out of print!

By Robbie on February 18, 2011

A few days ago I traveled to the humble hutch from which Bloodshot Records, L.L.C., conducts its worldwide operations. I wanted to buy a box of Country Love Songs, an album I made for the label either 15 or 17 years ago, depending on what you mean by "made." The lady who runs the shop led me to the warehouse room where, in the place where a shelf full of Country Love Songs normally sits, we saw a sign. "That's odd," she said. "Apparently it's out of print." For a few moments my spirits rose. But it turned out a false alarm. There was a box sitting out of place elsewhere in the cavernous space. As for the sign, I guess some malnourished intern had just let her optimism get away with her.

I had an album (Let's Kill Saturday Night) go out of print in, I think, 2002. Just a few weeks ago, I went into my garage to open a fresh box of 13 Hillbilly Giants to fulfill an order and saw that there was no fresh box. The Florida company that pressed a couple thousand for me in 2000 had very likely gone out of business (I just checked on the Internet, and yes, they are long gone), and I can't really say that, standing there in the garage, I gave a second's thought to rounding up the masters and the art, researching and finding a new CD duplication company, and inviting into my home yet another pallet loaded with boxes of product to disgorge onto a wary public. The dozens of boxes of Couples in Trouble and Happy cry to me: "Anything but that!"

Being out of print is, I believe, a great badge of distinction. Almost everyone who has been in the business of spitting out records or books for more than a few years has heard the presses go silent; about everyone except Charles Dickens and the Beatles will. Having everything you've labored over "fall into the sere and yellow leaf" puts you in the company of some of the coolest people on earth, such as Glenway Westcott, Peter DeVries, and Wade Ray.

So the least you can say is that taking it personally would be ridiculous. But I also am thrilled by the idea of something disappearing after a decent time on the market because of a number of other positives. Less litter for our grandchildren to clear up after us. A wieldier, more focused catalog, one that you can pack for a tour without extra layers of decisions and weight. The effective scrubbing of youthful warts from one's artistic persona. The encouraging reminder that one is a seller of goods -- a vibrantly whirring cog in a bustling marketplace -- not a museum curator. The end of 13 Hillbilly Giants does not augur the end of democratic society. More like its rebirth.

I still play some songs from Let's Kill Saturday Night at shows, and I admit that I enjoy it when some middle-ager comes to the record table afterward and asks to buy the record they came from. "Sorry, that one's out of print" feels satisfyingly to me, in that circumstance, like "That record was one that I worked for the better part of a decade, doing radio shows and press and travelling across this continent and one other at great personal expense to alert any interested buyers. You must have been attending to higher things during that decade. I am not the Country Music Foundation. Piss off." To look at it a little more philosophically, a record of music or a book of stories is a part of the life flow, not above it. The fragility of these things, their susceptibility to thermodynamic law, should make them more precious in our eyes. They don't, in the fullness of time, bestow immortality on their makers. (As Woody Allen said, I'd rather achieve that by not dying!)