For all their various tastes, serious record geeks fall into one of two categories. Some like to sit, dragonlike, on their stashes, and if they encounter anyone with enough record-collecting chops to know how rare and precious their treasures are, they’ll rub that in his face. Others are evangelizers—dudes who’ll burn you a CD-R of anything in their collection, no matter how valuable it is, if they think you’ll dig it.
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His first was Cosmic Lightning, a collection of insanely rare 80s material from Chicago glam-punk anomaly J.T. IV, aka John Henry Timmis IV. Manis did the assembly, and Steve Krakow (aka Plastic Crimewave) released it on his Galactic Zoo Disk imprint via Drag City in 2008. Timmis’s feverish instability made his songs more difficult to digest than typical punk, and the album appealed largely to fans of outsider music—it sold about 1,300 copies. Manis’s next collaboration with Drag City, released in early ’09, did much better: he put the label in touch with the surviving members of early-70s Detroit protopunk band Death, and . . . For the Whole World to See became Drag City’s best-selling reissue, moving more than 10,000 units. It got Manis quoted in the New York Times, and his 5 percent cut of the profits paid his rent for a few months.
On March 9 Moniker will drop its first release: a reissue of Clean Your Clock, the 2005 debut album by unhinged Chicago folk rocker John Bellows, originally self-released as a CD-R. “I saw John perform at Heaven Gallery last March,” Manis says. “He blew my fucking mind. It was something indescribable. He was very charismatic, vibrant, completely psychotic. He ripped his shirt off and somebody put a wooden chair on his head and he started hitting the back of the chair and sang this children’s book story that he’d read his kids earlier in the day. And at the end of that he takes the wooden chair off and sits on it and plays this epic song about being make-believe. My ex-wife started crying.”
Recently Manis has been trying to track down a Los Angeles rockabilly band from the early 80s—a couple weeks ago, after posting fruitlessly for six months on Craigslist, he finally found a member of the group through the Blasters. He’s also on the trail of a 70s California synth-psych project and a power-pop group from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Manis, 31, grew up.
