Extract
Amanda Petrusich
Blues in My Condition
John Heneghan’s East Village apartment is crammed tight with dusty American artifacts: antique wooden furniture, pulpy paperback books, a Beverly Hills, 90210 pencil case (with matching ruler and eraser), an unopened can of Bahamas Goombay Punch, a yellowing Planet of the Apes cereal bowl. All available surfaces are littered with collectibles; all accessible closets are bursting with vintage clothes, discerningly acquired by Heneghan’s striking live-in girlfriend, Eden Brower. Two exceptionally skittish house cats, both rescues, nip in and out of cardboard boxes, eyes wary and wide. Alongside the far living-room wall, sixteen squat wooden cubes – each filled with about a hundred 78 rpm records, most recorded before 1935 – loom, parsed into genres like Hillbilly, Blues, Hawaiian, or Comedy and organised alphabetically by artist. Each section is marked off with a neatly labelled cardboard divider; each 78 is housed in an unmarked brown-paper sleeve. It is an impeccable display. I ask Heneghan if he ever sits in his living room and gazes at his record collection, mesmerised by each perfect row. ‘All the time,’ he answers.
‘I have a recurring dream about finding Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman”, Heneghan says, leaning in, voice low and solemn. ‘It’s so vivid, so clear – the first time it happened I woke up in the middle of the night certain that I had the record. I was like, “This is amazing”. So I got up to check, and it wasn’t there, and I was like, “Fuck”. So then I have the dream again, and it’s so vivid the second time, and I think maybe the part about not having it was the dream. So I get up to check. Then I have the dream the third time, and the fourth time . . .’
At 40, John Heneghan is one of America’s youngest collectors of 78 rpm records. Although he’s careful to establish a clear distinction between collectors of 78s and folks who shamelessly stockpile LPs or 45s (for Heneghan, the distinction is acute, comparable to collecting pebbles vs collecting diamonds), his own collection began with an LP – a reissue of a Charley Patton record, which he acquired when he was 16 years old.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
‘I have a recurring dream about finding Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman”, Heneghan says, leaning in, voice low and solemn. ‘It’s so vivid, so clear – the first time it happened I woke up in the middle of the night certain that I had the record. I was like, “This is amazing”. So I got up to check, and it wasn’t there, and I was like, “Fuck”. So then I have the dream again, and it’s so vivid the second time, and I think maybe the part about not having it was the dream. So I get up to check. Then I have the dream the third time, and the fourth time . . .’
At 40, John Heneghan is one of America’s youngest collectors of 78 rpm records. Although he’s careful to establish a clear distinction between collectors of 78s and folks who shamelessly stockpile LPs or 45s (for Heneghan, the distinction is acute, comparable to collecting pebbles vs collecting diamonds), his own collection began with an LP – a reissue of a Charley Patton record, which he acquired when he was 16 years old.
– The rest of this article is printed in Loops Issue 01, available to buy from these Stockists.
