Yields a far-reaching collection
From there, talk turns to the heft of these things. One record doesn’t weigh much. Put 100 together, and you’ve got back-aching dead weight. When Doolittle shifted his collection from old bank to old school, he enlisted the help of local kids to move it all.
“Those 78s,” he says, “if you can lift one of those boxes, it’s work. Heavy shellac. I like the light classical better, rather than the heavy rock.”
And he laughs again, in this interesting and unorthodox place, bathed in music.
When people hear about the massive collection, they sometimes remind Doolittle that he’s getting up in age.
“I want to come to your estate sale,” one man told him, and Doolittle muses that maybe he should hold a pre-estate sale “before too long — before I kick the bucket.”
Don’t ask him to name his top 10 records, he says, because he can’t.
There’s records you can play when you’re sad, and records to play when you’re happy, and your favourites one day might not be your favourites the next.
Top 500, he says. That would be the way to go. The best way to do it.
He concedes that some people might see him as that “mad collector out in Maymont,” but he figures all collectors have to be a little bit weird.
So is it weird that when he hears Coleman Hawkins play Sweet Lorraine he can’t help but smile? No, it isn’t. He’s memorized everything about that song, can tell you about the sidemen and who else they play with, and it never stops making him happy.
“It’s something that comes from within,” he says of listening to music.
“An emotional experience. It can bring back memories of lying on the couch with your girlfriend, and Elvis comes on singing something, you know?”
He recites the name of that Elvis song, “That’s when your heartaches begin ... “and you know it’s nestled somewhere in these stacks, in this big old building, grooved into one of 35,000 records stretching as far as the eye can see.