A Record That Is Out of Reach

Like any good mystery, the legend of the rarest record in the world is a collection of rumor, half-truths and lies. But everyone agrees, it begins in 1961 in Times Square Slim’s dingy music shop.

Tall and cadaverous, Irv “Slim” Rose prowled morosely behind the counter of Times Square Records, which was hidden away in a subway tunnel beneath Manhattan’s 42nd Street. The light was terrible, the air opaque with railway dust, and when trains rumbled into the station, records fell off the wall.

Everyone called it the Rare Wall because hard to find rhythm and blues and vocal group records covered every square inch. There were edgy jump tunes and eerie, close-harmony ballads, love songs delicate as spun glass, and raunchy rockers. The labels themselves were works of art, fiery birds and billowy clouds rolling across a blood-red sky. Company names like Fury and Fire were drawn in a malformed, shimmery script that looked like they had been scribbled in the midst of a psychotic break.

In those days, little was known about these records. When they were issued in the early ‘50s, they sold almost exclusively to an urban black audience. A hit shipped thousands, not millions, and success was a hundred bucks in your pocket and the chance to make another record.

Slim had sold the records for a nickel each, but that changed after he bought time on radio station WHBI. The morning after the first broadcast of “Sink or Swim with Swingin’ Slim,” an outlandish misnomer since the dour Rose may have been the least swinging man in New York, the crowds outside his store were so thick he had to fight his way in to open up. By 1961, records on the Rare Wall commanded as much as $10.

One Saturday, a group of collectors was hanging around Slim’s when a man walked in with a 78 rpm record nobody had ever heard. It was a version of “Stormy Weather” by the Five Sharps, a vocal group on Jubilee Records.

The Ted Koehler-Harold Arlen composition is one of the most recorded songs in pop history. Everyone from Frank Sinatra to Ethel Waters has interpreted it; Lena Horne’s 1942 version remains the most famous. But the Five Sharps’ rendition was something special. Cruder, rawer, it moved at a dirge-like pace, accompanied by thunderclaps and the sound of falling rain. Some who heard the record thought it was god-awful. Others declared it the greatest vocal performance ever recorded.

Here’s where history begins to lose its way in the thickets of legend. Everyone agrees that Slim flipped for the record and asked to play it on his show. According to one version of the story, his pet raccoon Teddy plopped down on the 78. Others believe Slim dropped it. Whatever happened, the outcome was the same: The record shattered like a water glass.

Slim assured his angry customer that he would replace the record. He put up a sign offering $25 in store credit for a 78-rpm copy and $50 for a 45. Weeks passed. Slim raised the offer, then raised it again, until it seemed the whole country was looking for it. Slim went to the Jubilee warehouse on 10th Avenue and asked the company to dig the master out of its files. (The master is the disc from which records are made.) Jubilee reported that the master for release No. 5104 was among 80 destroyed in a fire several years earlier. Or maybe it was a flood.

Thus was born the story of the rarest record in the world, a disc so rare it might not exist.

“It’s the score of scores,” says David Hall, CEO of Professional Coin Grading Service in Newport Beach, which appraises collectibles. “If a 45 was found, I have no doubt it would bring $50,000.”

The Early Days of Doo-Wop

Today, there’s a name for what the Five Sharps were doing. It’s doo-wop, a term associated with TV shows like “Happy Days” that doesn’t begin to describe what black teenagers were up to on the street corners and in the parks of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Although black vocal groups had been recorded as early as 1891, the Sharps and hundreds of other unknown groups created the perfect theme music for a postwar America that was on the move, a bit unsure where it was heading, but determined to get there in style.

Each performance was less a song than a passion play. The tenor made his case, then the bass made his. Everyone came in and did something that was at once celestial and raw, ethereal and gritty. The whole thing ended with a piercing wail of defeat, a whisper of romance or a whoop of triumph.

The groups grew up in the same neighborhoods, attended the same schools, fell in love with the same long-legged girls. At first, in keeping with a nation fresh out of wartime, the songs they wrote were plaintive, aching with unfulfilled desire. Soldier boy, tell me why do you cry. It’s written in the blue, that she was meant for only you.

But soon, the songs got nervier, the pleas less desperate, the girls more independent. Crazy little mamas knock, knock, knockin’. Walkin’ down the street humming chop, chop, boom. The girls formed their own groups and answered back. I miss you so, you great big lump of sugar.

There were the Larks, the Wrens, the Royals, the Five Crowns, the Cardinals, the Robins, the Counts, the Cadillacs, the Falcons, the Flamingos, the El Dorados. The beat changed with every record, pushing the limits of what the audience would accept, teasing the cell that would divide and divide again, until the music got a new name--rock ‘n’ roll.

But the legend of “Stormy Weather” is also about another group of young men. Mostly white, often graceless, bordering on geeky, they came along a few years later and rediscovered the music. There were black collectors and women collectors as well, just as there were good white vocal groups. Across time, though, the voices of black teenagers reached the ears of the white teenagers who hung out at Slim’s and the Capitol swap meet in Los Angeles. They set out to learn everything they could about the music, and ended up rescuing the Five Sharps and dozens of others from obscurity.

“Stormy Weather” didn’t just kick off an enduring mystery, it helped turn pop record collecting into a profession. Hunting records had been a solitary pursuit down the disinfectant-drenched aisles of Goodwills. It was a passion, a hobby, but nobody thought it should be more than that until Slim came along. Now, 40 years later, there are magazines and record companies that specialize in old blues, R & B and vocal groups. There are auction houses that cater to record buyers in Japan and Germany--not to mention movie soundtracks and TV commercials strip-mining the music.

Along with the dolls, toys and muscle cars of the baby boomers, records from the golden age of recorded music, roughly from 1945 to 1964, are commanding exorbitant prices on the auction block. Used records is now a $20-million to $30-million business. A 45 by a vocal group called the Hornets recently sold for $18,000. Rockaway Records in Los Angeles, the highly regarded collectors shop, paid $250,000 for a single record collection.

The symbol of this go-go mood is David Hall. Large and fleshy, with preternaturally dark hair, Hall and his partners run one of the nation’s best-known auction houses, which buys as well as appraises collectibles. Hall seems to be everywhere, money in hand, snapping up rarities. At a convention in Austin, Texas, last year, he showed up with a glass case containing $100,000 in $100 bills. Over it he hung a sign, “We Buy Records. We Pay Cash.”

Hall likes to call his $15-million company “the Microsoft of collectibles.” Located in an industrial park in Newport Beach, protected by concrete blocks strategically placed to prevent thieves from driving a truck through the walls, the company’s headquarters is plain-white anonymous. Inside, the feel is the diamond mine and the mint. Employees talk in muted tones, surrounded by the purest distillate of all that commercial America has churned out in its century of dominance.

In a darkened room called the “mole hole,” five employees sit under incandescent lamps, grading rare coins. Hall pulls an 1804 silver dollar worth more than $1 million from one of three walk-in vaults. He picks out a 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card worth $121,000. He walks to the record room, which is lined floor to ceiling with blond wooden cabinets. Records, he is convinced, are poised to make the same leap in value that coins did in 1965 and baseball cards did in 1980.

Hall opens a cabinet and counts 11 copies of “Mystery Train,” Elvis Presley’s last single for Sun Records. Then he shows off one of three known copies of the Crystals’ unreleasable 45 “Let’s Dance the Screw.” With the self-satisfied smile of a man who has just given a great gift and can afford it, Hall drops a needle on a 60-year-old record by Robert Johnson. The voice and guitar of the long-dead Mississippi blues singer fill the antiseptic room. Ten years ago, Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway” would have gone for $500. Now, Hall says, it will fetch $4,000.

Hall has a chapter in the “Stormy Weather” story. Years after Slim’s wife left him and the record store closed down, three copies of the Five Sharps 78 turned up. One was cracked. One had a half-inch chip. The other, found in a junkyard, was in good condition. Hall and his partner, Gordon Wrubel, bought it in 1977 for the unheard-of price of $3,866. Other collectors thought they were crazy. Recently, someone offered Hall $25,000 for the record. The 45 version, though, has never surfaced.

As for the 78, Hall and Wrubel have locked it away in a bank vault. Once every five years, they bring out the record and play it.

The Professor, Acolyte and Dr. Demento

In Los Angeles, organized collecting began with the Society of Early Recorded Music, a group of intellectuals who met in the 1950s at a savings and loan at Sepulveda and National. They traded 78s. They discussed the social significance of the music. They listened to lectures by people such as Emile Berliner, the grandson of the inventor of the disc record. It was all very sedate and clubby, at least until younger collectors caught on to what SERM was up to and began showing up with their rock ‘n’ roll records. SERM members pulled out in a mood that if it wasn’t quite disgust was at least dismay.

The traders relocated to the parking lot outside the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood. By the mid-’70s, it had become a wild scene. The swap was supposed to begin at 8 a.m., but bargain hunters began arriving earlier and earlier. Eventually dealers began to set up their card tables at 3 a.m.

Some buyers wore miner’s helmets with flashlights attached so they could keep both hands free to riffle the records. The Professor and the Acolyte, a rail-thin older man and his young associate, went from stack to stack, buying nothing. The Acolyte, bent prayerfully at the knees, thumbed through the records while the Professor conducted stentorian lectures about the importance of each recording, all in the sepulchral darkness of a Hollywood morning.

Because the inner life of many collectors was so focused, the most ordinary experience was transformed by their obsession. Four or five were sitting around a table at the Hollywood Hamburger Hamlet many years ago, having just finished at the Capitol swap.

They fell into shop talk, gossip about who had to sell their collections to pay alimony, who had stumbled on the greatest treasure trove. Being young and sporadically employed, each ordered the same thing, coffee and a doughnut. By the time the waitress reached the last diner, she chirped, or perhaps snarled, “Coffee and a doughnut, right?”

The young man shot back, “Motown 1032.”

The table erupted in laughter, which the waitress did not share and which no one bothered to explain. If she didn’t know that Motown 1032 was the catalog number of Mary Wells’ 1962 Top 10 hit “You Beat Me to the Punch,” well, what could you do?

Many drawn to the Capitol lot found practical uses for their obsession. Barry Hansen, who looked for comedy records, became a fixture on L.A. radio as Dr. Demento. Wayne Johnson, who once loaded his station wagon with so many records that it locked up, now owns Rockaway Records.

It wasn’t just about hoarding and gathering. There was male territoriality and mating behavior at work. In the days before mortgages and car payments, a room-dominating display of vinyl was as close as a college kid could come to a rack of antlers. Over the years, the collections started at Capitol, and later at the Pasadena City College swap, grew and grew, until rooms, basements, even houses, could not contain them. The cottage behind Hansen’s Lakewood bungalow can no longer hold his collection of 250,000 records. He keeps the bulk in storage.

Some of the men who traded records at Capitol were completists. They wanted every Flamingos song, or every last record about the Mount St. Helens eruption. Others started out looking for that one great song they’d heard in the middle of the night 20 years ago. They went from table to table in the glutinous fog that often closed in on the Capitol lot, repeating the few words they knew and trying to hum a tune they were no longer sure of. When they found that song, there was always another that needed finding.

In the process, they became historians for a neglected branch of American culture, repositories of secret knowledge. It wasn’t degreed scholars who researched ephemeral labels and forgotten groups. It was collectors like Steve Propes, who wrote the first record guide in 1973 while working as a social worker. With dusty record bins their excavation sites, they were as intent on digging up every last record on the Red Robin, Federal, Tiara, Johnson or Ace labels as any paleontologist hunting bones in Montana. Maybe it wasn’t as important. Maybe it was.

Toiling in their own collections, each developed an area of expertise. One specialized in African pop music from the 1950s and ‘60s, another became an expert on group personnel. Want to know when Wilson Pickett joined the Falcons? Call Marv. It was never about price. It was about classifying and categorizing and filing everything on fiberboard shelves in the worthy but vain hope that in doing so you could gain ownership over the thing that owned you.

‘Paper and Plastic Mania’

The Professor and the Acolyte, wherever they are, wouldn’t recognize today’s big-time record conventions, with ticket prices near $20, with liveried waiters serving meals on glass, with 60,000 people attending shows in Barcelona and thousands more queuing up in Utrecht, London and Tokyo. Just as with baseball cards, where greed turned waiting for an autograph outside the stadium into a commercial transaction, much of the fun has gone out of record collecting. Price dominates everything.

One grading standard in use at auctions defines the highest level of quality this way: “Vinyl gloss is 100% full and blazing. Label displays ultra-bright, original color.” No mention is made of how the record sounds. Old-time dealers have a term for this craziness: “paper and plastic mania.”

But the greatest cause for despair is the conviction that there are no more great records to be found, that everything is locked up in somebody’s collection, to be dragged out and shoved under the noses of visitors, like vacation pictures or trophies won by the kids at Self-Esteem Camp. The days of discovering a wonderful bit of music in a cardboard box in some gas station are over. All that’s left out there are Les Baxter and Martin Denny and album covers depicting women in bikinis floating in cocktail glasses. That some people find even these things collectible shows only that the desire to find things is stronger than the revulsion at finding awful things.

As with many failures of the human spirit, age is to blame. Obsession is phosphorescent. It burns hot and fast and by middle age even myopic collectors can grow sheepish about sitting around in their shorts and slippers listening to old records. Nobody is playing jokes on waitresses anymore.

Bob Pruter, the rhythm ‘n’ blues editor of the collectors magazine Goldmine, says a week doesn’t go by that he doesn’t hear about a collector who has died. Those left are being forced to face up to their own mortality. Their wives are sitting them down under the Elvis clock and the poster of Nolan Strong and the Diablos and laying it out: When you die, what am I going to do with all this ju--, stuff?

That’s one reason why rarities that haven’t been seen in decades are showing up on David Hall’s auction lists. It is also why everyone is looking for the next generation of collectors. But the vocal groups that jump-started a revolution in pop music may be hard to sell to a young audience that associates doo-wop with cartoonish images of greasy punks with packs of cigarettes rolled into the sleeves of their T-shirts.

Val Shively, one of the biggest dealers in the country, is convinced that the hobby is dying, the slow and elegant death of a matriarch surrounded by loving servants, but dying all the same. When he auctions a record, only a few people are putting in bids. People don’t have record players anymore. Some young people have never even seen a record.

“I buy more than I sell now,” Shively says, “just because I care about the records.”

Would he do it again? “I wouldn’t start over.”

The Legend of ‘Stormy Weather’

It’s 1952. Five boys from the Jamaica housing projects in Queens like the way they sing together. They call themselves the Lovelarks, after tenor Bobby Ward’s bird. Around the projects, they’re known as the Bencholeers, because they practice on park benches. But those names don’t stick. Neither is hip enough for a group known for sharp harmonies and lush pink jackets. Someone suggests the Five Sharps.

They perform at school functions and any other place that will have them until they catch the eye of a local record producer. Jamaica had already spawned the Rivileers, the Cleftones and the Heartbeats. The producer makes the usual promise of fame and success and sets up a session with Jubilee Records at a studio in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. For the Sharps, it’s a dream come true. They’re working for the same label as their idols, the Orioles, whose buttery sound influences every street-corner harmonizer in the country.

The Sharps receive no money for the daylong session. All they get to eat are a couple of wieners and orange soda. They bring two of their own songs: “Duck Butt Dottie,” about Ward’s girlfriend, and “Sleepy Cowboy,” a humorous ode to bass singer Mickey Owens. They don’t get to “Duck Butt Dottie,” but they do record “Sleepy Cowboy” and a standard, “Stormy Weather.”

It’s a long day and the Sharps work hard. When Ward straggles in late, his dad hits the roof--it’s a school night.

Jubilee had a set routine for test marketing records. “In those days we made the acetates at night,” says Elliott Blaine, who helped his brother, Jerry, run the company. They would take the acetate over to a bar called the Baby Grand on 125th Street. A hub for the jumpy new city music, the Baby Grand had a long bar and a live radio show deejayed by Willy Bryant, known as “The Mayor of Harlem.” “If you thought you had something, they’d play it,” Blaine says. “You knew in 20 minutes if you had a hit.”

The Sharps’ record goes nowhere. They hear it on the radio twice. Sales are so poor, Jubilee makes the Sharps pay for their own copies. It gets so bad that the neighborhood record shop threatens to throw the records out unless the Sharps haul them away.

In the legend surrounding “Stormy Weather,” this is where things get the most murky. In the early ‘50s, record companies serving the black market pressed records first on 78 and only shifted to the newer 45 format if the song sold. Blacks didn’t adopt the technology as swiftly as whites because they didn’t have the money to spend on another record player.

Under that theory, the 45 version of “Stormy Weather” shouldn’t exist. But there is a strong case that it should. Its catalog number is 5104. Neither the record just before it--5103, “Kings Mambo” by the Five Kings--nor the record shortly after it--5106, “Why Don’t You Believe Me” by Herb Lance--caused much of a splash. But Jubilee released both on 45. Why not 5104?

After “Stormy Weather” fails, several of the Sharps go into the military. When they get out, they harmonize around the park bench, waiting for a break that doesn’t come. Two Sharps, Clarence Bassett and lead singer Ronald Cuffey, eventually form a new group, the Videos, and record a song in 1958 called “Trickle, Trickle.” Twenty-two years later, it becomes one of the Manhattan Transfer’s signature tunes. After the Videos disband, Bassett joins Shep and the Limelites. They record one of the all-time doo-wop classics, “Daddy’s Home,” a song still played on oldies stations around the country.

The other Sharps fade back into their Queens neighborhood. Tommy Duckett, the piano player, changes bedpans in a nursing home. Ward marries and gets a job as a kitchen helper for KLM at Idyllwild Airport. His life settles into a middle-class routine. He works his way up to supervisor of catering, buys a house and raises three daughters. Sometimes he tells them about the record he made once, a damn fine record too. But they’re kids and he can tell they aren’t buying it.

In 1972, the first “Stormy Weather” 78 turns up. Although it’s badly cracked, Ralph M. Newman, who edits a small fanzine called Bim Bam Boom, is intrigued. After satisfying himself that it’s the real thing, he buys the record for a few hundred dollars and spends weeks making a tape and splicing the clicks out of it. Then he reissues the song on the Bim Bam Boom label.

It doesn’t do much better than the Jubilee version. But it does get airplay on oldies radio. Bobby Ward is in his basement tool shop when he hears the song on the radio. He calls upstairs for the girls to come listen. They stand there laughing at the relic of a song their dad made.

Ward tracks down Newman, who is stunned to hear a ghost on the line. The mythic group on a faded record label that has been bedeviling music enthusiasts for 20 years finally becomes human, with faces and names.

Ronald Cuffey and Mickey Owens have died of leukemia, but the other three are still around. There are twists and turns, details to be worked out, forms to be signed, all leading to a night in April, 1975, when the Five Sharps take the stage for the first time in two decades. There are new members, but they hardly count as new because they were original members of the Lovelarks.

Their appearance at the Academy of Music on 14th Street is promoted as An Evening of Classic Doo-Wop Harmony. On the bill are some of the greatest vocal groups in history--the Five Keys, the Cleftones, the Tune Weavers--groups whose sound defined R & B harmonizing, groups with long careers, groups with hit records. The Sharps, on the other hand, are little more than a curiosity, a footnote. They’re scared to death. The group takes their places under a prop street light while sound effect rain and thunder crackles offstage. They begin singing, at first tentatively, but as they go they gain confidence. Their voices, threading together, coiling and knotting and loosening to find new knots, take on a delicate power and desperate sadness: “Don’t know why/There’s no sun up in the sky/Stormy Weather. . . .”

How many in the crowd came because they knew the story of the most legendary failed musical group in pop history? How many came to hear them bring back another time? How many to support a music that was dying even then? You could read your own message into the audience response, but there was no mistaking it. The Sharps bring the house down. The other groups, the famous ones, the ones with hit records, come up afterward, shaking their heads.

“They had lost the lottery of life,” Newman says. “But that night, they blew everybody away.”

The group became a curiosity around New York for a while. They played some more shows, made a little money and then, once again, faded away. Tommy Duckett has since died, leaving only Bassett and Ward, who now drives an airport bus. He has rigged up a stereo and plays his favorite vocal groups. The passengers sometimes ask questions. Who’s that? Clyde McPhatter? Who was he? Ward answers, but never lets on that he was part of it. That he spent a day in 1952 in a recording studio in Harlem. That he cut a record. Maybe it wasn’t the greatest thing ever made. Or maybe it was. What matters is that he was there, and now, thanks to some geeky record collectors, his daughters know it, too.

One mystery remains, however, the mystery that started it all, the mystery of the rarest record in the world. Bassett, the one Sharp to have a music career, believes there was a 45. He’s pretty sure he has seen one. Ward, who possesses a large laugh and uses it readily, is doubtful. “Nobody liked that record. Nobody bought it. As far as we know there were only five copies of that record bought and they were bought by the Five Sharps.”

The Eternal Quest Goes On

Val Shively’s looked as hard for that record as anyone. Shively was at Slim’s when the Wall was covered with rarities. He owns more than 4 million records, but the 45 of “Stormy Weather” has eluded him.

More than 30 years ago, he met a man whose job took him to all the record pressing plants in the New York area. I can get you anything, he told Shively. “What about ‘Stormy Weather?’ ” Shively asked.

No problem, the man said. He returned a few days later with 20 copies. But as soon as Shively played the song, he knew it was a remake done years later by a different group. Shively’s contact then set out for Jubilee. He reported back that the company was grinding up all their old records to make room for new inventory. He grabbed what he could and handed Shively 100 records, all on the early Jubilee script label. Those records are now worth thousands of dollars, but “Stormy Weather” wasn’t among them.

A decade later, Shively received a call from a friend in Columbus, Ohio. He said he was standing outside a tractor-trailer filled with records. He claimed to have a copy of “Stormy Weather” in his hand.

The owner of the truck made him put it back, but Shively’s friend said he would return in a few days to buy it. A week later, he called back: Kids had set fire to the truck and everything was destroyed.

“I’ve heard it all with that record,” Shively says. “I don’t think it exists. By now, somebody would have found one.”

Still, there’s room for a surprise.

Gordon Wrubel is squinting at a photograph of a 45. Wrubel is David Hall’s partner in Professional Coin Grading Service and co-owner of the 78 of “Stormy Weather” locked away in a bank vault. The 45 in the picture says “Stormy Weather” by the Five Sharps. The owner says he paid $1,000 and wants Wrubel, an expert in forgeries, to authenticate it.

Wrubel squints and blinks and takes off his glasses. He holds the picture under a high-intensity light and squints some more.

“This guy thinks he has the real thing,” Wrubel says. But he’s skeptical. More than skeptical. For the rarest record in the world to suddenly appear after all this time, it doesn’t make sense.

Wrubel picks up a copy of a known bootleg that Steve Propes, the author of “What Was the First Rock ‘N’ Roll Record,” sent him. Propes knows his 45 is a fraud because he bought it from the bootlegger. Wrubel sees defects in the picture that are similar to Propes’ bootleg.

“This guy got taken if he spent $1,000 on it,” Propes says. “I paid a couple of dollars.”