day-to-day manager. For the first year, Nagoski worked


80-to-100-hour weeks: running the store, scouring his favorite thrift store LP bins for fresh inventory, and in the evenings, turning his shop into a show space for out-of-town and local bands. A few nights a week, he even pulled out an old mattress and slept at the store. For his 30th birthday, he decided he need- ed a break and planned a three-city East Coast tour in which he’d perform at other record stores a piece he dubbed “The Bal- timore Yowler” in which he simply got in front of a microphone and screamed. The shop owners were friendly enough to let him have his cathartic moment. “My daughter had just been born,”


Above: nagoski listens to some of his rare finds in his home office. Left: a bin containing some of his eclectic collection.


Nagoski says. “I was in a new business that didn’t seem like it was going to par- ticularly work out. I had no money. I was single and profoundly unhappy. … There’s me screaming for 20 or 30 min- utes in a record store. That was how I celebrated my 30th birthday. Obviously, I was freaking out.” Soon after he returned to Baltimore, the box of Papagikas came into the store.


tions were always impossibly high. “He had this idea that sound could induce an ecstatic state in the listener,” says Dan Conrad, a musician and collabora- tor. “That it didn’t happen — sustained ecstasy — he would complain bitterly that the performance failed. It was an example of his desperate integrity.” For all his efforts, Nagoski’s albums


sold in the hundreds. “I’ve never really found an audience for my music,” he ad- mits. “There literally isn’t one.” Nagoski found a far more receptive


audience for his other love, championing old records, records that could be just as intense and foreign as his own, whether they were his prized prewar gospel sides or bagpipe novelties. “He has this way of talking about the actual item that is the


78 that makes it really important,” says friend and guitarist Ben Chasny, who performs under the name Six Organs of Admittance. “It’s almost in a mystical way. He’s not just talking about: ‘Here’s this item I own.’ When he talks about or writes about these items, they’re discs that can really transport you.” That intense connection to old re-


cords soon became his route to an adult life. In 2004, a woman he’d been dat- ing became pregnant with his daughter, June. Although the relationship didn’t work out, Nagoski was determined to be a committed father. After being fired from another bookstore job, he decid- ed to do what came most naturally: He opened True Vine in the Hampden neighborhood as its principal owner and


of her recordings. He tracked down translations of her songs, interviewed the granddaughter of one of her contem- poraries, rented reel-to-reel tapes of her performances, and even found a woman Papagika had babysat. He took a picture of her old club — now a jewelry store called Golden Paradise. The notes for the album are exhaustive but not overly academic. Cornell professor Gail Holst-Warhaft,


J


director of the school’s Mediterranean Studies Initiative, assisted Nagoski’s re- search and helped edit his notes on Papagika. She says that Nagoski may face criticism because he’s not a tradition- al academic, and his notes can be “over the top.” Nagoski dedicated five years to his


Papagika project. His liner notes ended up running 4,000 words long. He has chosen to begin with a mash note to his muse: “This is the nearly forgotten music


august 22, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 29


ust as the Papagika song was be- coming a mini-phenomenon on YouTube and beyond, Nagoski was conducting research for extensive liner notes to accompany an album


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