Collections · Disco · Funk · Soul
Twelve hundred records from the Bronx
A lifetime of funk, soul and disco, carried from the Bronx to the Hudson Valley, and now back into circulation.
Collections · Hudson Valley
On a Wednesday morning at the end of October, we drove up to Mohegan Lake to look at a collection. The listing said a thousand records of funk, soul and disco. When we got there it was closer to twelve hundred, plus five hundred CDs, boxed and waiting.
Colin built it over most of his life, almost all of it while he lived in the Bronx. Later he moved up to Mohegan Lake, raised a family, and brought the records with him. Decades of digging, carried from one home to the next.
Most collections are a mix of what someone loved and what they picked up along the way. This one leaned hard in one direction. Marvin Gaye showed up more than once: a Tamla pressing of What's Going On, and Live at the London Palladium from 1977. There was Paul Pena's 1972 album on Capitol, in mint condition. Most people have never heard of that record, and the people who have will stop for it. And tucked in among the soul was Heltah Skeltah's Nocturnal from 1996, Brooklyn hip-hop built from the same kind of records that filled the rest of the boxes.
We bought the whole collection and carried it up from his basement, box by box, into the van.
Back at the shop, we went through every record. We kept the 600 in the best condition. Those are being cleaned and sleeved for the crates at Needle to Wax in Dumbo, because what we put back in people's hands should be the best of what we find.
The rest went to local artists and to diggers looking for dollar records. Nothing ends up forgotten in a basement. Every record from Colin's boxes keeps playing somewhere.