‘Where Jewish Vinyl Goes To Die’

We're trying to outwit history and reinsert them into the telling.

Who was the most interesting person you met while record hunting?
There's an album by a guy called El Avram who owned an Israeli night club in the West Village called El Avram's—it's where George Carlin first started performing, and Louis Armstrong would drop in to check out the talent. I went out to New Jersey to meet the guy, who's now in his 80s. He beckoned me in and took me down to his basement, and he had painstakingly recreated his entire nightclub from the '60s, fixture by fixture. I felt like Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams."

Are there certain songs that you found yourself looking for on the albums, whose covers are sort of a litmus test of the times?
Hava Nagila has been recorded and rerecorded so many times, it's like the spine that runs through Jewish musical history.

You have a chapter on Jewish comedians. Any theory why there are so many of them?
There's a great Time [magazine] article that asked that question in 1970, based on the work of a psychologist, Samuel Janis, who was trying to work out why 80 percent of the top comedians of the day were Jewish. He undertook a psychological study of 76 different Jewish comics, and he worked out that the roots of comedy came from living a life of poverty and despair. When you look at Rodney Dangerfield on the front cover of "The Loser," he's really playing the Jewish role of the schlemiel, a guy who's a consistent outsider—a lovable outsider, and occasionally extremely funny, occasionally angry, but loaded with pathos.

How much do you think your whole collection is worth? Are some of these really rare and therefore valuable? What was the most you paid for one?
Its emotional worth is priceless, because the albums are footprints through history, and the history is our own history, so you can't really put a price on that. But if you look on eBay, you too could start your own collection for about $1.50 an album.

© 2008