Let’s make history The Portland music scene needs a centralized archive of memorabilia and music BY SAM PFEIFLE

Lost on Liftoff have plans to release their debut album on Labor Day Records later this month. When they do, I’ll make sure to remind you that frontman Walt Craven is now on his third wildly popular Portland band. Most of you remember 6gig, certainly, but what was that other band? Do you know? What did they sound like? Who else was in it?

Do a quick search for Craven on portlandphoenix.com and you’ll find the information you want pretty quickly. Except for that "sounds like" question. That even the vast resources of the Phoenix Web site can’t deliver.

So where would you go to find a copy of (okay, I’ll tell you) Goud’s Thumb’s album? We don’t have it here at the Phoenix offices. We launched in 1999, after the album came out, and we never got a copy (I have one in my more selective personal archive of about 200 albums; the Phoenix collection sits at about 500 titles). Bull Moose doesn’t have any copies. I called over to Chad Verrill in their buying office and he says that though they’ve got about 800 local releases in the system, most of them go back no farther than 2003.

The Portland Public Library? Well, a search for Goud’s Thumb on the online catalog turns up only a handbook of modern Greek language by Albert Thumb or The Plan of Redemption by Our Lord Jesus Christ: Carefully Examined and Argued by Inquiring into God’s Revealed Purpose in the Creation of Man, by I.C. Wellcome and Clarkson Goud. Arts librarian Tom Wilsbach guesses that the library has about 100 local titles, integrated by genre into all the other CDs in the collection, but couldn’t say for sure. Local music "is one of the things I try to emphasize," he says, but with a yearly budget of $5000 or $6000 for CD buying, there’s only so much he can do (and he does have, for instance, My Dirt, Rooms by the Hour, and Viva Nueva, by Rustic Overtones—searching for local music on the library’s site, portlandlibrary.com, is a pretty great time-killer, actually).

What about the Maine Historical Society, our historical gatekeepers? Nah. John Mayer, curator of the Maine Historical Society’s museum, says they’re "pretty much in a reactive mode in terms of how we collect stuff." Thus, since nobody has really donated any contemporary recordings, they don’t really have any. But they do have some very cool old scores of Civil War-era compositions.

A recent visit to WCYY and WCLZ turned up some 300 or so titles, but nothing of much vintage, and no Goud’s Thumb (though "Spinout" DJ and Labor Day Records honcho Mark Curdo certainly has a copy he might let you listen to).

Your best bet would be WMPG. Station manager Jim Rand says they have 1122 CDs in their local archive, plus another 250 or so LPs. Goud’s Thumb’s self-titled debut is among the collected CDs. Then there’s the "Local Motives" live-music radio show archives, which go back to 1990 on DAT or cassette and certainly include a Goud’s Thumb appearance or two. But they ain’t going to let you take any of it with you. Sure, an enterprising soul could take a laptop and rip a quick copy, but that’s sort of illegal and people would have to look the other way, and even a generous guy like Rand wouldn’t stand for that happening very often.

So, what’s this all mean? It means we need a local music library (or museum, the nomenclature isn’t important) whereby all of our local music titles could be collected in one place, both physically and electronically — especially electronically, as that would allow for the quickest access and take up the least space. Technology is such today that ripping even vinyl, cassette, and reel-to-reel to mp3 format is a snap, and the library could have daisy-chained dedicated hard drives networked to a series of G5 Macs running iTunes. Then, people could select the songs they wanted to play (iTunes is very searchable) and listen in comfort on wirelessly connected headphones while they sat on comfortable couches or browsed through collected information on archived bands.

The initial investment in equipment/time would be in the $20,000/200 hours range, depending on how many computers, couches, and headphones you wanted to roll with, how much rent you’d be charged for a small space on Congress Street, and how much time it would take to visit the various places with local music and rip the material to a laptop’s hard drive. Time would depend on the torchbearer, but the money could be quickly and easily made up. Certainly, a token admission at the door could be charged, and there’s no reason why the city wouldn’t help promote such a wonderful and unique tourist attraction. Two dollars seems reasonable, and the city might even be persuaded to give a low-interest grant for the start-up. If somebody like the Maine Historical Society or Portland Public Library wanted to give the local music library a room, so much the cheaper. Labor would be minimal to begin with, Macs are historically easily and cheaply serviced, and overhead would be very low, indeed, though a marketing campaign would be necessary to generate foot traffic.

Further (and here comes the legwork part), the individual artists could be contacted with this proposal: Would it be all right if people plugged in their iPods to download your music if they were asked to pay 99 cents per song, $10 per album, to be reinvested in the local music library? I don’t know of many local musicians who’d say no, other than those with albums very recently released, and those albums would be less important to the library anyway, as they’d be widely available. In fact, the library could easily get away with saying that anything newer than three years old would be ineligible for purchase from the archive and they could direct interested parties to the individual artists’ Web sites.

As the library progressed, memorabilia would be acquired, the library of music would be hosted on the Web for online listening and download (some would argue that this should just be done as a Web site only, but I think the sense of place in downtown Portland would be vital to the project), and a series of reunion shows could be scheduled to raise both money and awareness for the institution.

I’m thinking the addition of a coffee/snack bar would be quickly needed and would raise money to boot, but as an initial investment I’d say it’s too much hassle.

Now all we need is a name. Borrowing from last week’s column, the Manny Verzosa Memorial Portland Music Library seems appropriate, though it’s not very snappy. We could go with "the MVMPML" for short. It’s got a nice post-modern appeal.