Ron Hall's face still lights up when he comes across an album with his favorite song, "Gloria," on it.
"It's the best song ever written," said Hall, 58, a longtime collector and seller of vinyl records. "The band Them did it with Van Morrison singing in '66; that was really good. Then Jimi Hendrix did a version of it. Now everyone's done it."
Ron Hall has 2,000 albums in his personal collection, 8,000 to 10,000 stored for sale, and as many as 2,000 popular titles that sell well at the Memphis Flea Market, where he has sold for 27 years.
Ron Hall is not only a big collector of vinyl albums and related music memorabilia, he is also the author of two books about the Memphis garage band scene in the 1960s and '70s.
In addition to vinyl albums, Hall has big collection of cardboard music advertising cutouts.
Shelves groan under the weight of the thousands of albums in Ron Hall's collection. He likes "oddball" treasures with great cover artwork, virtually unknown music and personal connections.
Even though an entire generation born in the late 1970s and '80s grew up with nothing but CDs, Hall cautions those who claim vinyl is a dinosaur. For the past 27 years, he has been a fixture at the Memphis Flea Market ("The BIG One"), selling crates full of records to eager young buyers who Hall said are learning to appreciate the art of vinyl, if not the technology.
"Sometimes I'll see something at a yard sale and just go nuts over it," Hall said.
Hall worked for record distributors Record Sales in Whitehaven, and later Stan's Distributing, based in Shreveport, La., through the 1970s, when recorded music rivaled television in the entertainment industry.
Records, he said, were conversation starters and reasons for people to get together and have fun.
"Friends of mine can come over here and pull stuff off the rack, and it seems like so many of these records have a story with it," he said. "There's a reason I have it."
A shift in vinyl sales came about, Hall said, when major distributors started buying up smaller ones. Columbia, Capitol Records, RCA, and more recently, Warner Brothers, swallowed smaller labels to cash in on their signature styles. With control of the industry in just a few hands, the need for traveling salesmen dried up as well.
"It was rough. The whole thing changed. It got down to like five major labels who controlled everything."
Hall took a job with the U.S. Postal Service in 1985, after 13 years in record distributing, but continued selling records on his own. In addition to the flea market, he sells on eBay under the handle "waxwatcher."
He describes his love of vinyl records as a never-ending search for "oddball" treasures with great cover artwork, virtually unknown music and personal connections. While many collectors delight in legends like Elvis or The Beatles, Hall's prizes are the kind that are available only on vinyl records.
"I've got an album by the group Title Unit that they cut in a roller rink in Millington," said Hall. "They couldn't have pressed many, probably 300 to 400, and sold them mostly when they played, so most of their albums left the area. I've only talked to one or two other guys that have that record."
Hall is also fond of his autographed album covers, because he can remember the stories that led to the signatures.
He recalled chauffeuring the New York Dolls before and after their Memphis concert in the late '70s. Hall's co-worker refused to drive the makeup-wearing, big-haired glam rock group, but Hall jumped at the chance.
"I'd bought their album and got them all to sign it," he said, displaying the cover proudly. "When you get something signed, that has something that you can remember, a whole story behind it. I wouldn't get rid of that for anything."
Hall's collection consists of about 2,000 albums that he keeps for himself, between 8,000 and 10,000 in storage for sale, and as many as 2,000 popular titles that sell well at the flea market. He charges about $3 per album on average, though some rare ones go for as much as $50-$60.
Music celebrities have been customers at the flea market, including Scott Bomar of the Bo-Keys, who scored Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow" and "Black Snake Moan." The late Paul Burlison, guitarist of Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio, showed up from time to time in the early '80s.
In 2001, Hall put his knowledge and experience to paper, writing "Playing For a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage and Frat Bands in Memphis 1960-75," an encyclopedia of facts about his favorite genre, garage rock. The book was featured on WKNO's "Memphis Memoirs" series.
He followed "History" in 2003 with a second volume, "The Memphis Garage Rock Yearbook." Both were published by Shangri-la Projects.
Some collectors shop Hall's flea market booth looking for album art. Customers ask for albums with motorcycles, Corvettes or certain names on them. (Hall admits he buys albums with the name "Sue" in the title for his wife, Sue).
Something about local music, though, just sings to Hall, a Frayser High graduate, who moved to Memphis in the fourth grade.
"You put on an old Muddy Waters album, it doesn't bother me at all if it crackles and everything, because I can just see him -- see some old sharecropper sitting around a crank-up Victrola in a shotgun shack listening to the old blues records, hearing them crackle."
SOURCE: http://www.commercialappeal.com
