Earlier than it burned, Charlie Springer’s home contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, a whole bunch of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold data. The albums alone occupied a complete wall of cabinets within the household room, and one other within the storage. On his desk have been a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an previous RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Seaside Boys signal—so far as he is aware of, one in all solely eight remaining on the earth—hung above the eating desk. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; close to his hearth, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.
Final month, the night time the Eaton Hearth broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s home. And when he got here again, the remnants of his residence had been bleached by the hearth. The spot within the household room the place the document assortment had been was darkish ash.
I’ve identified Charlie for so long as I can keep in mind. He and my father met due to data. Within the late Nineteen Eighties, Charlie was at a crowded get together within the Hollywood Hills when he heard somebody greet my father by his full title. Charlie whipped round: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your title on data.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument store, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional help) he offered throughout recording classes. Charlie was a nationwide gross sales supervisor at Warner Bros. Information and will rattle off the B-side of any document, so after all he’d clocked Walecki showing time and again. Rising up, I believed each track I’d ever heard may be discovered on Charlie’s cabinets; his good friend Jim Wagner, who as soon as ran gross sales, merchandising, and promoting for Warner Bros. Information, known as it the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame West.
Charlie’s assortment began when he was 6. He had requested his mom to get him the document “in regards to the canine,” and he or she’d introduced again Patti Web page’s “(How A lot Is) That Doggie within the Window?” No, not that one—he wished a forty five of Elvis’s lately launched single, “Hound Canine.” He’d cart it round with him for the subsequent seven a long time, throughout a number of states, earlier than inserting it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown exterior Chicago to afford “Candy Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he bought Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his native document store and located its proprietor, Lenny, sitting on the ground, frazzled, surrounded by piles of data. Each week, Lenny needed to rearrange the data on his wall to mirror the order of the High 40 chart made by the native radio station WLS. Charlie supplied to assist.
“What is going to it price me?” Lenny requested.
“Two singles every week.” Charlie held on to all of these singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.
When he was 12, he purchased his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Seaside Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Inexperienced Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to develop into a priest. There, he and his buddies discovered a listing of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and despatched out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went with out a lot. Radios have been contraband, however Charlie taped one beneath the chair subsequent to his mattress, and at night time, whereas 75 different college students slept round him, he would use an earbud to hearken to WLS. “And I might hear data, and I might go, Oh my God, I gotta get this document. I have to. ” Seminarians might go into city provided that it was strictly essential, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he bought a few different Seaside Boys data, the Kinks’ “Uninterested in Ready for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”
Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, on the finish of his junior yr. All of these five-and-dime data had been in his prefect’s room, however when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be discovered. So, Charlie bought a ladder, wriggled by a transom, and bought his assortment, saved in two crates which had beforehand contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums completely,” he instructed me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out simply in time for the Summer time of Love. He moved right into a commune of types, a 16-unit residence constructing with the partitions between flats damaged down, and bought a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on phone poles across the Bay Space. He’d staple up psychedelic paintings promoting Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Useless, or Sly and the Household Stone. (He nonetheless had about 75 of these posters.) He labored at Tower Information on the facet however would hand his paycheck again to his boss: The cash all went to data. Anytime one in all his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Seaside Boys—launched a brand new album, he’d host a listening get together for buddies. When he moved again to Chicago, his music assortment took up a lot of the automotive. The document retailer he managed there, Hear Right here, would obtain about 20 new albums each day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two earlier than Born to Run), he thought it was such successful, he locked the store door. “Till I promote 5 of those data,” he introduced, “no one is getting out of this retailer.”
Subsequent, Charlie labored his manner up at a music-distribution firm, ranging from a gig within the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Information, he’d work with shops and radio stations to assist artists promote sufficient music to get, after which maintain, their large break. To promote Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they might signal albums at a Kansas Metropolis document store; to assist Dire Straits get their begin, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for a few yr till it caught on. He was additionally on the shortlist of people that would pay attention to check pressings of a brand new album for any pops or crackles, earlier than the corporate shipped the ultimate model. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of these uncommon pressings, together with Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.
He moved to Los Angeles within the ’80s to be Warner’s nationwide gross sales supervisor, and in 1991, he purchased his residence on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled within the foothills, the realm smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Alongside the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, an impressive native oak that our households would sit beneath collectively. He began inserting hundreds of his albums on these cabinets within the household room, overlooking that tree.
In Charlie’s home, a document was at all times enjoying. He had lately papered the partitions and ceiling of his rest room with the WLS surveys he began gathering as a toddler, in his first record-store job. Each document he pulled off the shelf got here with a reminiscence, he instructed me. And if he saved an album or a memento in his home, “it was a great story.”
A gold document from U2, on the wall subsequent to the staircase: “All bands, once they first begin off, they’re new bands, and no one is aware of who they’re, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, they usually performed a gig for about 15 individuals, after which we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went again to the restaurant a pair years later, and the identical waitress waited on me, and I mentioned, ‘Wow, I keep in mind I used to be in right here with U2.’ And he or she goes, ‘These guys have been U2?’ I used to be like, ‘They have been U2 then they usually’re U2 now.’”
Within the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix hanging an influence chord on the Monterey Pop Pageant: “Seal places his first document out, and I’ve simply develop into a vice chairman at Warner Bros. And I’m going to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal document goes to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that type of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘As a result of I do know with each corpuscle in my physique it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gents’s guess. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” On the subsequent lunch, he requested the finance government to signal his greenback invoice. Simply then, Mo Ostin, the top of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo mentioned, ‘So Charlie, is there one thing across the constructing that you just at all times preferred?’ I used to be like, ‘Effectively, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”
*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Instances / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Solar Information / Alamy