A man, a room full of Ampex, and a record store owner.
There was a nice segment on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday. It was about a guy, Leon Kagarsie, now in his sixties, who as a teenager in Maryland lugged around a tape recorder to music festivals across the state recording country, bluegrass and rockabilly acts. This was no clandestine pirate taping exercise. Not with a 1950's reel to reel ampex it wasn't. He apparently set his mike right up on stage and started rolling when the music began. He's got an archive of such breadth and quality that folks would chew through drywall to get to hear it. He's got a partner too, now, the guy who owns the record store where he works part time fixing old equipment, Joe Lee. This is where I woke a little (hey the show's called morning edition - I'm usually trying to remember whether I put milk in my cereal or raisin bran in my coffee) Joe Lee, Joe's Record Paradise. I remember that guy, I knew him when he had a store (the eponymous JRP) at the Plaza del Marcado, Prince Georges County MD. I had friends who worked there, Logan Perkins. It's where we went to spend our money. When we weren't at Skip Grof's place or Vinyl Ink . It's where you'd go to get your fabulous thunderbirds record. Those years lay across an ocean of time and being for me now
Joe was what you might call a character. He was one of those people unable to deal with anybody straight, or simply. I guess if you knew him and were one of his folk, you'd be ok. Otherwise you were a mark - a target and he existed to test your knowledge, your endurance, and torment your ignorance. I remember him particularly from a party I attended. I believe our host was a women named Marcia, a few years out of U. VA and working at Goddard. Also there, was a guy named Alex Heard who was then writing a humor column for the new Washington Post magazine, which I always gathered he didn't really want to write. Joe circled about this guy the way a wolf might circle around a herd of sheep in a forest glen trying to spot the weakest member. His mission that night seemed to be to make Alex understand that he was no hipster and and never would be . My recollection is that Alex left early and Joe Lee was pleasant, and pleased with himself for the rest of the evening. He reminded me of the father of one of my friends from my home town who once regaled me at considerable length with a shaggy dog story about the time, when as a tech sergeant, he met Curtis LeMay. My friend, Noel looked like he wanted to die, my other friend George just looked stunned, but on he went unable to turn away from the fortune of running across one of the few kids in that town who had any idea who LeMay was. And who would sit and listen dutifully to a man recollecting [Me: "wow, you met Curtis Lemay." Him: "Well, let me tell you about it..."].
Well now Joe Lee has Leon Kagarsie, and his sweet million dollar tape collection, and they've got record labels calling, and the Smithsonian knocking. If any of those guys want to get anywhere, they had better find the best chair in the room, and be prepared to sit a spell.
10:05:36 PM  ;
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