What does American culture at large see in record collecting? Some notion of the answer is hinted at by the archivist at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: “ Everyone has some kind of emotional connection to rock and roll. When an average person walks into an art museum, they probably don’t consider themselves an expert about art. Whereas I think most of our visitors have a fair amount of knowledge about rock and roll[1].” The emotional connection to rock 'n' roll, which leads to a monetary and a social connection, is the focus of this paper. Events around the death of vinyl record collector and the subsequent auctioning of his collection bring the reality of that "connection" into focus.
Tom Knight was a Michigan disc jockey in with an extraordinary collection of records and compact discs, numbering over 55,000 items. He was killed June 5, 1997 in his Brighton, Michigan home, a crime for which his wife and her brother are serving prison sentences. Knight, whose given name is Thomas Margellar, has achieved some degree of fame in death as his collection, consisting of an eclectic variety of artists, styles and formats, has caused a change of strategy in an unlikely area: the auction circuit. Along the way from leaving the possession of Knight and his home to becoming a defining event in the auction world, the collection served the outcome of a murder trial, and became the center of a short-lived local drama. On a personal level, it reveals the collector of rare and unusual records to be of an uncomplicated if somewhat obsessive nature, who collects with little else in mind than love of the music, and views benefit outside that enjoyment as secondary.
Knight was born in 1949, so it is no exaggeration to say he shared his childhood with the infancy of rock ‘n’ roll. His parents recount that it was earlier in his life than anyone can recall when he began to frequent record shops, pouring over every item. He purchased a wide variety of genres, asking constant questions and displaying expert knowledge at a young age. This enthusiasm hardly waned through his life. It eventually led to his finding his way onto the air in 1980, when he quit his job at Ford and began his freelance DJ career, which he continued until his 1987 death.
The collection was housed in alphabetical order in a specially build room in Knight's basement, with archival quality climate control to protect the items. Friends, colleagues, and family were impressed at the extent of his organization and the care with which he handled the materials. Equally impressive was his sharing of the collection with the public, whenever possible: he offered his services as DJ through his Knight Train Productions[2], both to private parties and to radio stations in Michigan. Finally, the collection is likely to contain the origin of the professional name Knight: according to fellow collector Joe Moorehouse,
there was a band from Detroit in the 60's called Terry Knight and the Pack that actually became, with Terry Knight as their manager instead of their lead singer, Grand Funk Railroad, in the 70s. It's interesting to me that Tom had all their records. Given what he had, all their records, I just wonder if that's where he got his professional name....[3]
Knight apparently had started a catalog, but had entered less than 10% of his holdings. Such a document would have taken longer than most collectors are willing to spend. Joe Moorehouse a fellow collector, remarks, "the problem with cataloging is just time. It takes a long time to do that. If I had a lot of money I'd pay someone to do it for me. Collectors are buying and selling all the time. The documentation starts to dominate the hobby. Most collectors aren't even very good typists.[4]" This is not a small issue for collectors. It is not a matter of being disorganized or not caring about the collection or access to it. In fact, common record collector's traits include rigid adherence to orderly storage and protective covering for their records. Tom Knight exercised these traits. The issue is one of opportunity cost. Cataloging is a profession separate from collecting: it was a choice of one or the other.
After Knight's death the collection, now in the control of his parents, was sold to William Doyle Galleries auction house in New York City, where it was partially disbursed in an auction on February 16, 1999. The list of artists read like a history of rock 'n' roll itself: Bill Haley and the Comets, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Platters, the Rolling Stones, Roy Orbison, Ritchie Vallens, thousands more.
It is this very personal connection to the rare and expensive to which the auction world appeals as it seeks out new markets to pursue amongst a younger public. The user in both the case of the public auction house and the private record collector is entirely an economic entity. Members of the professions involved with selling and collecting these items treat them as cautiously and as frugally as they would precious jewels: their value as physical assets is established. Their value as an inroad for the auction houses into the lives and purses of the post-Baby Boom generations of Americans is potentially huge.
As the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum gains national notoriety and seeks to gathers the rare and unique items of its genre's history, and as vinyl recordings fall into pop-culture's past, the natural reaction of music enthusiasts is to prize these relics, and to reflect that enthusiasm in their spending. But certain collectors, like Tom Knight, comprehended the value of preserving and cataloging these items before the notion was popular. A collector since childhood, he built a basement storage area for his collection, including climate control and steel shelving to protect his treasures. Among local DJ's and record shop owners he became known as a marvel. Not only for the volume of the collection but for the wide eclectic range of taste he exhibited[5].
There were also peculiarities to his procurement habits, which to the ordinary non-collector would seem strange, but on closer examination are revealed as fairly typical among serious collectors. To the my bemusement, Tom Knight seemed strange in the highly private way he collected, and in the obsessive enthusiasm he is said to have shown. But it turns out these are fairly common record collector traits rather than oddities. In fact if anything is to be considered odd it would be that Knight, knowing the extreme monetary value of his records, would frequently play them on his radio shows when he might have realized their value was lessened by frequent use.
If there is some degree of irony in the notion that these artifacts of our cultural past are so jealously hidden despite their public appeal, it is one of many frustrating issues that appear to be common to other types of collections. Yet Knight was not typical among collectors. His most unusual trait was his broad range of interests. Not confined to rock 'n' roll, or to one subspecies of rock 'n' roll, such as "girl groups" or "surf music 45's" (narrowness of scope is a trademark of many record collectors), Knight scoured Detroit area record stores for nearly three decades and seemed to be bent on collecting anything and everything. In fact his behavior was more like that of a field representative for a newly established institution (with a thin collection and a broad mission) than that of a private collector with limited space in his home to house his materials.
Who were the individuals who purchased the fruits of Knight's lifetime of collecting and what did they see as the meaning and social function of collecting valuable vinyl? His public, aside from those who benefited from his Michigan radio broadcasts, are an uncommon combination of radically divergent individuals and organizations, including his family, his killers, other collectors, the auction house that sold his items, and a national audience that might have glimpsed him one night in February 1999 on CNN's Moneyline, or heard of him on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
When Margellar died he left behind his parents, both in their eighties, and his wife, who, along with her brother is now a prison term for being an accessory after the fact in his killing. Her brother, Robert, has been convicted of second degree murder. Knight's father, Tom Sr., quite plausibly declares that Knight "...lived for that collection, and died for that collection.[6]"
There is a strong case for the collection having been being a motive for the killing. It was clear enough to Linda, his wife, that the overall value of the collection was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Until a probate court decision gave possession of the records to the Margellars, Linda was in a position of inheriting the collection after finishing her prison term. In addition it is speculated that the collection was "cherry picked" before it passed into the possession of his parents (the police arrested Knight's wife two days after the murder and she had full access to their home and the collection in the interim). This suggestion lends the collection living attributes: it was the owner's pride, his enjoyment. It was the motive for his killing.
The influence of this collection in the mind of the public having been thus enhanced by a violent crime, there lingers the possibility that William Doyle Galleries, the auction house which eventually sold his records, might have profited from the public's fascination with the circumstances of Knight's violent death. But attendees of the auction did not concern themselves with the collector's death. They were looking for that item, the one that marked their careers, a glimpse of which they had been seeking, their eyes to the horizon in the corners of dark record stores for their entire collecting careers. The auction house was not particularly concerned with the events around Tom's death, either. His name was not even mentioned in their promotions for the event.
As for the meaning that Knight's collection had to his family members, there is no small irony in considering that one collector's life's work became his destruction. To them the notion of our society's emotional collection to rock 'n' roll must have another meaning altogether. Still they are able to fondly recall the life he devoted to records and his enjoyment in making and valuable finds in unusual places.
An auction of Tom Knights records was held on February 16, 1999 in New York City at William Doyle Galleries. The auction house showed no interest in cultivating the seamy or sensational side of Knight's death. Their focus was the value and the rarity of the items:
ROCKIN' RHYTHM N' BLUES:
THE FINE VINYL AUCTION
An extraordinary single-owner collection of records. Including almost 60,000 singles, EPs, LPs and CDs by The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, a selection of recordings by Elvis Presley on the Sun label, rare rhythm and blues and rockabilly among numerous other recording artists from the early 1950s through the mid 1990s.
This promotion appeared at the Doyle Galleries web site, alongside a wide variety of highly selective and expensive events that included such precious titles as Important Estate Jewelry and Belle Epoque: 19th and 20th Century Decorative Arts. Other similar auctions had failed, or yielded unprofitable results. A decision had been made to risk trying this experimental event based on research done after the appearance of the October 18, 1997 Detroit Free Press report on Knight's collection and the extent of his collection.
To the serious collectors, though, it was the promise of finding the rarest of the rare among the collection that held true attraction. For a brief period before the auction there were spectacular estimates as to the overall value of the collection, the highest figure reaching $1.2 million[7]. The actual take turned out to be a fraction of that figure, with a sizeable number of items left unsold. Nevertheless, the level of public enthusiasm generated by the sale was enough to prompt Doyle to announce that the Fine Vinyl auction would certainly be repeated the following year.
A potential inroad to the upwardly mobile young American, this collection represented a departure for the auction house, made possible by the death of Tom Knight, but not necessarily sold for the purpose of exploiting that fact. An important transformation for the collection occurred as a result of the auction. It became a random group of products for sale. The work committed to bringing these items together was now reversed, transformed into the work of other collectors, or dealers. Items removed from this extraordinary consolidation of recording relics may bear the name Tom Knight even after changing hands several times, but the collection effectively ended at Doyle's auction.
The auction also provided Tom Knight's records, and indeed all records, with a moment of fame. CNN's Moneyline pondered the value of classic vinyl as an investment. NPR's All Things Considered waxed philosophical on the collector's dilemma of whether to enjoy a rare record by playing it, or to keep its value by leaving it pristine. The notion of Knight's records carrying shockingly high monetary value momentarily fills the heart of anyone who owns vinyl. Detroit Free Press writer Sheryl James, from whose writings provide most of the details of Knight's life, was inundated with phone calls by enthusiastic record owners wanting to make a profit[8]. Surely this was an event of affirmation for the public's faith in its favorite music and the format the rock 'n' roll generation grew up with.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum thinks otherwise[9]. Assistant Archivist Howard Cramer noted that Tom Knight’s collection had been overvalued by the appraiser, overly hyped by the attention of the Detroit Free Press, and that Doyle’s had not succeeded with the auction on any level. “It’s easy to misunderstand the value of collectibles”, he said, “because people are familiar with names, tend to misunderstand in terms of their monetary value vs. their marquee value. When you actually break it down to its elements, what is actually a valuable record vs. what gets people’s passions going tend to be two different things.” Though he viewed the Knight collection in a different light, his statements on the nature of collecting were consistent with others I had encountered: there is both a private and a public value to the items; the general population feels strongly connected to rock ‘n’ roll; and the two values are easily misunderstood.
This led to some interest on my part as to the view that the Hall takes of its collections. Its collections are at a higher level, one of a national monument to rock 'n' roll, rather than as a repository for "completists" who seek to own the full catalog of doo-wop, or the full collection of Beatles pre-Sgt. Peppers singles.
As to the monetary value of records in general, Cramer submitted that "the indication is that vinyl is continuing to go up" in price. As far as this institution was concerned, though, Tom Knight and his records had no bearing on the state of things other than as a briefly interesting curiosity. The mission of the museum sheds some light on their dismissal of the collection: "We really want artifacts that are more historical in nature as opposed to being more fan-oriented.[10]" Since the Hall routinely harvests its items from the families and friends of those who created the records, it is easy to see why Knight's vinyl is out of their scope. Still, the Hall is home to a quarter of a million records. How many are cataloged? None. Apparently, the same maxims hold true for this national institution as they do for individual collectors: cataloging and collecting are two separate occupations.
As news of the auction crossed the country, the importance of the single owner affected its appeal on potential buyers. Knight was portrayed as a meticulous person, taking more care, doing less damage to his items. If the collector has been discerning and persistent along with meticulous, the possibility of finding that item, and in excellent shape, was much greater.
The notion of that item is one that was introduced to me by Chester Prudhomme of Port Townsend, Washington, a 25 year collecting veteran who was called in by Doyle to appraise the collection in January 1999. Though Prudhomme is an authority on various collectibles including autos, airplanes and recorded music, he was at first somewhat at a loss to define the collector and his relationship to the collection. After struggling with the definition for a moment, he intimated that for the individual it came down to one's personal satisfaction with owning the precious item within the mission around which he collects. Dollar values in mind or not, the collector has a vision of what his ultimate find would be. Money can be a factor in this, but not necessarily. Prudhomme himself admitted to vainly seeking one such item for his collection of guitars.
The Martin Guitar Company has a certain model from 1952 called the Triple O 17. Only 25 made. I have never even seen in all those years of looking. But there's no demand for it. So if I could find it I could get it for $1500 to $2000 because no one else wants it. That's cheap compared to its rarity. On the other hands, a Martin pre-war A-28, they made five or six thousand of them but they are worth much more than the Triple O 17 because every guitar collector wants to have one.
With this notion in mind, Tom Knight becomes more, not less of a mystery. For the diversity of the collection makes it difficult to imagine what that item might have been for him. According to more than one acquaintance, Knight collected new singles by local, unknown bands with the same relish as he collected precious, expensive, hard to come by oldies.
Sheryl James, author of the Detroit Free Press articles that brought Knight to Doyle’s (and to this writer’s) attention, defined Knight as a person “who just collected anything and everything. Even if it wasn’t going to be worth anything…” In saying so, she revealed the same basic truth of collecting that Prudhomme had offered in his guitar example. There is no telling in advance, and the bottom line is demand. Certainly in 1954 no one would have clamored to get Elvis Presley’s Mystery Train as something that was “going to be worth anything[11]” (it sold at the auction for $2000). Of course we can only speculate as to whether monetary value or rarity was first in this collector’s mind. For the one who purchased it, though –according to Prudhomme- it’s not the cash value but “a certain sense of gratification, self-satisfaction, that pride from owning something so rare that so many people want.”
Prudhomme, who had been hired by the gallery to appraise, had
estimated the collection's value at $1.2 million. Actual take at
the auction was $152,260. This disparity was in part due to the
packaging, but mostly the timing "A real, live record dealer
would have auctioned them off in a 2 year period to totally
maximize their profit", commented Prudhomme later. Also a factor
in the lower-than expected intake from the auction was vagueness
of the pre-auction "catalog" made public on Doyle's web
site[12], batches of items in a 72 page litany of cursory
descriptions. A sample follows:
*154 Miscellaneous Group Of Rock And Pop 1960s, 45 RPM
Commercial and promotional labels, many picture sleeves.
(Approximately 150)
400-600
* 155 Miscellaneous Group Of Rock And Pop 1960s, 45 RPM
Commercial and promotional labels, many picture labels.
(Approximately 150)
$400-600
*156 Miscellaneous Group Of Rock And Pop 1950s And 1960s, 45
RPM
Commercial and promotional labels, all picture sleeves.
(Approximately 150)
$2,000-4,000
*157 Miscellaneous Group Of Rock And Pop 1950s And 1960s, 45
RPM
Commercial and promotional labels. (Approximately 150)
$800-1,200
Information sparse as this list was, it became the inspiration for at least one collector to drop everything and rush to the sale. Ann Arbor collector Joe Moorehouse recounts that he
had seen the whole collection the year before. I didn't know Doyle had it at this point. I had started to think I might have another shot at it if it was just sitting there. The night before the auction was to start, we're sitting in the dining room at 8:15 and there is the story in the newspaper saying the auction is happening the next morning and the list of contents is on the Web site. I saw they didn't delineate the records, that they were in boxes of 150 records that weren't delineated, so I figured, maybe this could work, maybe I could just go after the records from the sixties if they're selling them in groups...at midnight I booked a flight to New York. Stood outside Doyle at 9:30 in the morning...I bought what records I could. I didn't know what I was buying. I knew what was in the collection, but I didn't know exactly what records I had until ten days later when they came to my house[13].
Though greatly enthusiastic about many of the 8,000 items he purchased that day, Moorehouse shares Prudhomme's opinion that the auction house's one-day approach is not fitting to the record-collecting world. "When you sell things in boxes of 150 records you are selling to dealers then. To get maximum value you gotta sell one record at a time. Well, no auction house is going to do that, and when there's 55,000 of them you just about have to go into the record business full time to do that. And they don't want to."
Two separate cultures, with very little in common, came together because of Knight's collection: these were the auctioneers and the record collectors. This was not an unprecedented occurrence, Prudhomme states that "it was only the second time records have gone into auction in this particular fashion.[14]" This statement refers to the primary disagreement between the routines of record dealing world and those of the auctioning world. At Doyle's web site, there is an arrangement of auction events listed in date order by theme. Most of them take place within a matter of hours, and most of them include a number of items that carry values much higher than the highest priced 45-rpm single (The highest paid for one 45 was $2,000 for Elvis Presley's Mystery Train). By contrast, the record collector is accustomed to purchasing through trade events, mail order, and in stores. In all of these cases, the seller is not necessarily under a great time constraint, and to sell one item could take many months. To some, this was simply a bust for the auction house, who should have realized this was the domain of dealers, individual collectors, and regular used record stores.
Doyle's doesn't necessarily see the situation in the same light. And the $152,260[15] take seems to have been enough to encourage further work in this area. In fact, their enthusiasm for contact with younger audiences will be channeled in this area, which they believe to be an expanding market. [16]
After the auction, the Journalist Richard Pyle noted that “…industry observers see the sale as an opportunity for records to cross an important commercial threshold: from the domain of the hobbyist to that of the high- powered collector, much as baseball cards and comic books have done.[17]” What was the “vinyl underground” becomes a lucrative field through the occurrence of discoveries such as the Tom Knight collection. Remembering for the moment that one can never tell ahead of time what will be widely sought in the future, every rock ’n’ roll item suddenly takes on great potential. This collection and its unusual journey to international notice (CNN, National Public Radio, the London Financial Times and the New York Times all appeared at the auction to report on its success) could be the herald of a series of great cultural shift toward a heightened value of pop culture and its artifacts.
Appraiser Chester Prudhomme disagrees with Hall of Fame archivist Howard Cramer's notion of the sale having been unsuccessful: “I think (Doyle’s) purpose-and it worked very well- in doing this, was to gather- to get lots of publicity. And they got lots of publicity- they couldn't have bought for any amount of money. In places they couldn't have bought it even if they had the money.” To Prudhomme, the collection was worth more to Doyle’s as an inroad to a market niche neither they nor their auction house competitors had yet penetrated: the young hipster with a few disposable dollars in his income. Sheryl James of the Free Press agrees. “It was a strategic move on their part…they believe that, unless you get people interested, younger people, like in many other industries, get them in the habit, get them used to the idea of going to auctions…you won’t renew your clientele.[18] ”
Doyle's may be shrewdly capturing a new market and forcing other auction houses to compete in this new and unfamiliar territory, but in so doing they made their auction into a wholesale purchasing event. Along with the collectors, the dealers participate. They then pass the records on to other dealers, then to collectors. The transformation, if it does occur, will take time because rare buyers aren't expecting to find their rare items at auction houses. Both Prudhomme and Moorehouse mentioned an almost laughable logistics of trying to sell 55,000 items in one 8 hour period.
In rock ‘n’ roll, and in music in general, many people see themselves, and feel their identity defined. Relics of the brand of music that was once scorned and derided as a trashy teenage entertainment -during the of rise of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry- is now held so valuable by the world that a full time curator of rock’s artifacts, with an archival staff, programs a meaningful set of exhibits and public events, following the model of fine art museums. The curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum pays homage to the recent explosion of monetary value of pop music-related collectibles by noting that their repository’s donation-only policy is an economically motivated choice as well as one of principle. You read about people spending $50,000 or $300,000 for a guitar. We just didn’t have the money (to consider purchasing for the collection)[19].”
Knight's collection came into the public eye because of a news stories about his murder that only mentioned the collection briefly. A Doyle representative, Carolyn Ashleigh, whose antique appraisal work with PBS television’s Road Show is nationally respected, took notice of James’s mentioning the collection in an October, 1997 articles in the Free Press, thus beginning the series of events that led to the records being hauled away in January 1999 via refrigerated truck to New York City and Doyle’s. Had Tom Knight been allowed to live the collection would exist in relatively obscurity, and the functions it has happened to serve since would not have come to pass.
Thus, this one very private entity, a record collection, intended for a single individual’s enjoyment and little else, had spawned in a short span of time a series of events that people could not have initiated. As Knight’s father had noted, “he died for that collection.” Because of Knight’s collection, the Police established motive for his killing, sealing the convictions of Tom’s wife Linda and her brother Robert Bulger. Because of Doyle’s interest in the collection, record collections as a whole are brought into focus as a new potential investment opportunity.
The range of activities taking place around the collection gives it a value beyond what Knight envisioned, and beyond what any individual is capable of controlling. Ironically, had the potential of this collection’s capturing the interest of a corporate entity such as Doyle’s, no motive for killing Tom Knight would have existed in the first place. The irony of often whimsical items of enjoyment such as rock ‘n’ roll 45’s being coveted in the bastions of capitalism is bountiful. The entire rock ‘n’ roll genre, so often used to represent the opposite of social control over individuals, so often claimed by the misunderstood youth as a welcoming escape from the orderly world of commerce, education, corporate greed, now comes more completely under the control of commercial forces. Evaluation of collectibles, Prudhomme states, “is all about supply and demand”[20]. The emotional and economic seem intertwined in this statement.
As the drama of Tom Knight’s death evolves into a study of the new potential commercial value of old record collections, the social forces acting upon the collection and its user are compelling. James asserts that his personal life suffered as a result of the man’s connection with his obsessive hobby. It is possible that the social atmosphere makes collecting a disastrous undertaking for individuals by placing pressure on them not to be abnormally interested in the hobby. The disconnection from norms causes resentment and jealousy. Prudhomme, a “psychotherapist by profession and a collector by practice”, offered the following insight: “collectors do not necessarily feel that everybody else knows about the collection to feel that sense of gratification. The fact is there are many, many, many private collectors who don’t even want people to know they have a collection of anything, let alone what’s in it…it’s not for anybody else…it’s for them.”
Though Knight's collection might have been one ingredient in a
deadly mix of circumstance, its role in his life was, like the
attraction many people feel to gather like objects of rare or
unusual nature, something simpler. As collector Joe Moorehouse
rather humbly observed, "...it's impossible to forget the
circumstances that led me to have them...the fact is he should
still be alive and playing the records that I'm now playing and
selling [21]."