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
