Unpacking Music Man Murray: My visit with one of L.A.'s last great record collectors

by C.P. Heiser

Murray and the collection © C.P. Heiser

Turning to his record player and switching to a 78 stylus, Murray lets drop a scarce test pressing of a Valentino recording, circa 1923. “Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar...” he croons, the voice on key and sure, if only a little brittle. Meanwhile, the door into the collection is open, and I see just a hint of it: a glimpse of the shelves stuffed with the engraved sound of countless other voices and instruments.

Music, as it relates to an object bearing recorded sound: this is what Murray Gershenz has been obsessed with for decades. Born in the Bronx in 1922, he served as a parachute mechanic during the Second World War before moving west and stumbling into a career as a cantor for various Los Angeles synagogues. All the while he collected records and tapes, and soon collecting took over. Big band, jazz and blues. Classical, folk, rock and roll. Murray collected all of it. In the ’60s he opened up a book and music shop at Santa Monica and Western. It wasn’t long before the books were jettisoned and the music took over.

Fifty years later, one of the largest private record collections open to the public sits on Exposition Boulevard between the 10 freeway and Baldwin Hills. Painted twice across the cinderblock exterior — once in large block letters and then in cursive, over the security-gated entrance — is the name Music Man Murray. If a building can be called a doppelganger, than this drab, isolated structure might be the corollary for the man who unlocks its doors and shuffles inside each day.

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We speak at Murray’s desk, in the anteroom of the two-story building. Behind me, I can feel the presence of the collection — one that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Half a million. Maybe more. (The rest is in a warehouse somewhere else.) But let’s get something straight from the outset: this is no museum exhibit, and hardly an archive. It is a singular mass, a monster comprised of hundreds of thousands of recordings, many of them ancient 78 pressings or eight-track cassettes or acetate prints, which, I am beginning to sense, no longer matter so much without each other. Maybe this is why the Collector, who is fast approaching ninety, doesn’t want the thing to splinter apart, doesn’t want it to be sold off piecemeal. He wants a buyer for the monster.

“I want to get the hell out of here,” he mutters at his desk, surrounded by favored memorabilia. An insomniac, he’s spent many nights recording compilations of rare records he didn’t want to lose track of through sale: collecting, in other words, his own collection. These favorites are here, near his desk, always in sight. “Crazy,” I say, admiringly. Murray gives me a sweet look that might be his signature. He is straight out of central casting. Behind a ticklish-looking mustache and large glasses, his eyes are bright and thoughtful, with white tufts of hair decorating the sides of an otherwise bald pate. Glancing over my shoulder I wonder if it’s time to see the collection. Go on in he tells me. He’s feeling tired today.

Behind me, the Collector stands propped within the jamb (doubtless where he ought to be in case of an earthquake), backlit by the open door to the warehouse, the shelves of the collection looming over him: sagging under the stock, insurmountable, and almost pointless — who’s going to climb them? Stymied by the albums which are shoved in so tightly together it takes effort just to pull one out, I turn to look at Murray in the doorframe, and snap a picture. What’s happened to the Collector? What is happening?

“Things just stopped moving,” Murray says, not so much glum as done. Along the side of the staircase, a hulking conveyor belt, used for transporting boxes of inventory between the first and second floors, sits idle. It hasn’t moved in a long time either.

Murray’s got other stuff to do anyway. As it turns out, he’s an actor, does TV and film and radio. If you watch Modern Family or Parks & Recreation, for example, you might have seen Murray. A documentary film by Richard Parks, about Murray and his attempts to sell the collection, debuts this weekend (see the trailer for the film below). In all, Murray seems satisfied with his life. In fact, he seems fine with moving on, leaving the collection — his life’s work — behind. The question is whether somebody will buy it complete and allow Murray to leave, for lack of a better term, with a clear conscience. Otherwise, there will be another, more ambiguous question to face: when does a collection stop being what it is?

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Murray remembers the early days of his career, when he was visited by another music collector. The man wanted to sell his collection. Murray went to the man’s house and valued the collection of records — it was full of gems and rarities and worth a small fortune. At the time, starting out as he was, Murray was in no way prepared to make such an acquisition. Of course, he did anyway, taking out a loan and spending much of a day heaving boxes of the man’s records back to his shop. It was an epic score, and Murray still relishes the memory.

Two weeks later the man returned, asking if Murray would consider selling back the collection. The man must have been terribly distraught to embarrass himself this way, but Murray doesn’t remember very well. Why should he? There was no chance in hell he was giving it back. Murray does remember asking the man why he sold the collection in the first place. “Persian rugs,” the man answered. They were his new love, but not for long. The man bought a rug with the money Murray had given him, but missed his records. I imagine a distinguished-looking man in a smoking jacket. Lying on some fine, elaborate carpet, he stares mournfully at the useless record player beside him. Murray shakes his head. The Collector may have wise eyes and a kind face, but there is little sympathy now, only bemusement for the fellow who didn’t know himself well enough to understand that the collection represents the collector, and that to abandon it is to abandon oneself. If you’re ready to let go of what you once were, like Murray says he is today, that’s one thing. If you’re not, you’re like the poor fool who handed Murray his soul. Murray, it turns out, isn’t as sweet as he looks.

In “Unpacking My Library,” his essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin claims that the best way to acquire a book is to write it oneself. The second best way, he says, is to steal it. The point? There is utter hubris in the collector’s impulse. However self-effacing or geekily awkward a collector might be, however apparently humble in manner or appearance, a true collector harbors inside of him the arrogance of a despot, the blind desire of Cortez. As Benjamin famously quoted the Latin: “Books have their fates.” And copies of books have their fates as well, he says, the most important fate being its “encounter with the collector, and his collection.” For the collector, “the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves."

Behind Music Man Murrays’s apparent sweetness, the competitive drive to acquire, to possess, still flickers in the story he tells of the errant collector. The collector is both conqueror and liberator. Of any given specific set of like objects, Murray tells me, “You have to have everything.” That is the mark of the true collector: you must possess a private Manifest Destiny, a fetish driven by rivalry, competition. The problem is that Music Man Murray’s rivals just aren’t coming anymore. There aren’t the same obsessive people out there working hard to track down, say, every last acetate copy of Heda Hopper’s radio program “Hollywood Magazine” (which, incidentally, Murray pulled for me from a pile near his desk). As Murray says, they just stopped coming. So the flicker in his eyes snaps on and off, like a pilot light not finding gas.

What puzzles me a little is why Murray doesn’t appear to be suffering from even the mildest case of existential angst. Near the end of Benjamin’s essay, the critic distinguishes between public and private libraries, noting that the phenomenon of collecting loses much of its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Why, then, is Murray okay with giving up his life’s project, the single thing that has defined him more than anything else, and just walking away? Perhaps it’s that he’s come to the conclusion that, without other collectors, he simply is no longer a collector himself. The place that is Music Man Murray and Murray the man are no longer inseparable. The place is the place. Murray is Murray. And if the hand-lettered sign on the building has lost hold of its referent, what, then, is the place worth?

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Without prompting, Murray tells me an interesting if apocryphal story. It is about a journalist who visits an asylum to investigate patient treatment. The reporter speaks to different people who present clear reasons for their being committed. During his work, the reporter comes across a man whom he believes to be a visitor like himself, given how absolutely normal — totally sane — his behavior seems. It is only after a long, pleasant chat that this man reveals, in passing, that he is a patient at the asylum. The reporter is flummoxed, and blurts out, “But you’re completely fine! Totally sane! One hundred percent uncertifiable. Why in God’s name are you here!?” The man demurs; the reporter insists. At which point the man’s eyes bulge and he explodes in a rage, attacking the reporter savagely, beating him and clawing at his face. “His problem,” says Murray. “He was convinced he was crazy.” That was his sticking point, Murray says: the guy didn’t want to be told he didn’t belong there.

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We’re back at Murray’s desk. I ask him what makes a collector collect, and Murray tells me it’s like malaria. “Once you get bitten, you can’t give it up.”

We smile, but I think we both know that’s not quite accurate. Collecting isn’t a contractible disease, randomly acquired. To be a true collector is an essential trait of personality, like being a “leader,” or a “clown.” It is a private pathology. There is no “somewhat of a collector.” You either are, and you always have been, or you aren’t. If it wasn’t records for Murray, it would have been bottle caps or baseball cards or vintage cars.

And perhaps this is how the story of the lunatic lines up with Murray, at least the Murray of today. Like the lunatic who isn’t a lunatic, Murray is a contradiction: a collector who isn’t a collector. For both men, it may be a question of place. The lunatic will scratch and claw to stay in the asylum no matter how often he’s told he doesn’t belong there. He will protect his rightful place in the asylum. Murray, on the other hand, is leaving the place that has defined him. And someday soon, he hopes, he will be a collector without a collection. Outside, the building with his name on its façade appears to be shrinking, just as music, too, has shrunk. These days, music lives inside a few scattered bits of data, the fetishized object becoming, at least for the masses, not so much the music as the little hand-held device upon which it plays.

I nod and Murray nods and the record scratches out the tune, “Pale hands I loved...” That’s “loved” — past tense — though I doubt this is the last time he plays it.

Left to right, filmmaker Richard Parks, Murray's son Irv, and Murray © C.P. Heiser

Richard Parks' documentary Music Man Murray premieres this weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. For more information about the film you can visit Parks' site for the film, or click here for a schedule of screening times. It will also be screening at the East Bay Jewish Film Festival.