Music Man Murray

Last week was Record Store Day, a tip of the hat to a dying way of life. It's not so much that people don't buy records anymore as stores don't sell them. Companies don't manufacture them. Most people don't really care about them. Having lived through LPs and then cassettes and then CDs and now mp3s, Grinwout's has collected and recollected over and over again, leaving some behind, taking on new tastes and ideas in the next iteration. Lately we've been falling into movie soundtracks, starting from Yo-Yo Ma's Ennio Morricone album and just growing out of there. Some people, however, don't simply get into the music they're into, or move from music to music. They are collectors. And the mark of a true collector is completeness. Otherwise there's no point in collecting.

Music Man Murray's collection is complete. Or at least it's large. A two-story exhibition space of half a million records. Plus an off-site warehouse. This man has been collecting for years.

The collector is both conqueror and liberator. Of any given specific set of like objects, Murray tells me, “You have to have everything.” That is the mark of the true collector: you must possess a private Manifest Destiny, a fetish driven by rivalry, competition. The problem is that Music Man Murray’s rivals just aren’t coming anymore. There aren’t the same obsessive people out there working hard to track down, say, every last acetate copy of Hedda Hopper’s radio program “Hollywood Magazine” (which, incidentally, Murray pulled for me from a pile near his desk). As Murray says, they just stopped coming. So the flicker in his eyes snaps on and off, like a pilot light not finding gas.

Unpacking Music Man Murray: My visit with one of L.A.'s last great record collectors, is a piece by C.P. Heiser in the LA Review of Books. It's a piece on this one man, and on a certain kind of person we don't see much anymore, but at the same time, it's about collectors in general. They are among us. This is how they think.

The documentary should speak for itself: