chicago and stand-alone events at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, NYC, and the Menil Collection, Houston. As a curator, Corbett has been involved in many exhibitions at museums including the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago, 2016), the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964-1980), Sullivan Galleries, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago (Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence, 2010), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 2009). Corbett taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1988 to 2014.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 23, 2017
And I thought I was a music freak.
John Corbett's Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium is a collection of columns that Corbett wrote in the early 2000's about his vinyl collection and some of the strange records he had found over the years. Corbett also relates his history with records and some personal experiences he's had with them.
This book was both incredibly rewarding and incredibly difficult. Most of the book is full of Corbett's columns and his thoughts on various rare records. Most of the records were bizarre jazz recordings that Corbett was surprised by or confused by. It's a fun way to see how music has changed over time and to hear big names in the music industry. However, a lot of these records were unheard of and didn't hold any interest for me or ring any bells. Parts of the book dragged on as I read column after column of "Here's a cool jazz recording I found!" and then "Here's another cool jazz recording I found!" and "Here's a bunch of jazz musicians you've never heard of who appear on this cool recording!" I would have devoured these columns if I was given one each week, but all in a row, it was a bit overwhelming for me. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Corbett obviously knows what he's talking about and I feel like I learned quite a bit about vinyl collecting, jazz recordings, and music obsession from him.
Honestly, this book made me feel a strange mix of motivation and inadequacy. I consider myself something of a music snob - while I realize I have a lot of learning to do, I was always the friend who listened to "weird" and obscure music and who could be counted on to recommend interesting new sounds to those around me. Corbett's book opened a whole new world of music to me - and made me realize how limited online music streaming can be for the avid music fan. I learned this as I tried to look up several records Corbett mentioned on Google Play. They weren't there. If I was lucky, the artist in question would have a couple songs on Google Play. But most of the time, there was no record of the album and artist I was looking for and I'd be left to wonder how I would ever hear the interesting sounds that Corbett's writing made me crave. While my feelings of being a failure as a music snob hit in the beginning, they gradually subsided and I found myself feeling more excited by the idea that there's always new music to learn. Take John Corbett, who, after years of working in record shops and researching artists and searching out new music, is still finding new tunes. For me, this was a hopeful ending and I look forward to researching some of the recommended artists a bit more - especially Sun Ra.
I recommend this for music listeners and record collectors. I also recommend it to anyone with a deep knowledge of or interest in strange jazz records - you'll find plenty of music recommendations here.
John Corbett's Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium is a collection of columns that Corbett wrote in the early 2000's about his vinyl collection and some of the strange records he had found over the years. Corbett also relates his history with records and some personal experiences he's had with them.
This book was both incredibly rewarding and incredibly difficult. Most of the book is full of Corbett's columns and his thoughts on various rare records. Most of the records were bizarre jazz recordings that Corbett was surprised by or confused by. It's a fun way to see how music has changed over time and to hear big names in the music industry. However, a lot of these records were unheard of and didn't hold any interest for me or ring any bells. Parts of the book dragged on as I read column after column of "Here's a cool jazz recording I found!" and then "Here's another cool jazz recording I found!" and "Here's a bunch of jazz musicians you've never heard of who appear on this cool recording!" I would have devoured these columns if I was given one each week, but all in a row, it was a bit overwhelming for me. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Corbett obviously knows what he's talking about and I feel like I learned quite a bit about vinyl collecting, jazz recordings, and music obsession from him.
Honestly, this book made me feel a strange mix of motivation and inadequacy. I consider myself something of a music snob - while I realize I have a lot of learning to do, I was always the friend who listened to "weird" and obscure music and who could be counted on to recommend interesting new sounds to those around me. Corbett's book opened a whole new world of music to me - and made me realize how limited online music streaming can be for the avid music fan. I learned this as I tried to look up several records Corbett mentioned on Google Play. They weren't there. If I was lucky, the artist in question would have a couple songs on Google Play. But most of the time, there was no record of the album and artist I was looking for and I'd be left to wonder how I would ever hear the interesting sounds that Corbett's writing made me crave. While my feelings of being a failure as a music snob hit in the beginning, they gradually subsided and I found myself feeling more excited by the idea that there's always new music to learn. Take John Corbett, who, after years of working in record shops and researching artists and searching out new music, is still finding new tunes. For me, this was a hopeful ending and I look forward to researching some of the recommended artists a bit more - especially Sun Ra.
I recommend this for music listeners and record collectors. I also recommend it to anyone with a deep knowledge of or interest in strange jazz records - you'll find plenty of music recommendations here.
February 28, 2017
I received a digital copy of this book for review from the publisher Duke University Press (via Netgalley). As John Corbett himself points out, the death of vinyl has been greatly exaggerated. Far from being killed off by the digital format, vinyl sales are now at a 25 year high, ushering in a revitalised reissue market and a new generation of collectors. With it has emerged a fresh economy in vinyl related merchandise, a new generation of affordable record players, storage solutions and books on the format. The latter are extremely variable, a few choice histories of vinyl, some memoirs spun around the collecting bug of the vinyl obsessive, earnest academic investigations into the longevity of the medium, but also a lot of cheap, flimsy cash-ins and vapid coffee table nonsense. Vinyl Freak is not one of these books. It is, for the record collector, a 180mg heavyweight slab of pure joy.
Subtitled ‘Love Letters to a Dying Medium’, Vinyl Freak alternates John Corbett’s personal paeans to the format with chunks of his long-running Vinyl Freak column written for DownBeat Magazine. The column celebrated obscure items from Corbett’s collection that at the original time of publication were not available digitally. Most of the Vinyl Freak columns focus on jazz records, but even for someone like me for whom jazz is genre blind-spot, the writing remains engaging. I can’t have read more than half a dozen of the original columns before I was opening YouTube to search for audio clips of the artists discussed, such is the infectious enthusiasm of Corbett’s writing. As Corbett points out, music history is written and re-written by what is and what isn’t currently in print. For this reason, the post-scripts to the columns are particularly fascinating, detailing the life of the recordings in the intervening years.
It’s the sections between the Vinyl Freak columns that give most insight into John Corbett’s life, and how he became a record collector. Thoughtfully he ponders what it is about the record format that makes it so special. Evocatively he describes the physicality of searching for records, the way in which the crate-digger navigates the racks, the look and feel and smell of vinyl. He writes exceptionally on the subculture of the collector, noting that what has always fascinated him about records is ‘the play between understanding them as objects of solitary attention and as the focal point of social interaction’. For this reason my one reservation about the book was the ‘Speciality of the House’ section where Corbett details personal highlights from his free-improvisation collection, which, without the engaging detail of the Vinyl Freak columns, veers into list territory, an aspect of record collecting I find slightly off-putting due to its association with one-upmanship.
For me, the real gem of the book was hidden right at the end, in the chapter nerve-rackingly titled ‘Anything Can Happen’. Nerve-racking because it retells the story of receiving a forwarded email in which it becomes apparent that the home of the recently deceased Alton Abraham is being cleared and the future of decades worth of artefacts from the career of Sun Ra, whom Abraham’s managed, hang in jeopardy. There follows a story of serendipity, of the subjectivity of value and of a man spending four years of his life, and damn near bankrupting himself in the process, to save what now forms the basis of an important archive of material. I was actually near tears by the end of the chapter.
A wonderful book. If John Corbett is a freak, then you’ve got to question anyone that wants to be normal.
Subtitled ‘Love Letters to a Dying Medium’, Vinyl Freak alternates John Corbett’s personal paeans to the format with chunks of his long-running Vinyl Freak column written for DownBeat Magazine. The column celebrated obscure items from Corbett’s collection that at the original time of publication were not available digitally. Most of the Vinyl Freak columns focus on jazz records, but even for someone like me for whom jazz is genre blind-spot, the writing remains engaging. I can’t have read more than half a dozen of the original columns before I was opening YouTube to search for audio clips of the artists discussed, such is the infectious enthusiasm of Corbett’s writing. As Corbett points out, music history is written and re-written by what is and what isn’t currently in print. For this reason, the post-scripts to the columns are particularly fascinating, detailing the life of the recordings in the intervening years.
It’s the sections between the Vinyl Freak columns that give most insight into John Corbett’s life, and how he became a record collector. Thoughtfully he ponders what it is about the record format that makes it so special. Evocatively he describes the physicality of searching for records, the way in which the crate-digger navigates the racks, the look and feel and smell of vinyl. He writes exceptionally on the subculture of the collector, noting that what has always fascinated him about records is ‘the play between understanding them as objects of solitary attention and as the focal point of social interaction’. For this reason my one reservation about the book was the ‘Speciality of the House’ section where Corbett details personal highlights from his free-improvisation collection, which, without the engaging detail of the Vinyl Freak columns, veers into list territory, an aspect of record collecting I find slightly off-putting due to its association with one-upmanship.
For me, the real gem of the book was hidden right at the end, in the chapter nerve-rackingly titled ‘Anything Can Happen’. Nerve-racking because it retells the story of receiving a forwarded email in which it becomes apparent that the home of the recently deceased Alton Abraham is being cleared and the future of decades worth of artefacts from the career of Sun Ra, whom Abraham’s managed, hang in jeopardy. There follows a story of serendipity, of the subjectivity of value and of a man spending four years of his life, and damn near bankrupting himself in the process, to save what now forms the basis of an important archive of material. I was actually near tears by the end of the chapter.
A wonderful book. If John Corbett is a freak, then you’ve got to question anyone that wants to be normal.
June 26, 2017
Perhaps it's due to my mood at the moment, but "Vinyl Freak" is the best book I have read on record collecting, or to be more specific, for the love of vinyl and music discovery. First of all, I read this book due to my friend Amber Noé, who suggested to me at a bookstore. She doesn't (at the moment) share my love for the vinyl world, but still, it was sweet of her to find this book for me. Second, I may only know eight albums here that the author John Corbett writes about. All, are obscure Jazz or experimental music albums. To say that they are obscure is like saying the night is dark. I never heard of these artists or their music. So, what is the purpose of someone like me reading a book on someone's collection that is mostly, if not all, entirely unknown?
Corbett recognizes the importance of sharing one's love of a collection and showing it to someone else. He not only shows this body of work but also explains what and where they came from. It's a geek book of course, but a very generous one, where the reader doesn't feel left out of the information or more importantly, the passion of such a collection.
The book is beautifully designed in that every album he writes about we can see the record cover as well. All entries listed here are not on CD or streaming, as of the publication's date. If you're a music collector, all this will do is make one keep a list to check out later. Corbett also writes an essay on the issues of collecting and his history of his passion. There is also an excellent piece at the end of the book regarding his over-the-top passion: Sun Ra. I sense there will be a separate detailed account of that subject matter in another book by Corbett. Nevertheless, this has been a total fun read for me and made me re-think what I do with my music blog regarding my collection. Learn from the master!
Corbett recognizes the importance of sharing one's love of a collection and showing it to someone else. He not only shows this body of work but also explains what and where they came from. It's a geek book of course, but a very generous one, where the reader doesn't feel left out of the information or more importantly, the passion of such a collection.
The book is beautifully designed in that every album he writes about we can see the record cover as well. All entries listed here are not on CD or streaming, as of the publication's date. If you're a music collector, all this will do is make one keep a list to check out later. Corbett also writes an essay on the issues of collecting and his history of his passion. There is also an excellent piece at the end of the book regarding his over-the-top passion: Sun Ra. I sense there will be a separate detailed account of that subject matter in another book by Corbett. Nevertheless, this has been a total fun read for me and made me re-think what I do with my music blog regarding my collection. Learn from the master!
Read
December 31, 2017Just kidding I didn't read this crap.
September 16, 2017
While I give this book 5 stars without reservation, it is not for everyone. Corbett has a vast and encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, particularly free, improvisational, and downright freaky jazz. This book compiles several years of columns he wrote for "Down Beat" magazine regarding out-of-print LP's that merited being reissued in some form, preferably vinyl. Appended to this compilation of columns is his story of how he acquired a storage unit worth of Sun Ra ephemera that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. If you don't know recognize the name Sun Ra or you wonder how his ephemera warrants preservation, this book is not for you. If you are a Sun Ra fan, a jazz fan, a fan of just plain weird records, by all means read on.
June 29, 2017
A must for vinyl freaks and jazz fanatics! Corbett is a Virgil of the lost land of LPs.
April 19, 2017
A treat for anyone who is or has been a record collector, and fans of (mostly) obscure jazz. Look for my review at AllAboutJazz.com.
April 11, 2018
I'm thrilled that I actually own two of the records he writes about!
January 2, 2025
There are lots of books out there about record collecting and 98% of them suck. Not shocking that John Corbett managed to buck the trend.
November 18, 2018
I love my vinyl collection. Admittedly, not as much as John Corbett but it is something that I treasure and the moment anyone tries to convince me to put it in storage or – God forbid – sell it I become really defensive and protective. I totally understand John Corbett’s love for his music collection.
Vinyl Freak is – as the full title suggests – a love letter to Corbett’s record collection. I love the passion and the knowledge that oozes off each and every page in this book. I think for me, personally, as someone who isn’t very knowledgeable on Jazz music, I can see how this book could become quite slow and tedious but that is not due in any way, shape or form to do with John Corbett’s writing. It is because of my own ignorance of the genre. Those, like me, would find the book a difficult read. However, if you are a jazz enthusiast then I can quite imagine this book becoming some form of Holy Scripture.
Thoroughly researched and clear passion, Vinyl Freak is a must for the jazz lover in your life.
Vinyl Freak – Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett is available now.
Vinyl Freak is – as the full title suggests – a love letter to Corbett’s record collection. I love the passion and the knowledge that oozes off each and every page in this book. I think for me, personally, as someone who isn’t very knowledgeable on Jazz music, I can see how this book could become quite slow and tedious but that is not due in any way, shape or form to do with John Corbett’s writing. It is because of my own ignorance of the genre. Those, like me, would find the book a difficult read. However, if you are a jazz enthusiast then I can quite imagine this book becoming some form of Holy Scripture.
Thoroughly researched and clear passion, Vinyl Freak is a must for the jazz lover in your life.
Vinyl Freak – Love Letters to a Dying Medium by John Corbett is available now.
December 31, 2017
Honestly, I don't like jazz much, and 95% of this falls under that heading, but I've been a record collector all my life, so there was still a lot of common ground.
I picked this book up because I love album art and it has color reproductions of some of the craziest album art I've never seen. I hadn't even planned to read it, though once I started the writing was good enough that I ended up reading it cover to cover!
I especially enjoyed the end section where the author tells the story of how he ended up saving a huge collection of Sun Ra masters and memorabilia from destruction and his subsequent obsession with it.
I picked this book up because I love album art and it has color reproductions of some of the craziest album art I've never seen. I hadn't even planned to read it, though once I started the writing was good enough that I ended up reading it cover to cover!
I especially enjoyed the end section where the author tells the story of how he ended up saving a huge collection of Sun Ra masters and memorabilia from destruction and his subsequent obsession with it.
February 11, 2018
I have only heard of a few of these musicians but still found this a highly compelling read just for his light touch, humor and passion for collecting vinyl. It also pulled back the curtain on all the different ways music was recorded and distributed. The structure could have been better explained but a minor quibble.
December 7, 2017
Perfect Xmas present - or any time of the year present - for the vinyl freak in your life (and maybe that's you; well - bonus). Amazing archive of rare jazz-record reviews; passionately detailed.
April 24, 2018
A wonderful collection of musings and reviews for voracious record collectors, audiophiles, and aficionados of obscure jazz.
February 22, 2023
Great reference
June 6, 2024
Although I'm not more than a casual listener of jazz, and this book isn't as much of love-letters-to-vinyl or love-letters-to-record-hunting as I thought it was going to be, it's still a very engrossing book. Corbett's writing about music and styles and musicians' flairs puts me there, listening to this music with him. And his additional notes of whether a previously rare album has now been re-released make for a fun game, trying to guess the outcome before I get to that part of the essay. His interstitial essays about music or collecting or vinyl overall, plus his essay about collecting Sun Ra materials, were also really good (the Sun Ra one was fascinating, and the museum collections-geek side of me perked up over this one, too).
One bad thing, though! The bonus flexi disc, at least the one in my copy of the book from the library, can't play on my record player! The spindle hole is too small! And I'd been looking forward to listening to this for weeks!
One bad thing, though! The bonus flexi disc, at least the one in my copy of the book from the library, can't play on my record player! The spindle hole is too small! And I'd been looking forward to listening to this for weeks!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews