I’d say I have a hundred phonographs, plus or minus 10 percent. When you turn on the radio, you get punk and everything else now. I also used to collect old radios, but lost interest in that because what you play on them isn’t old stuff. I’ve gone through different phases in life where I didn’t do much with phonographs in college and when I got married and started a family. It just was fascinating to get music out of such a crude, mechanical-type system.
I’d always been into music from the 1930s and ’40s, because my parents played it at home so much, but then I got this thing working. One day I was messing around and opened it up and started playing with it.
It was a 1917 – my grandfather bought it right before World War I. When I was around 10, my grandfather passed away, and my dad brought home his Victrola and stuck it under the stairs in the basement. Victor III, originally “Victor M” (Monarch) model in 1901.