Thursday, April 23, 2009
By Denise Dick
The archive collects, preserves and provides information on popular music.
POLAND — It started in the booths at a downtown record store and grew into a career and lifelong passion.
Bob George, director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music, New York City, graduated from Poland Seminary High School and left for the University of Michigan in 1967. He earned a scholarship in the 1970s to complete an independent study program at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.
George, 59, now lives in New York, but his mother, Elizabeth George, still lives in Poland township
“I visit every year,” George said.
Those visits usually occur in the summer. His wife, Patrice, teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology, so it’s difficult to schedule visits any other time of the year.
“He’s a fabulous artist,” Elizabeth George said of her son, who created mostly modern art pieces.
But his love of music started at a young age too, she said.
“When he went to Woodstock, he took his little sister,” Elizabeth George said. “I was a little concerned, but I knew they’d be OK.”
She remembers her son listening to music in his bedroom as a youth.
According to its Web site, ARC is a “not-for-profit archive, music library and research center located in New York City.”
It collects, preserves and provides information on popular music from all cultures dating from 1950.
“Since the Archive’s founding in 1986, our holdings have grown to over 1.5 million sound recordings, making the Archive the largest popular music collection in the United States,” the Web site says.
George ended up teaching at the Whitney, where he met Laurie Anderson, who at that time was a street performer, and the two started working together in 1977. His interest in art took a back seat to music.
In 1981, George produced Anderson’s song “O Superman.”
“It got to No. 2 in Great Britain and No. 1 in many other countries,” he said.
It didn’t do as well in the United States.
“That kind of got it going,” George said of his career in music. “At that time it was called sound art, experimental music or performance art.”
Much like many other kids growing up in the 1960s, he played guitar.
“My fondest memories are in the old booths at the Record Rendezvous in downtown Youngstown and [WHOT] DJ Boots Bell,” the township native said. “There were these beautiful, old mahogany booths that you used to sit in and listen to music. It used to be a very physical experience.”
After producing Anderson’s song, George started working as a DJ at clubs and on radio, traveling the world. During his travels, he amassed 47,000 albums.
“At the time, there were no CDs,” George said.
When he tried to give his collection to a library or archive, nobody was interested. Both the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Center declined the offer.
Those institutions preferred classical music. His collection consisted mostly of punk, hip-hop and reggae.
“A group of people got together and provided all the funding,” he said, referring to his board of advisers and trustees.
George’s collection provided the early foundation for the archive. It started in 1985.
He says he doesn’t have a particular favorite type of music. Right now, he’s listening primarily to Arabic and North African music.
“As you become more of an administrator, your hands-on experience kind of diminishes,” George said.
He tries to listen to two new things per day.
The collection now consists of 1.5 million sound recordings in a 12,000-square-foot space. Most of the recordings have been donated by record companies, private collectors or the artists themselves. The Archive includes 350,000 CDs, 500,000 long-playing records and 750,000 12-inch dance records.
Nile Rodgers, the producer of much early hip-hop music, donated many of his works, as did John “Jellybean” Benitez, the producer of Madonna’s early music.
Keith Richards’ Blues Collection is another part of the Archive, and it’s endowed by Richards of the Rolling Stones.
Rodgers, Richards and Benitez all serve on the Archive’s board of advisers, as do David Bowie, Lou Reed and Paul Simon, among others.
“Me and the Devil Blues,” a 78 RPM by blues legend Robert Johnson, is part of Richards’ collection and likely one of only 12 of that record in the world, George said.
It’s something the archive couldn’t afford to do on its own.
“We don’t usually go after rare things,” George said. “We need that kind of help to do that. We can’t do that on our own.”
But Richards loves that genre of music, George said. It inspired him and his work, and donating the collection to the archive is the artist’s way of giving back and preserving it.
“We’ve been getting more donations than ever before,” George said. “It’s too expensive to store these things and, also, for collectors, it’s their life’s work.”
The archive recently joined in a cooperative agreement with Columbia University and the Arts Initiative at Columbia to integrate the Archive’s resources into arts programming at the university and to other activities.
“The archive is an extraordinary resource, and it is an honor for Columbia to make the collection available for education and scholarship,” said Jim Neal, vice president for information services at Columbia and the university librarian. “We welcome this opportunity to advance wider availability and use of the archive.”
That also ensures the archive’s future. It had been an independent entity. By joining forces with the university, the archive will continue.
Next month, George plans to present the National Discography in Washington, D.C. It will be an online version of the archive’s cataloging system that’s easy to use to locate and discover information about music, albums, songs, artists and other data. It will also offer information about out-of-print material.
“We hope to become a reliable source of accurate information” about music, George said.
denise_dick@vindy.com