In 2002 sample master DJ Shadow released his second full-length, Private Press, but I didn’t get the reference in the title till a few years later. In the mid-aughts, obscure private-press albums that had been fetching ridiculous prices from rabid record collectors—Red Hash by Gary Higgins, You Think You Really Know Me by Gary Wilson—were reissued in a steady stream.
There have been thousands upon thousands of private-press records, and only a few are indisputably accomplished pieces of art by musicians who simply didn’t have the good fortune to find a label to release them. Most are borderline unlistenable, at least when judged by traditional criteria, and were pushed out into the world by artists who were apparently tone deaf, deluded, or both. The Times article, unsurprisingly, is mostly about the former: “Many of these records have been around for a while, at record fairs and so on,” says music writer and collector Byron Coley. “Lots of collectors initially bought the private-press records strictly for their covers. They were fetish objects in a way. Then people started to listen to them, and realized, hey, there’s some great songs on these records. What’s happened is that younger listeners have picked up on it, and that has created renewed interest in the CD reissues.”
Most of the profiles are written by Daley, whose prose can make even the most colorful folks sound a little dull. (Other contributors, notably Rich Haupt, approach their subjects with more personality and humor.) Daley frequently makes illogical leaps, and he seems too eager to pack in the odd details he’s discovered in his research—their relevance often isn’t clear. Take for example this passage about Chicagoan Harriette Blake, an acrobat and lounge singer described as “tabbed for stardom” by Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet: “An 1890s-themed beer garden was set up for the 3rd Madison Realtors Home Show in the spring of 1969. The garden housed Blake and magician/comedian Don Alan who entertained the heavily trafficked summit, while mini-skirt clad Futura, a robot girl, was unveiled as the housewife of the future.”
It’s true that there are parallels. In both cases, it costs money to make and share recorded music, which tends to weed out the less committed (though admittedly the process is much cheaper today). Accessible digital home-studio equipment makes it possible for today’s fringe musicians, like their predecessors in the world of private pressings, to produce and distribute their work entirely isolated from industry professionals who might provide quality control or normalizing influence. And both types of artist seem equally likely to labor in the additional isolation of obscurity, since to find somebody on Bandcamp (for instance) you usually have to look for them.
