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B. George - Punkappella (1978)

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Bob George in the ARC NYC stacks. Photograph: unknown/ARC NYC ...

‘No one else is saving it’: the fight to protect a historic music collection ...

It all started in a loft in Tribeca, New York, long before it was a trendy neighbourhood. “I had 47,000 records and nobody wanted them,” recalls Bob George, who had just published a discography of punk and new wave music. “That led a lot of people coming to me and saying you have to save this stuff; no one else is saving it. That got the ball rolling in my loft in what is now fashionable Tribeca, which was an incredibly unfashionable war zone in 1974 when I was first there.”

George turned his record collection into the ARChive of Contemporary Music (Arc) in 1985 with co-founder David Wheeler. The non-profit music library and research centre now contains more than 3m sound recordings or over 90m songs, making it one of the biggest popular music collections in the world. Donors and board members have included David Bowie, Jonathan Demme, Lou Reed, Martin Scorsese and Paul Simon.

The Arc is not open to the public but has been a vital resource for film-makers, writers and researchers ranging from Ken Burns looking for a song for his series Baseball to the new Grammy Hall of Fame and Museum in Los Angeles needing cover art for its inducted recordings. Now, however, this unique treasure trove is under existential threat.

The Arc cannot remain at its current Hudson Valley premises indefinitely and is in need of a new and bigger home. “We have to move and we don’t know when we’ll have to move and the collection is really at risk because it’s all on pallets,” says George, who dreams of a patron like James Smithson, the British scientist who left his estate to the US to found the Smithsonian Institution. “We’re looking for someone to help us buy a very wonderful property or for us to build a new building on vacant land in upstate New York.”

After growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, George moved to New York in 1974 as a visual arts student and started collecting records as a DJ. In 1981 he released Laurie Anderson’s first single, O Superman, which sold nearly a million copies worldwide and made it to number on the UK singles chart. He was a guest on John Peel’s beloved BBC radio show, sneaking in little-known records from New York, and took music to European broadcasters too. People kept giving him records that other collections turned down.

Some of the 18,000 recordings in the Keith Richards Blues Collection. Photograph: Arc NYC

“I was doing the book and then doing Peel shows and it accidentally became this large collection that nobody wanted. They kept saying, oh, we collect classical, we collect Broadway, we collect ethnic music. I said, well, I have funk, reggae, African and hip-hop and they said, oh, no, we don’t collect any of that. Forty years later, I say, you put all those together and that’s what music has become.”

The simple goal of the archive, which has always had a peripatetic existence, is preservation. “We have no interest in quality,” George cheerfully admits. “It started that way from the very beginning because there’s no way to tell what’s valuable in the future. Everybody brings their own criteria and tastes to things in their own time. But the future is quite different, as we hope.”

The archive has never received aid from any city, state or federal organisation but its scale gives the Library of Congress a run for its money. It has absorbed major collections from musicians and fans and is home to most of Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ extensive blues inventory.

George dispatched two semi-trailers to a condemned house in Boston sinking under the weight of Jeep Holland’s set of more than 125,000 recordings and over 2,500 signed albums from the likes of the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols. “Going towards the bathroom, he has a gas stove, the pilot light is on, there are records in the oven. It was just a storage space ... His car had become so full of records that he abandoned it and rented a car.”

George has made repeat trips to countries such as Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, Cuba, Japan, Jordan, Laos and Thailand. The Arc contains Demme’s personal collection of Haitian albums. More than 150,000 pieces of world music have been catalogued; there are plenty more to do. “We’ve tried to get as much of that material as possible so that collection is just fabulous.”

The Arc preserves copies of every recording in all known formats. It has electronically catalogued more than 400,000 sound recordings and digitised 200,000 with the Internet Archive – more than any other public university or private library in America. It also contains more than 3m pieces of material including photos, videos, DVDs, books, magazines, press kits, sheet music, ephemera and memorabilia.

The late Andy Rourke of the Smiths at Arc looking at Smiths records he had never seen. Photograph: Arc NYC

George says: “We catalogued 105,000 singles just recently; we have another 200,000 or 300,000 to go. This is the first way a band at one time got their feet in the water. They put out one or two or three singles. If they did hits, they got the chance to do an album and so much of this material does not exist on LP or CD. Little by little more of it might be streaming because of YouTube, as people can get away with murder on YouTube, which is great, but YouTube will disappear. Everything commercial will disappear.”

Among those who have turned to the archive is the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, who wanted records by the singer Bert Sommer for his film Taking Woodstock. “The archive is amazing because we don’t know what we have until somebody needs it. We’ve been into the stacks and we found five LPs by Bert Sommer. For me, it’s like I have no idea who this guy is and what he did; he’s sort of a folkie. For Quincy Jones, we just sent him a list of the 8,000 things that he’s either produced or on.

“Research was how we basically stayed alive along with the largesse of the rock stars or celebrities that we had hooked up with. The idea was never to open to the public but that’s what we want to do now. I don’t think it’s untrue that we’re one of the largest in the world and that we want to make that available. We’ve tried to save two copies so there will always be a listening copy and then that would then become a listening library.”

George hopes the new archive will be open to students, educators, historians, musicians, authors, journalists and the general public. An anonymous donor has come forward with a million dollars to help realise that dream but more money is urgently needed. One possible new home is an abandoned IBM campus spanning 34 acres, although that would cost $8-10m. George is considering partnering with an upstate university and has plans to offer residencies for scholars.

“People could come in and produce a work, and that would go out into the world. It could be a blog, essay, tape, compilation, new recording, whatever. We’re really quite un-academic. I’m against it somewhat and I’d like people to have ideas and bring those ideas and put them back into the world as opposed to making it an interactive experience for everybody. I don’t want to be Disney World. It’s nice to have seminars. It’s nice to have listening parties. It’s nice to have dances.”

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Dogs of Brattleboro, Robert F. George, Spring 2019

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2780. Prince - ‘Bob George’ (1987)

Ain’t that a bitch?

from the album The Black Album

The history of The Black Album is well documented, but let’s rehash it anyway: originally announced as The Funk Bible, The Black Album was given a promotional release in late 1987 in a simple black sleeve. The eight-track collection, which would have followed the sprawling classic Sign O’ The Times, was dark in content and presentation, managing to appear even more enigmatic and mysterious than Prince’s existing work. The LP wasn’t just Black because of the sleeve - the uncompromising funk and R&B contained within was widely viewed as an attempt to win back an African American audience that had felt shafted by Prince’s shift to commercial pop, and subsequent superstardom. Most importantly, the LP was fantastic. It was strange, experimental and uniquely compelling without ever sacrificing the quality of the songs.

Somewhere between this promotional release and the actual projected release date of December 8, Prince - apparently influenced by a demon he named Spooky Electric - declared the album evil and cancelled its release. Copies were out there, of course, meaning the album would become a legendary bootleg, and one of the most famous unreleased record of all time, while Prince quickly released Lovesexy, a much brighter, more commercial album, in early 1988. In the video for the first single ‘Alphabet St.’, he flashed a split-second message onto the screen: “Don’t buy The Black Album. I’m sorry.”

By 1994, Prince’s feelings had changed somewhat. Desperate to get out of his contract with Warner Bros., he agreed to release The Black Album on CD in a limited edition (it was available for about three months), despite saying that he was still “spiritually against” the record. I found my copy of this official release when I was about seventeen, in a very small record store on the Gold Coast - I likely could have sought out a copy online by that time - it would’ve been 2007 or 2008 - but I was especially happy to experience finding it in “real life”. When I heard it for the first time, I was astounded that it actually really did live up to twenty years of hype - and that ‘Bob George’, one of the most unusual songs Prince ever wrote, actually was as extraordinary as everyone said.

On ‘Bob George’, Prince adopts a violent, abusive persona, which is channelled through a slowed-down, almost demonic (Spooky Electric, is that you?) version of his voice. His maniacal rants (including a famous line in which the character refers to Prince as “that skinny motherfucker with the high voice”) are backed by a deep stuttering beat that forms one of my all-time favourite Prince productions - how can something so simple sound so utterly filthy? The madness of ‘Bob George’ is the best representation of The Black Album’s convoluted history, and the brutality of the track just gets more fascinating with every listen. Within a few months of this song about threatening to murder your girlfriend being pulled, Prince was prancing around in a cartoonish pastel universe in the video for ‘Alphabet St.’ - such prominent Gemini behaviour is almost enough to make you believe there’s something to astrology after all.

Most people will probably have a different favourite from The Black Album, but I could never turn away from ‘Bob George’ - it’s just too bizarre, too intriguing, and too ruthless to ignore.

‘Bob George’ audio:

Written by Richard Eric, 28/5/18

#prince #the black album #bob george #1987 #1994 #unreleased #unreleased songs #unreleased albums #80s funk #80s r&b #eighties funk #eighties r&b #funk #r&b #pop music #80s pop #eighties pop #music list #countdown

The Mystery behind "The Black Album": One of the Most Bootlegged Prince Albums ever recorded

The Mystery behind “The Black Album”: One of the Most Bootlegged Prince Albums ever recorded

Do you remember how you first heard of “The Black Album?” In 1987, it became one of the most bootlegged albums ever. This after Prince pulled the plug on the project one week before it was set to be released. The problem was most promotional copies had already gone out and the album became an exclusive sought-after item that fans searched for like buried treasure. Fans weren’t sure if Warner…

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