‘It’s a good disease’: Maymont man’s love for music
MAYMONT Pull up a chair, in this old Maymont school, and sit a spell.
The building is tattered and a little torn, and the children disappeared a longtime ago. But there’s still learning to be done here, amid stacks of records — vinyl, shellac, styrene — with 83-year-old collector Dave Doolittle curating it all.
There’s no power in the place, no heat, and the thermometer sits just above freezing one fall morning when two visitors stop by this Saskatchewan town of 138 people. Doolittle runs power in from outside so he can listen to his records.
“My cousin told me about this place,” says Doolittle, whose collection — 35,000 records or so — was stored in the town’s former bank until a few months ago, when he had to move because of other plans with the space. “It’s reasonable, and I can play the music loud if I want.”
This isn’t the whole collection. Around 4,000 sit back in his house, some real nice ones, but this is a fine place to start.
Doolittle talks about the anticipation of listening to what lies in those grooves. He points to a Glenn Gould record, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor.
“I could play that every day, and there’s always one spot on there that the hair on my arm goes up,” he says.
Doolittle doesn’t collect newer stuff. Everything else is on the table, literally. Huge swaths of jazz LPS are filed into plastic boxes, separated with homemade labels: Savoy, Blue Note, Verve, Prestige, Columbia.
There’s a section of sports records. Feminist records. Labour records. Christian records. Rock. Calypso. Classical.
He has spoken-word records, split into those with music and those without, then subcategorized into country of origin: Canada. United States.
There’s a small handful of records labelled “Naughty!!,” another filed under “Big Screen Bombshells.”
There’s “Tiny Tots” and “Oddball” and “Very Odd.”
And the music? Oh gosh, the music in that room.
“It’s exploration. New sounds. Liking groups, and trying to find more,” he says.
This is a place for talking, for listening, for flipping. As Doolittle talks, the visitor flips. He had 50,000 records at one time, he says, some of that from “a collection I bought that turned out to be a lot of chaff, and not much wheat. It was tough, getting that straightened out.”
He breaks into laughter.
“It’s an obsessive-compulsive thing; it’s sort of a disease. But it’s a good disease. It’s better than stamps, for instance. You can play them.”
Doolittle did collect stamps when he was a kid: “Birds eggs and butterflies and stamps, and stuff I could get cheap,” before moving into vinyl.
Those old collections get him thinking, and his eyes to twinkling.
“Stamps are interesting,” he says. “You can carry your collection under your arm,” and he laughs again.