Original Artyfacts: Media, Materiality, and the Role of Reissue Compilation Albums in the Garage Rock Revival

Abstract

The reissue compilation album is a media form that has largely been overlooked in popular music scholarship despite the important role these albums have played in the circulation of Anglo-American popular music in the second half of the 20th century. This paper will focus on the role of reissue compilation albums in the revival of garage rock, a genre of rock that began in the 1970s in the United States within niche communities of record collectors and critics who sought to revive obscure, amateur rock and roll music of the mid-1960s. Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted amongst label owners and producers who were active in the American garage revival scene in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as archival documents available at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this paper presents a retrospective ethnography of the early garage rock revival. From questions that concern the material production of reissue compilations, I ask, what kinds of media entities are reissue compilation albums, and how do they serve to mediate the past and present in material form? This paper will also explore ethical questions concerning the role of revivalists in compensating the original musicians of the reissued material. As these albums circulated amongst fans within informal networks of circulation, I draw on the metaphor of “archaeology” to make sense of the idiosyncratic and often informal ways in which garage music fans collected, curated, and revived the past for new audiences.