“The Dealer Said Nobody Wants Blues Anymore” — He’d Been Playing It Since 1963 D

March 7th, 2020. Kentish Town, North London. The assembly rooms Fordis road 10:30 on a Saturday morning. The vinyl and instrument fair had been running on the first Saturday of most months for 9 years and had the specific quality of events that happened regularly enough to have developed a culture around them.

Regulars who arrived at the same time each session and went to the same stands first. traders who had been there since the beginning and who had accumulated over nine years. The specific knowledge of which spot in the hall produced the most foot traffic at which hour of the day, and which configuration of their table encouraged browsing versus buying.

The assembly rooms held 42 stalls in its main space with overflow into the corridor that ran along the east wall. The main space had high ceilings and wooden floors and the specific smell of old vinyl and old wood and coffee from the machine in the corner which produced a kind of coffee that was not good but was hot and available and which people drank because the fair opened at 9 and some of them had been setting up since 8.

Eddie Marsh had stand 19 as he had for seven of the fair’s nine years. He was 68 years old and had been selling blues records and blues adjacent guitars and amplifiers since 1984, which was 36 years of knowing what he knew and knowing it in the specific depth of someone who has spent 36 years acquiring things they love and selling them to people who love them in equal measure.

His stand had a specific visual quality. The records were arranged not alphabetically but by the logic of listening, the logic of someone who understood the relationships between recordings rather than the alphabetical proximity of names. Someone who knew what they were looking at would find in the way Eddie organized his stand.

a kind of argument about the blues, about how it moved and who it moved through and where it went when it arrived in Britain in the early 60s and what the British musicians did with it. Someone who didn’t know what they were looking at would see a lot of old records. Eddie’s stand had not been doing well that morning.

By 10:30, he had sold two records, one to a regular he recognized from previous fairs, one to a young woman who had bought it because the cover was attractive and who may or may not have known what was on it. He was not worried about this in the way of someone whose livelihood was threatened. He was an intermittent seller, a retired school teacher who came to these fairs because they were the places where the records found people who needed them.

He was mildly concerned about it in the way of someone who has been at a fair for two and a half hours with a stand that he has taken considerable care over and who would like the care to produce more than two sales. This channel exists for stand 19 at the assembly rooms for road and for what was about to arrive at it.

Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. Ryan Cole was 27 years old and had stand 20. The stand directly adjacent to Eddie’s, separated by an aisle of approximately 60 cm, which was enough space for one person to walk through, but not two, which meant that any conversation between the occupants of stands 19 and 20 was conducted in the specific proximity of people who have been placed next to each other by circumstance rather than by choice.

Ryan sold vintage amplifiers and effects pedals and the occasional guitar. All of them targeted at the contemporary market. The equipment favored by musicians who played the kinds of music that were currently popular and who needed specific tonal profiles that specific vintage equipment could provide. He was good at what he did.

He knew his equipment. He knew his prices. He knew his customer. He had a phone bracket set up on his stand so he could shoot short videos while demonstrating equipment, which he posted to an account that had 42,000 followers and which had over 2 years become a meaningful part of his income.

He was 27 years old and had built something from nothing. And he was not wrong about any of this. He was wrong about one thing which was about to become clear. At 10:25, a customer had asked Ryan about the guitar on the stand adjacent, Eddie’s stand, which had, leaning against the back of the table, a 1959 Harmony Sovereign Acoustic that Eddie had acquired at a house clearance and had cleaned and rerung and set out for sale.

It was priced at 80, which was below market, but Eddie priced things to sell rather than to maximize. Ryan had looked at the guitar. He had looked at Eddie. He had said with the confidence of someone who believes they are providing useful information. Nobody’s buying blues stuff right now. The market’s all modded Fenders, boutique pedals, math rock, post punk revival, anything that sounds like the ‘9s.

Basically, blues is a dead category at fairs like this. You do better with almost anything else. Eddie had looked at him. He had not said anything. He had been at fairs for 36 years and had encountered this sentence or its equivalent approximately every 5 years throughout that period. Each time delivered by someone who was su and each time proved wrong within the following 18 months by the thing that always happened which was that blues never died.

It just waited for the next generation to find it. He did not say this. He turned back to his stand. Ryan had not meant it unkindly. He was 27 and knowledgeable, and he had looked at Eddie’s stand and seen old records and an old guitar, and had offered what he considered useful market intelligence. He was not wrong about the current fair market.

He was wrong about the permanent market, which is a different thing, and which 27 years and 2 years of building something from nothing had not yet given him the length to see. Subscribe and turn on notifications. The man who is about to arrive at stand 19 has been playing blues since 1963, 3 years before Ryan Cole was born. At 10:28, the man arrived at stand 19.

He was 76 years old. He had long silver white hair and a dark coat. He had been at the fair since it opened, moving through the stalls in the unhurried way of someone for whom a fair of this kind is a familiar environment, and who has learned that the things worth finding at fairs are found slowly rather than quickly.

He had already spent 45 minutes and had bought three records from two different stalls, and had passed on several things that had interested him at first, and then not. He had reached stand 19, and had been going through the records for approximately 12 minutes. He had not spoken to Eddie. He had browsed.

He had picked things up and put them down with the care of someone who handles records as physical objects and not just as audio containers, which was a way of handling them that Eddie recognized as the handling of someone who knew what they were looking at. At 10:30, he pulled a record from the back of the third row and held it up and looked at it for some time.

He turned it over. He looked at the back. He looked at the label through the sleeve. He said it face up on the table and looked at it. He said, “This is a UK first pressing.” He said it the way you say something when you are confirming something to yourself as much as stating it to another person.

He said it at the volume of the stand rather than the volume of the room. Eddie looked at the record. 1962, he said, “Pi International, one of the early UK blues releases. Most of the copies went to music shops and radio stations. Very few circulated to the public.” The man looked at him. “How many are you aware of?” “In this condition, maybe 12, possibly fewer.” The man nodded.

He picked the record up again and turned it over. He was handling it with the specific care of someone for whom this object is not primarily a commodity. Subscribe and turn on notifications. What happens next at stand 19 is the reason this channel exists. Ryan at stand 20 had looked up from his phone.

He had been shooting a short video demonstrating a 1974 Fender Twin at 10:29 and had not seen the man arrive at Eddie’s stand. He saw him now. He processed the silver white hair and the dark coat and the specific quality of attention the man was giving an old blues record. He did not recognize him. He registered him as a browser who had found something of interest and made no further calculation.

The blue stuff does find its people, Ryan said to Eddie with the concession of someone who has been watching for 2 minutes and is willing to revise a small part of a position they still mostly hold. He said it across the 60 cm aisle. He said it amiably as a correction to his own earlier statement rather than as an apology, which is the correction that 27year-olds make when they have said something confident and are not yet at the age of the other kind.

The man looked up from the record. He looked at Ryan. He had not heard the 1025 conversation, but he had heard the 1032 revision which contained within it the ghost of the earlier statement. What blue stuff, he said. Ryan gestured at Eddie’s stand. The records, the harmony over there, the all of it really.

And you were saying nobody wants blues anymore. Ryan paused. He had the specific expression of someone who has been heard saying something they said to someone else and is deciding how to proceed. I was saying the current fair market is trending away from it. He said, which is true.

The man looked at the record in his hand. He looked at Ryan. He said, “When did you start selling?” “About 2 years ago, two and a half.” “I’ve been playing blues since 1963.” The man said the fair market has trended away from it six or seven times in that period. Each time it has come back to it, usually within two or three years.

He set the record on the table. He looked at Ryan with the expression of someone sharing a data point rather than making an argument. Blues doesn’t go anywhere. It waits. Ryan looked at him. He looked at Eddie. Eddie was looking at the record on the table, which he had priced at £45 and which had just been described accurately as a UK first pressing in this condition that he was aware of perhaps 12 copies of.

Are there moments when someone has said something in passing that landed with the full weight of 60 years of experience? Tell me in the comments below. I read everyone. Could I try the harmony? The man said to Eddie. Eddie reached behind the table and lifted the 1959 Harmony Sovereign from its lean and held it out.

The man took it with the two-handed care of someone who has been handling acoustic guitars since they were 14, which was 62 years. He sat in the chair that Eddie kept behind the table for his own use when foot traffic was slow and which no customer had used before. He settled the guitar on his knee.

He pressed the first chord shape to the neck, E minor, the root of most of what he was about to play, and listened to the open string sustained for a moment. Then he played. He played a progression that was not a performance, not something arranged for presentation, not something that showed technique or range or the catalog of what a guitar could do.

He played in the way of someone who was working something out in real time, following the guitar rather than leading it, letting the instrument say what it wanted to say with the specific voice of a 1959 harmony sovereign that has been played and put down and picked up again across 61 years of accumulated resonance.

The guitar did not have the projection of a high-end instrument. It had something else. The voice of a thing that has been played, which is different from the voice of a thing that is played for the first time and different from the voice of a thing that is never played at all. People stopped. Not immediately.

The fair was a fair with the specific ambient noise of 42 stalls and the conversations around them and the music playing from three different directions. But within approximately 45 seconds of the first note, there was a radius of quiet around stand 19 that expanded as more people turned from what they had been doing and oriented toward the source of the sound.

This channel exists for the radius of quiet that expands around something true. Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. Ryan had set his phone down. He had been midv video when the playing started and had stopped the recording without thinking about stopping it. He was standing at the edge of his stand, not at Eddie’s stand, not moving toward it, just standing at the boundary of stand 20 looking.

He did not know who the man was. This was still true. The specific arithmetic of silver white hair plus dark coat plus 62 years of guitar vocabulary had not yet produced a result. He was watching the way you watch something that has caught you before you understood why it caught you, which is the best way to watch anything. The man played for 4 minutes.

He played three distinct progressions. A slow 12 bar, a faster shuffle, and something that was not a standard form at all, but that contained within it the DNA of everything that had preceded it in the previous four minutes. And in the 61 years of playing before that morning, when he stopped, he stopped without announcement, letting the last note sustain until it was gone rather than cutting it.

The radius of quiet held for 3 seconds. Then the fair came back. There was applause, which was unusual for a fair of this kind where people browse rather than attend. There were conversations breaking out around the stand. Several people moved toward stand 19. Three of them bought records. One of them, a woman in her 50s who had been standing at the far edge of the radius of quiet with an expression that suggested she had heard something she hadn’t expected to hear at 10:40 on a Saturday morning.

Asked Eddie about the harmony. Ryan said across the 60 cm aisle, “Who is that?” Eddie looked at him. He said the name. Ryan said nothing for a moment. He looked at the man who was still in the chair with the harmony on his knee talking to Eddie about the PI International pressing and whether the matrix numbers were consistent with the first run or possibly a second pressing of the first run which was a distinction that mattered in a specific way.

He looked at his phone which was still recording nothing. He looked at the man again. Subscribe and turn on notifications. What Ryan does next is the smallest and most important thing in this story. Ryan picked up his phone. He pressed record. He filmed for approximately 8 seconds, long enough to capture the man and the guitar and the stand in Eddie’s face, which was the face of someone whose stand had just been brought back to life by a Saturday morning that had been going quietly.

And then he stopped. He looked at the 8 seconds. He deleted it. He looked at the man. He put the phone in his pocket. Some things are not for 42,000 followers. Some things are for the room. When the conversation between the man and Eddie reached its natural pause, Ryan stepped across the 60 cm aisle.

He looked at the man. He said, “I said nobody wants blues anymore.” The man looked at him. “I was wrong about that,” Ryan said. He said it without drama. He said it the way 27year-olds say things when they have just been given sufficient evidence to revise a position and have decided to do it immediately rather than gradually.

I was right about the fair market in the short term, but I was wrong about the thing underneath it. The man looked at him for a moment. The thing underneath it is 60 years old, he said. It has been underneath it for 60 years. It is not going away. He handed the harmony back to Eddie. price this correctly,” he said.

“The 1962 pressing also, don’t let people tell you what the market is. Know what you have.” He reached into his coat. He took out a guitar pick, dark, worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side and set it on Eddie’s table beside the 1962 pressing. “For the stand,” he said. “It’s been playing blues since before 1963.

It knows where it’s been.” He stood up and put on his coat and walked through the assembly rooms toward the exit. He passed 26 stalls without stopping, which was a different route from his arrival. He did not look back. Eddie looked at the pick. He looked at the 1962 pressing.

He looked at the harmony, which the woman in her 50s was now holding with both hands and playing a tentative chord on, having not played guitar in 15 years, and having just watched someone play one in a way that reminded her why she had started. She bought the harmony. She bought it at the price Eddie named, which was the correct price. Ryan went back to stand 20.

He did not film anything else that morning. He sat behind his table and thought about the thing underneath it, which he now understood was different from the current fair market, and which he would have to spend some time thinking about before he understood what to do with the distinction. He was 27. He had time.

He had enough time to learn this. Eddie went home with more than he had expected to go home with. The 1962 pressing he kept. Some things are not for selling. The pick he keeps, in the case of a guitar he has had since 1987, a harmony sovereign not unlike the one that the woman bought that morning, a different year and a different condition and a different history, which he plays on Saturday evenings when the fair is done and the week is almost over.

He plays blues. He has been playing it since 1971, which is 49 years, which is not as long as some people and longer than most and exactly as long as he has been playing it. If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for stand 19 at the assembly rooms on Fordes Road and for the radius of quiet that expands around something true and for the deleted video which was the most important thing Ryan Cole did that morning.

What has made you stop in the middle of something and listen before you understood why you were listening? Tell me below. I read every single comment. Jimmy Paige once said, “I believe music is the most universal language.” He has been speaking it since 1963. On a Saturday morning in March, in a room with 42 stalls and the smell of old vinyl and not good coffee, he sat in a folding chair behind stand 19 and spoke it for 4 minutes. The blues does not go anywhere.

It waits. It has been waiting since before anyone at that fair was born. It will still be waiting when none of them are at fairs anymore. That is what 60 years looks like from the inside. That is what Stan 19 looked like from the outside. Both things are true. See you in the next one.