The House Where 28,000 Records Burned
Before it burned, Charlie Springer's house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.
Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend's house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.
I've known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: 'You're Fred Walecki? I've been seeing your name on records.' Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he'd clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I'd ever heard could also be found on Charlie's shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.
Charlie's collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record 'about the dog,' and she'd brought back Patti Page's '(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?' No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis's recently released single, 'Hound Dog.' He'd cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford 'Sweet Little Sixteen,' by Chuck Berry, and 'Tequila,' by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles's 'What'd I Say.' And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, sitting on the floor, frazzled, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.
'What will it cost me?' Lenny asked.
'Two singles a week.' Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.
When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin' Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan's eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee's Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. 'And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ' Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he'd break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That's how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks' 'Tired of Waiting for You,' and the Lovin' Spoonful's 'Daydream.'
Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect's room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. ('Orange crates held albums perfectly,' he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He'd staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he'd host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen's first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. 'Until I sell five of these records,' he announced, 'nobody is getting out of this store.'
Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he'd work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin' It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Prince's Purple Rain.
He moved to Los Angeles in the '80s to be Warner's national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors' horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.
In Charlie's house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, 'it was a good story.'
A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: 'All bands, when they first start off, they're new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, 'Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.' And she goes, 'Those guys were U2?' I was like, 'They were U2 then and they're U2 now.''
In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: 'Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, 'Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.' The senior VP of finance says, 'You shouldn't say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?' And I'm like, 'Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it's gonna go gold' … So we make a $1 gentlemen's bet. About six weeks later, it's gold.' At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. 'Mo said, 'So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?' I was like, 'Well, 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 Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy
Article originally published at The Atlantic
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Cosmopolitan
13 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
What Is Decentering Men?
I have no idea when or where I first encountered the phrase 'decentering men.' All I know is that by the time it weaved its way into my vocabulary a few years ago, I seemed to understand it instinctively. This concept, wherever it came from, put words to something I'd been experiencing in my own life both consciously and subconsciously as my relationship to men—what I wanted from them, how I saw them, and how I saw myself in terms of them—began to shift in the latter half of my 20s. According to writer Sherese (Charlie) Taylor, who coined the phrase in her 2019 book, Decentering Men, that's the point. 'This phrase resonates because it gives language to a quiet, growing rage,' she tells Cosmo. 'It speaks to the exhaustion of organizing your life around men's potential, opinions, or comfort. It speaks to the clarity that comes when you finally stop contorting yourself, when you finally say, 'I will not sacrifice myself for a system that was built to consume me.'' In recent years, 'decentering men' has fully entered the zeitgeist, reaching buzzword status on TikTok and even popping up in conversations with stars like Hannah Berner and Paige Desorbo, who've discussed the concept on their Giggly Squad podcast as well as in a recent interview with CBS. 'Decentering men means when you wake up in the morning, do not base all your decisions around a man,' Berner told co-host Gayle King. But as with anything that gains traction online, the internet virality decentering men is currently enjoying leaves it vulnerable to potential misuse and misconceptions. So if you, like me, woke up one day to find this phrase had suddenly taken up residence in your brain without knowing exactly where it came from or what it means, here's an expert-backed guide to the trend that is actually not, in fact, as Taylor puts it, 'a cute trend,' but rather 'a political response, a rejection of the lie that our power comes from proximity to men.' Below, everything aspiring male decentrists should know about decentering men, from what it is to why it's popping off right now and what it really means to decenter men from your life—including your love life. 'To decenter men is to actively interrogate and undo the ways patriarchy has taught us to center them in our thoughts, decisions, and self-worth,' explains Taylor. 'Patriarchy embeds itself deep in our psyche. It teaches us that men are the prize, the rescuer, the final destination.' To decenter men is to acknowledge and unlearn these internalized beliefs and the systems they uphold and to reorient our lives around new ones. Gender equality writer and influencer Sommer Tothill adds that to understand what it means to decenter men, it may first be helpful to think about what it means to center them—which is something so ingrained in society that it can be difficult to identify. 'Essentially, women center men when we orient our life plans around securing a romantic relationship with a man,' Tothill explains, adding that women are also culturally pressured into maintaining these relationships even if they are not healthy, rewarding, or safe. But decentering men, and the ways in which life under patriarchy first teaches us to center them, is about more than the 'happily ever after' model of romantic relationships as the end-all, be-all that Disney movies of yore are (somewhat reductively albeit not unfairly) accused of spoon-feeding generations of young girls. The pressure women feel from a young age to get a boyfriend, a ring, a wedding, to orient our lives around the crowning achievement of locking it down with a man in the eyes of the law and all of our Instagram followers, is one of the most obvious manifestations of centering men at work. But the roots go much deeper. 'Women's entire lives are defined by patriarchal systems engineered to exploit our time and labour; it's so built into the fabric of society that we can even fail to notice it,' says Tothill. 'Decentering men is a conscious pushback against this exploitation.' Because that exploitation is so accepted as a default societal setting, its force often goes unnoticed—even and especially by the women it drains. 'I coined the term 'decentering men' when I realized I was exhausted from living with a man-shaped shadow in every decision,' says Taylor. 'It felt like I was living at 85 percent, waiting for someone to permit me to hit 100. That's what patriarchy does. It teaches women to hold back until we are chosen. Decentering men is a practice of naming that, confronting it, and choosing to live as sovereign women on our own terms.' Decentering men has quickly gained popularity since Taylor coined the term in 2019, becoming even more widespread in the last few years. Sex researcher Melissa A. Fabello, PhD, attributes this recent boom to the rise of TikTok and the breakneck speed with which trends gain traction on the platform, as well as the simultaneous increase in awareness of South Korea's 4B movement in the US, which encourages women to abstain entirely from dating, marrying, sex, and having children with men. Of course, both 4B and decentering men owe their recent rise in American consciousness to a current political climate that has reinforced and reinvigorated a regressive culture of misogyny. 'It's cruelly obvious in recent years that the patriarchal structures that define our society, as well as individual men, have little interest in actively advancing women's liberation,' says Tothill. 'After a string of high-profile political disappointments for women—the repeal of reproductive rights in the US, for example—women are realizing they will not be protected by men or male systems of power. So we are asking ourselves: do men even deserve our attention?' Meanwhile, for all the political regression in the air at the moment, our current era remains the first time in modern history that women have had the social and economic opportunity to choose singlehood, notes feminist dating coach Lily Womble, founder of Date Brazen and author of Thank You, More Please. Although, of course, it's worth noting that for many women, staying single remains financially risky if not impossible. Still, as women increasingly gain access to modern freedoms like financial independence and the ability to shape our lives on our terms, 'it's critical that we weigh those freedoms against the risks our relationships with men can pose to them,' says Tothill. The more freedom we get from men, the more we realize how much we have to lose to them. If decentering men is having a moment, it's because 'women are paying attention,' says Taylor. 'We are watching Roe v. Wade be reversed. We are watching incel culture go mainstream. We are watching our rights be stripped away, our safety threatened, our labor exploited, and our autonomy questioned. We are watching the rise of fascism cloaked in tradwife aesthetics, where women's value is reduced to submission and domesticity. And we are done pretending that this is normal. That is why it's resonating. Because women are waking up, and we are tired.' So if centering men begins with the societal pressure women face to build their lives around securing a romantic relationship with one, does decentering them have to mean going boy sober? Short answer, no, not necessarily. While, as Febos noted, decentering men is related to the 4B movement, it does not demand the same commitment to swearing off men entirely. In fact, Womble says the idea that decentering men means you can't or shouldn't date them is one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding it. 'The problem that the decentering men movement is aptly responding to is the patriarchal culture that tells women to shrink what they want and settle for emotionally lackluster relationships,' says Womble. 'Considering this patriarchal conditioning, of course women are taught that to date men is to inherently settle for and center them.' According to Womble, decentering men in your dating life is not about removing them from it entirely, but rather recentering yourself and your desires. And if those desires happen to include a relationship with a man, women are well within their rights to pursue that without compromising their values. 'The problem is when you make men (specifically those who were wrong for you) the focus—whether that's going on mediocre dates, staying in 'just okay' or even toxic relationships, or stopping your dating life altogether, even when you want partnership,' says Womble. 'I see women often turn their exes into 'evidence' that the relationship they want doesn't exist. That's another way of centering men instead of their own desires.' For some women, of course, decentering men may indeed involve forgoing romantic or sexual relationships with them. Because at its core, decentering men is about interrogating the societal conditioning that encourages women to prioritize romantic commitment to men and the heteropatriarchal structures with which it intersects. For some women, this may include 'asking themselves where they learned to chase concepts like marriage and nuclear family and whether or not that desire is authentic,' says Febos. 'It could look like valuing and enjoying being single, putting friends back at the center of one's life.' Either way, 'this isn't about rejecting love,' says Taylor. 'It's about rejecting the patriarchal conditioning that tells us we must suffer for it, earn it, or mold ourselves to be worthy of it.'

Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
The Beach Boys, with one founding member, set to perform at Alaska State Fair
Jun. 5—The Beach Boys will perform at the 2025 Alaska State Fair, officials announced Thursday. The band, led by founding member Mike Love, is scheduled to perform at 7 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 25. Tickets will go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday. The Beach Boys formed in California in 1961 with a lineup that included Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Love — their cousin — and Al Jardine. The current lineup includes lead singer Love and 1965 addition Bruce Johnson. Known for their California surf rock sound and glossy vocal harmonies, the band has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. The group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2001. The band is performing around the country on its "Sounds of Summer" tour. The Beach Boys join already announced acts Dwight Yoakam (Aug. 31), Wiz Khalifa (Aug. 24), Medium Build (Aug. 15), Rainbow Kitten Surprise (Aug. 16), "Weird Al" Yankovic (Aug. 17), Chris Tomlin (Aug. 18), Billy Currington (Aug. 23) and Foreigner (Aug. 30) on the 2025 fair lineup.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
‘Poker Face' Season 2 Review: Rian Johnson Ups the Chaotic Ante in Peacock's Comforting Howcatchem
Sleuths, by and large, aren't given the luxury of lying low. Worn-down beat detectives are always getting called to the next crime scene. Part-time investigators can't resist a femme fatale's desperate pleas (or ample pocketbook). But even when you set aside their professional obligations, puzzle-solvers usually don't know what to do with themselves when the game is not yet afoot. Typically, gumshoes crack cases by compulsion. Take Rian Johnson's last 'Knives Out' mystery: At the start of 'Glass Onion,' Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has grown frustrated by the pandemic's stultifying effect on real-world brainteasers. With too much time off (and too much time moping in the tub), he thinks he's going insane. He's tried reading books, he's tried playing games, he's even enlisted help from a few similarly-minded peers (including Angela Lansbury and 'Poker Face' star Natasha Lyonne). But nothing helps. 'The last thing I need is a vacation,' he says. 'I need danger, the hunt, a challenge. I need… a great case.' More from IndieWire How 'Andor' Season 2 Production Design Gives the Empire Its Oppressive Weight 'Poker Face' Season 2: Costume Designing Wicked Looks for Cynthia Erivo's Quintuplets In 'Poker Face' Season 2, Johnson sees this quandary through the looking glass (onion). Lyonne's Charlie Cale has too many cases to solve and too little downtime in between. No matter where her baby blue Plymouth Barracuda takes her, there's another liar, another dead body, and another wrong waiting to be righted. Her situation, like her innate ability to identify a lie, is unique. She's not a cop on assignment. She's not a private eye looking for work. She's happy to make a living picking apples from an orchard or snagging foul balls in the minor leagues. And yet, death haunts Charlie wherever she goes, so it's only natural to wonder: Is her nose for bullshit a blessing or a curse? What a mystery! Resolving this dilemma gives 'Poker Face' Season 2 a sturdy spine, which is especially important since the individual vertebrae (aka the individual episodes) aren't quite as compelling (save, once again, for one true gem). Since we've known Charlie, she's been running. In the first season, she seeks justice for her murdered friend and, as a result of doing the right thing, has to go on the lam. Each week, she's in a new town, working a new gig, caught up in another suspicious story. The lone wolf lifestyle suits Charlie just fine — for a while. Her ebullient personality helps to make friends wherever she goes, but when some of those friends end up dead and the rest have to be left behind when it's time to skip town, well, those losses add up. As Season 2 starts, Charlie's traded one vengeful mob boss for another. She out-maneuvered Sterling Frost, Sr. (Ron Perlman), but after refusing to use her 'gift' to help another crime family, she now has to deal with Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman). Here we go again: Charlie does the right thing, and her reward is a life spent in hiding. For a procedural, starting over is more of a comfort than an annoyance, and the first episode, directed by Johnson, offers numerous pleasures — five of which are all played by Cynthia Erivo! There's also a mini-montage of Charlie trying out odd jobs (and making new friends) before she's chased off by gun-toting mobsters. There's lovely cinematography by director of photography Jaron Presant, and Johnson savors every odd little eccentricity available in the wacky initial investigation. (His ability to reveal key details through playful yet carefully considered camera movements is downright Spielbergian.) Perhaps most importantly, Episode 1 also makes it clear Charlie is enjoying her life as best she can; that is, she's enjoying her life whenever she's not staring death in the face (those mobsters' bullets come awfully close) — a pattern that persists in her subsequent cases. While most of those aren't as satisfying as the first, Charlie always is: Generous and bright, like the long curly locks spilling out from under her various trucker hats, Charlie is an unnatural charmer, her wide smile and gravelly intonation a congenial contradiction that convincingly cultivates curiosity in wherever they're aimed. She makes the most out of her fleeting conversations with strangers, and only the liars among them are ever upset for sharing a few sentences with our affable star. It's a testament to Lyonne's well-honed charisma and attentive performance that Charlie remains the top draw despite an onslaught of shiny guest stars playing distinct characters. Katie Holmes is a delight as a fed-up mortician's wife more than ready to fly the coop. Gaby Hoffman's quick turn from straight-laced Cop of the Year candidate to a feral Florida Woman is batshit fun. Simon Rex settles in nicely as a washed-up pitcher looking to make a little money off losing. Melanie Lynskey and John Cho crackle with chemistry in the season's best episode (of the 10 screened for critics), and Erivo brings the perfect playful pitch to each of her nearly half-dozen characters. Two tweaks to the format help distinguish Season 2's journey from the original run: The first is a notable uptick in chaos — the situations Charlie finds herself in range from psychotic scams ('A New Lease on Death') to absurd send-ups ('One Last Job'), but each episode attempts to ratchet up whatever quirky quality it's working with, including an early entry that nearly goes supernatural ('Last Looks'). The other departure is simpler: Charlie, without crossing into spoilers, gets to come out of hiding. She's free to decide where to go and when, which allows the show to revel in an extended stay later on and serve the season's central conceit: Season 2, by and large, is about accepting who you are, even if living your best life doesn't mean living an easy life. Charlie yearns for enough time to appreciate 'the unobserved pageant of the ordinary,' as she calls the knickknacks filling up random cars, and thus, random lives. A life on the run doesn't allow for much rumination, but neither does a stationary one. Giving Charlie the time to experience both allows her to examine what she really wants, and what she really needs, without deluding herself into thinking things would be different if she wasn't being hounded by mobsters (or, on the flip-side, if she wasn't tied down to any one place or person). She's not like Benoit Blanc, always itching for the next great case to crack; she'd be perfectly happy floating in untroubled waters. She isn't a detective, and she's certainly not a cop; for all the odd jobs she's had, solving mysteries isn't one of them. Charlie is just a person in a unique position to help, so of course she's persistently hounded by people who need it — and lots of people need it! At a time in America when our institutional safety nets are being disbanded and the burden to support each other often comes down to individual efforts, Charlie's struggle feels all the more apt. She wants to help — she just also wishes there was less need for her to do so. And therein lies her salvation. Charlie can't help but love people. She's a people person. Even when she tries to stay out of their lives, she's inevitably drawn in by natural or circumstantial curiosity. Because Charlie thrives around people, so does 'Poker Face.' As a howcatchem procedural, it has to resolve similar issues as its lead: The formula requires a certain amount of repetition, just as the audience demands a new mystery each week. When episodes rely on people to bring them to life — be it famous guest stars, well-realized characters, life-affirming arcs, or all of the above — they're that much easier to enjoy. For the most part, 'Poker Face' Season 2 is quite easy to enjoy. After all, it knows helping people isn't a gift or a curse; it's a calling, and when you realize how fulfilling it can be, the only mystery left to solve is how to help others see the same thing. 'Poker Face' Season 2 premieres Thursday, May 8 on Peacock. Three episodes will be released the first week, then one episode weekly through the finale on July 10. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst