How many albums can you think of that feature a space helmet on the cover? There's Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere, Moby's 18, Parliament's Mothership Connection, and Tom Petty's Highway Companion. There are soundtracks for movies like Moonraker, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Day The Earth Stood Still. What about that Star Wars disco album? Does Daft Punk count?
There are at least 360 of them according to archivist Bob George, and he should know: he is the founder and director of The ARChive Of Contemporary Music (ARC), a nonprofit archive, music library and research center that has become home to one of the world’s largest collections of popular music in all its physical forms.
ARC, which was founded in 1985, is steeped in rock lore: among the aisles and aisles of records are Michael Jackson air fresheners, a blown-up photo of Iggy Pop signing a woman's breast, novelty records on how to belly dance, original Steve Keene artwork, and the album Music To Massage Your Mate By, featuring a pre-fame Burt Reynolds on the cover. There's also a printout of the cover for Prince's notorious Black Album, which Prince recalled shortly before its intended release in 1987 because he became convinced it was "evil" (it was eventually released in 1994). Next to it is an excerpt from a review of the album which highlights the "marvelously surreal" track titled..."Bob George."
Was it just a coincidence that the real Bob George happened to meet Prince in the '80s shortly before he recorded the album? Wikipedia would have you believe so, but George noted that he had asked Prince for money for ARC at the time (he said no), and Prince was particularly amused that George's full name is Robert John George ("Your parents never gave you a last name"), which George thinks may have lingered in the singer's mind.
In addition to 3 million+ recordings, ARC also houses music books, videos, memorabilia, press materials, and Bob Dylan-branded wine. There are thousands of signed records everywhere you look, including ones from the likes of Bob Marley, Johnny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and Robert De Niro. The walls are filled with curated "galleries" of album covers arranged by theme—the day Gothamist visited, there were dozens of religious-themed records featured near the front door, including one titled Satan Will Jump On You For Nothing and another called Jesus Signed My Pardon. George has also compiled all those space helmet covers on their website if you want to get a taste for how deep their collection goes.
At the start of the new year, George (who prefers to go by B.George) revealed that he and his three full-time employees have six months to move all their material out of ARC's space on White Street in TriBeCa, where it has been housed for the last 20 years, because of rising rents.
"The taxes have skyrocketed for the building, and for the first time we had to start paying a portion of the taxes," he told Gothamist recently. When they first moved into the building, which has over 10,000 square feet of storage space stuffed to the gills with records, CDs, cassettes and more, the rent was about $6,000 a month; it's now over $20,000 a month. He estimates that as of January, they were $100,000 in debt, necessitating the move.
The NY Times wrote an article about the situation in January, which generated a lot of good press and sympathetic inquiries for ARC. George said they had offers for places everywhere from Bushwick to Memphis, Tennessee to Stuttgart, Germany. But his goal has always been to keep ARC as close to NYC as possible: "I prefer to be here. It's not the center of the music industry that it used to be, but there are a lot of people who have a lot of great things and a lot of great knowledge. After awhile here, you realize there's nowhere else like it."
George, who is 70, moved to NYC in 1974 when he got a scholarship from the Whitney Museum, which is how he met avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson; they both were hired by the Whitney to teach at a high school program on the Lower East Side. The two started collaborating together, with George co-directing her stage shows in the late '70s. He founded One Ten Records around that time, and received a National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 to produce recordings by visual artists. That led to him putting out Anderson's first single, "O Superman," which became a worldwide hit.
George is reluctant to take too much credit for that: "I did almost nothing on the record. I just put it out, right?" he said. "I slowed it down a bit. I kept saying, 'You know, we'll get more royalties in Europe if we have a long song.' It can be the 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' of art music."
During this period, George started traveling around Europe DJing and acquiring records. He wrote “Volume: The International Discography of the New Wave,” the first discography of punk music. When it came out, he was contacted by legendary BBC DJ John Peele, who invited him to co-host a show with him. "I was very good radio DJ, and not a very good dance DJ," he noted. The first edition of the book, published in 1981, was 250 pages; when the second edition came out a year later, it had grown to 700 pages.
"And then people keep sending me more records, and because I was doing the radio stuff and because I had put out Laurie's records, people were sending me a lot of stuff," he said. "I tried to give them away to the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, universities, to anybody who'd have them, and nobody's interested because what do I have? I have disco, punk, reggae, experimental music and hip-hop. And that's the real crux of the matter: nobody was interested."
Instead, George and his friend David Wheeler decided to start their own archive on Hudson Street, starting with the 47,000 records he already owned. Ever since, ARC has relied on donations from other collectors from around the globe—for example, very early on, they received over 100,000 records from The Jeep Holland Collection. They hold record sales twice a year to sell off excess inventory, which George estimates brings in around $100K; the rest of the money they need to maintain the archive all comes from donations. "It isn't about the money—we wouldn't do this if it was about the money," he said.
In recent years, they've collaborated on projects with the likes of Columbia University, Gracenote, the Grammy Hall of Fame and Lincoln Center. They've teamed up with the Internet Archive to begin digitizing their archives as well, but ultimately, ARC is most interested in the preservation of recorded material. "One of the great things about the Internet Archive is they're willing to say, 'Okay, we'll make the digital. You save the physical. We're not sure which is going to last the longest. So let's hedge our bets, or let's do what's best for culture,'" George said.
Researchers, writers, musicians, music labels, and filmmakers have all turned to ARC for help finding recordings; George and ARC have contributed to films including Taking Woodstock, Philadelphia, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation Of Christ, and Ken Burns’ series Baseball. They've also put on public events exploring the music from the Muslim world, Brazil, India, Cuba, and Scandinavia.
George has also amassed a board of trustees to help guide the archive in its decisions, as well as a "board of advisors" made up of some of the biggest names in the music industry, all of whom have donated to ARC or lent their names to help raise more money. That illustrious list has included Lou Reed, producer John Hammond, director Jonathan Demme, Paul Simon, Fred Schneider of the B-52s, Todd Rundgren, Martin Scorsese, Youssou N’Dour, songwriting team Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoll, and more.
Three artists who have been of particular help: Keith Richards, who donated his extensive blues collection (now numbering over 8,000 records), including an original copy of Robert Johnson's "Me And The Devil Blues" single, of which only 12 copies exist worldwide.
There's Nile Rodgers, the Chic cofounder and producer whom George says frequently uses the archive as a resource, and who has been generous with donations. “What’s wonderful about his collection is it’s not judgmental by genre,” Rodgers told the Times. “Now it’s probably even more important to support something like this.”
And then there's the one-and-only David Bowie. "Nile has been a real catalyst and a linchpin for going to a lot of different people," George said. Rodgers, who produced Bowie's hit 1983 album Let's Dance, was the one who got Bowie to host a benefit party for ARC a few years back. Chic, who hadn't played together in years, reformed to perform as well at the event.
"Bowie was fabulous," George recalled. "I don't know how it is now with celebrity parties—they lend their name but they don't really show up, or they come for 10 seconds. He stayed for like three hours, sat at a table, and anybody who wanted to talk to him could go over and sit and talk with him. He was so generous with his time and so delightful. And people have told me, oh, they met him like three years later and he remembered them. So you know, you don't get that a lot, right?"
"David Bowie is the only person I ever met who glowed and it's not a joke," he added. "He came in with Iman and they glowed. I mean, it was weird. And everybody noticed the same thing because he just looked so fabulous."
One place they've never received any help from: the city. "The fact is that we've done this for 34 years with no help. The city is not interested, never has been," George said. "I've been through so many mayors since the start, and maybe 15 heads of the Department of Cultural Affairs. They're seven blocks away. No one's even come here, ever." George said he's heard from them once since they announced the news of the move, but nothing came of it. "We don't understand why the city wouldn't want to be part of it with us. We're like a library. I don't think they make the equation between books and sound recordings."
This week, George told Gothamist they finally had some good news. He and the ARC's board had settled on two new locations for the archives: one in upstate New York near Hyde Park, and another in Los Angeles. (He didn't want to get into more detail about the locations because the contracts were not yet finalized.) He said that thanks to donations that have been made in the last two months, they are financially secure for at least the next year. And there will also be temporary exhibitions, based around themes like the space helmet covers, shown in NYC, L.A. and London. "It will be about six months away, probably in the fall," he noted, "as it will take a bit of time to get settled."
Considering all the money troubles, the stress of upkeep, and the lack of institutional support, Gothamist asked George what compelled him to keep going with the project. "Oh, I have no choice. I'm doomed," he said while laughing. "I don't have a lot of money worries for myself—I have no overhead, a rent-stabilized apartment, a little bit of money form producing. So I'm helpless. I have no choice. I just think that this is really worth doing. It's that simple."
