Buying your first album of your favourite musician is a big deal for some.
It might represent your unique style and taste, or even a way to show self-expression in your younger years, helping define your identity through the music you love.
For music collector Ken Murphy, the first addition to his collection was a present from his father in 1964 — a Beatles record.
“This was maybe the best gift I’ve ever been given, and maybe will be for the rest of my life,” Murphy said. “It changed my life.”
Since then, Murphy has been dedicated to preserving and collecting all types of music-related treasures, which led to the opening of VinylCentric last summer in Calgary’s downtown core, a gallery and archive that celebrates and showcases a variety of notable Canadian music artifacts including records, posters, and sound systems.
All the phonographs and consoles on display at the gallery are made by Canadian manufacturers, many of which are rare finds, and show the evolution of sound systems in Canada.
At one point, Canada’s recorded music scene was almost non-existent, and most of the popular songs came from across the southern border.
“In the late 1950s there were two recording studios in the whole country. We didn’t have a recording industry. If you were a Canadian performer or songwriter, you had to go to the United States,” Murphy said.
“The story I want to tell is how Canada went from zero to hero in 20 years.”
From 1957 to 1977, Canada developed an entire recording industry that propelled figures like Leonard Cohen and Neil Young into the popular music sphere, putting the country on the map for unique talent.
Canadian music has a very rich and deep-rooted history, something that Murphy is trying to preserve. In his archive, there are around 100,000 records and more than 10,000 posters and publicity photos being scanned and digitized for display.
“It’s an endless process,” Murphy laughed. “We’ve been at it for 10 decades.”
Murphy’s newest addition to the gallery is called Hot from Harlem Revue, an exhibit based on the Harlem Revue, an iconic travelling cabaret from New York that frequented many black-owned nightclubs in Montreal in the 1950s.
Overall, the gallery offers a unique experience for guests, something Murphy thinks could resonate with just about anyone.
“We don’t want to show you the instruments that musicians played, or the gowns that they wore on stage because I don’t think we have an emotional attachment to those things,” Murphy said. “But when it comes to sounds, literally the soundtrack to our lives and the stories behind them like the artists and the labels, gosh, it’s fertile ground.”
