In October the Wire published a primer on what it pronounced “the moment when Black music grew its Afro and took a lesson from hippy-rock, exploding into the Technicolor dream funk and proto-disco of psychedelic soul.” On the British magazine’s list of essential recordings from the era, alongside the expected goods from Parliament, the Temptations, and Rare Earth, was an obscure compilation called Chains & Black Exhaust: 18 tracks of some of the heaviest, spazziest guitar funk ever laid to wax, including some amazing paeans to mind-altering substances like Gran Am’s woozy “Get High” and Iron Knowledge’s lacerating “Showstopper,” which extols the virtues of coke.
It took about three decades for prewar jazz and blues to be recognized for their historical value, so Carfagna figures funk is next. “Soul and funk is now 30 years old, so the canonization window is closing and you can posit that as a movement it has a semidefinitive beginning and end, before it evolved into disco and hip-hop. We’re talking about the lineage of black music, and I think people are beginning to understand that the music needs to be preserved.”
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Carfagna was just seven years old when a radio station in Columbus, Ohio, began broadcasting a weekly hip-hop show called Sunday Night at the Raps. He was immediately drawn to the music. His parents, who owned a grocery store in Columbus, were devout soul fans. “My parents were heads,” he says, “but they were suburban heads-that-had-a-bag-of-grass-in-the-end-table kind of folks.”
He and some of his friends put together a hip-hop group, but samplers didn’t come cheap back then, so Carfagna mostly stockpiled his records. That changed in 1990, when he moved to Miami to live with his father and stepmother for the last two years of high school. “One day I was playing the Ruth Copeland record I Am What I Am, playing the break over and over, really loud,” he says. Deep in the spell of the music, Carfagna didn’t notice a knock at the front door. His stepmother answered and let in former Public Enemy “minister of information” Professor Griff. He’d been charmed by the beats pouring out of Carfagna’s bedroom as he walked by. “I almost had cardiac arrest,” Carfagna says. “I never shook that bad in my life. It’s like if you’re a teenager, Mr. Blueballs, sitting at the house and you just pray some girl will knock at the door and straddle your shit.” Griff had recently moved to Miami and was living a few doors away.
They began a regular phone correspondence, and that summer the pair went on a two-week record-finding trip, the first of many. Davis says he and Carfagna share a taste for uncovering the mysteries behind the records: “It’s like archaeology, the lengths you go to track this stuff down and right its place in history. If there’s a record that nobody in the world knows about, especially if there’s a huge, long-standing mystery to it, we try to go the extra mile to put it to bed. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of time, and often it yields absolutely nothing.”
“If you meet someone who made a record, odds are that they have other music that they couldn’t afford to put out,” says Carfagna. Reissues “give these people an additional opportunity. In addition to me buying the record that you have, I can also give you money to put your music out again for this entirely new audience. We gave J.C. what he wanted, and he’s elated. He said he was doing nothing with it, and now he has some money in his pocket and some records to give to his buddies.”
Carfagna says that once the book is finished he plans to unload most of his singles collection. “Even though the 45s are my serious passion, there needs to be a point where you cut it off. I don’t want to be the 65-year-old dude with all of these records. I’d rather cash them in and buy something really incredible, like a home. So it may seem like I haven’t had a job in five years, but when I cash those in that’s the 401K that I would’ve been storing away otherwise. It’s like having a bunch of Hummels or something–eventually you just sell the shit.”
