Unboxing hidden music history: Lou Curtiss' Whimsical Collection and vinyl's survival

Episode 33: Lou Curtiss Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Lou Curtiss spent his life rescuing forgotten music. Now after his death, thousands of items from his personal collection are being unboxed and sent back into the world. At Folk Arts Rare records in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego that time capsule of music history is slowly being opened up for the first time. There are boxes upon boxes of records, CDs…

Brendan Boyle: … ephemera, thousands of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette mixtapes.

Evans: How many boxes are there that you have yet to go through?

Boyle: There's a whole storage unit for all this stuff.

Evans: Lou collected all of this and built something even bigger. He founded Folk Arts over 50 years ago and became a legendary figure in American folk and blues circles with a music collection as singular as the man himself.

Boyle: He was big. He had a big beard. He was an original West Coast American folk lifestyle, everything.

Evans: That's Brendan Boyle. He runs the store now and has been coming here since he was a teenager. For months, he and his team at Folk Arts have been sorting through Lou's personal archive. Basically a mountain of music and inside that mountain is one record, one story that offers a glimpse into lose life's work.

Boyle: You never see this record.

Evans: The artist is Thomas Shaw.

Boyle: Thomas Shaw was probably the most impressive local San Diego blues musician of all time.

Evans: Today, Thomas Shaw's music isn't on Spotify. He's not alone. Thousands of recordings have never made it onto a streaming platform and likely never will. That's the kind of music you can find at places like Folk Arts. And if not for Lou Curtiss, Thomas Shaw's music might not be here at all. In the early 1970s, Thomas Shaw was a preacher who ran a church in Southeast San Diego.

[Thomas Shaw's "Rock My Baby Back Home"]

Boyle: This profession was running his church and just like cruising around alleys, looking for stuff to pick up and sell.

Evans: And when he met Lou, he was in his 60s. He was still playing guitar, but had long set aside hopes of doing anything serious with his music.

Boyle: He had never recorded before. And he walked into Folk Arts, asked Lou if he had guitar strings. He was sold guitar strings and, of course, Lou was like, have a seat.

[Thomas Shaw's "Broke and Ain't Got a Dime"]

Evans: Lou didn't sell guitar strings, but he did help make Thomas Shaw a legend. We'll hear more of that story and we'll open more boxes with more stories, like how Lou met an international jazz icon while he was still playing at bowling alleys in San Diego. And we'll explore how physical media, especially vinyl records, survived the '90s in 2000s and why that matters. In a time when our music is mostly in the cloud, Lou Curtiss' Whimsical Collection is in the real world.

Boyle: It's really like something that you can touch and explore. There's so much to listen to. It's crazy.

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: Lou Curtiss might not have been famous as a musician himself, but his impact ran deep. American music wouldn't be the same without him. He was the sort of person who knew everyone. Lou wrote about his friendship with Tom Shaw for his long-running column in San Diego Troubadour. He said Tom cut his teeth playing in the Texas Blues Clubs where quote, "most all of those guys got to record, but while Tom Shaw often beat those guys in guitar contests, he was still passed over by the recording companies."

[Thomas Shaw's "Martin Luther King"]

Evans: Tom moved to San Diego in the 1930s, never having recorded anything. He spent his time running his church and also a few clubs like the Little Harlem Chicken Shack known for its good food and great music.

After they met in his record shop, Lou acted as his unofficial manager. He helped Tom finally get that record deal, and Lou's wife, Virginia, even snapped the album cover photo in their living room. After Tom returned from touring Europe, nobody believed him that he'd done it, but Lou had proof for the naysayers. A poster from one of Tom's shows in Germany. And that poster that Lou used to prove Tom's sanity, it's still on the walls here at Folk Arts.

Is that a Tom Shaw tour poster in Germany?

Boyle: Yeah.

Evans: Nice.

Boyle: Pretty cool.

Evans: The walls in the record shop are plastered with posters, snapshots, and notes, like a sort of makeshift museum of local music history.

Boyle: That's Thomas Shaw with his priest robe. There's a lot to say about all this stuff.

Evans: There is a lot to say about this stuff. When I went to visit Folk Arts Rare Records on a sunny Friday, Brendan Boyle was doing what he's been doing for months and what he expects to be doing for years to come. Sifting through Lou Curtiss' seemingly endless collection. Folk Arts recently acquired the archive and is slowly putting it on the shelves for anyone to explore and buy

Boyle: Really important blues recordings. Really amazing early gospel music. Early Portuguese music. It's hard to…

Evans: Can you…

Boyle: You wanna hear it?

Evans: Yeah.

Boyle: Yeah. This is certainly a record I've never heard before. First time in my life.

Evans: Have any of you heard this one? Portuguese? Early Portuguese string music? Let's go.

[Early Portuguese string music plays.]

Evans: But the collection isn't just obscure or rare, it's woven together with the collector's life. Lou passed away in 2018, four years after selling the store to his protege, Brendan, who runs it today,

Boyle: I started shopping there in, I believe, the year 2000 when I was 18. Evans: Nice.

Boyle: Loved it. It was my favorite place. It was considered to be kind of magical and it felt like a roadside attraction.

Evans: Lou took Brendan under his wing, demystifying the vast world of music.

Boyle: He'll answer your questions all day long and you'd be amazed at the amount of knowledge he had.

Evans: Lou Curtiss was an early Civil Rights and Vietnam War protestor involved in folk scenes around the country. He established Folk Arts Rare Records in 1967, shortly after the success of the San Diego Folk Festival that same year. He helped run the festival for over 50 years.

Boyle: His San Diego Folk Festivals were like a week long, and were these gatherings where there was all sorts of dialogue happening between the generations.

Evans: Lou worked on countless recording and archiving projects, supporting musicians like Tom Shaw and many others, and all the while bringing home tons of albums for his own collection. And now you can find them at Folk Arts. And if you're lucky, you might get to hear a story too.

[Kathy & Carol's "George Collins"]

Boyle: Kathy and Carol were a really important folk duo. They were from Escondido. They were friends with Lou, they helped organize the first Folk Festival, played it. They released an album on Elektra Records. In 1965, that was considered like the full record of the year nationally.

[Kathy & Carol's "Sprig of Thyme"]

Boyle: A lot of record collectors consider it to be like what you call proto-psychedelic record 'cause it's recorded super sonically in a hi-fi manner. They have really beautiful harmonies and you kind of get lost into it in a sort of like dreamlike manner. Local San Diego history, a lot of people don't know about. They're a really great band.

[Slim Gaillard's "Atomic Cocktail"] 

Boyle: So these are rare recordings of Slim Gaillard. He's arguably one of the most entertaining entertainers of all time. My personal favorite musician. Lou turned me onto him and Lou used to go see him perform at bowling alleys in San Diego 'cause he was just looking for work.

You go to Sunset Bowl and Grossmont Bowl, it's like 1961. He had these residencies there for a period of time where Loou would just go hang out with them in a bowling alley bar and ask him questions.

[Slim Gaillard's "Frank Rhoads Round"] 

Boyle: You can't make this stuff up.

Evans: Lou wasn't just shaping the local scene in San Diego, he was also preserving music history. Part of the collection, what Brendan calls "the really priceless stuff," is being added to an ongoing archive at UCLA, but most of it will be here for everyone. And a big part of Lou's collection is material from Document Records.

Boyle: He acquired pretty much every single Document release, well over a thousand CDs and LPs

Evans: Beginning in the mid 1980s, Document collected and rereleased extremely rare blues and jazz recordings from the turn of the century through World War II. Document saved a lot of music from going permanently extinct.

Boyle: 'Cause a lot of those records were recycled and destroyed during World War II because they were made out of shellac and the Japanese had taken over Southeast Asia, and that was our source for shellac, which was essentially like beetle goo.

Evans: Records used to be made out of a natural resin secreted from an insect native to Asia. Shellac was also used to produce artillery, and during wartime scrap drives, patriotic Americans would donate their old records to be recycled. And record companies also donated metal masters to be melted down and used in the war effort. Over a hundred million records were reportedly destroyed this way. And to this day, Document scours the music collector world, and if they can find even one copy of an old shellac record that survived the war, they archive it, remaster it and put it out again. These are old recordings. Some like around a hundred years old, and now they're having a second life.

You might recognize "Pick Poor Robin Clean," recorded by Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas in 1931. Warner Brothers licensed the song from Document for the movie "Sinners." The song went from a few extremely obscure recordings into one of the biggest movies of 2025.

[Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas' "Pick Poor Robin Clean"]

Evans: If you find something good in Lou's collection at Folk Arts, chances are it will be a discovery. And those discoveries and the local record shops that make them possible are cornerstones of a music community.

Boyle: We learn a lot from customers. Customers learn a lot from us. We literally, at any given moment, have no idea what's gonna happen next.

Evans: Folk Arts also operates a second shop tucked in the back of Part Time Lover, a listening bar with a hi-fi sound system in North Park. It's packed every weekend, a sign that more and often younger people are becoming interested in discovering music they might not find anywhere else.

Andrew Mall: Even though it seems when you log into Spotify or Apple Music, that it has everything. It doesn't.

Evans: This is Andrew Mall, associate professor of music at Northeastern University in Boston. He studies the history of the recording industry, nostalgia and collecting.

Mall: The rights holders who license the music to Spotify into Apple Music, they don't actually own everything. You know, they act as if they do and they do command something like 70% of the market, but there's lots of catalogs, lots of music that they simply don't own and that thus doesn't get digitized and doesn't get licensed to the streaming providers. And to see artists and labels get a chance at new audiences because they're like dedicated professionals at record labels, at archival labels trying to do this the right way. I think that's an amazing thing.

Evans: But collections like Lou's might have become nearly obsolete if the vinyl format had died out completely. That nearly happened in the '90s and 2000s, but it was a few stubborn groups that kept it alive in the dark times. That's after the break. Stay with us.

[Music]

Evans: Vinyl is cool again, but there was a time when it seemed destined to go the way of the typewriter or floppy disc as CDs and then digital music took over the recording industry.

Mall: During the '90s there were really kind of three communities that were keeping pressing plants afloat. One community was the DJ community, right? So new releases still got 12-inch releases on vinyl, so those DJs could spin them at the clubs. So we had DJ community, we had let's just call it like indie labels, but I'm thinking primarily of indie rock and punk. For some reason, they kept releasing music on 7-inch vinyl and also on LP. And the other community was the audiophile community. So listening to records, listening to vinyl to me sounds better than listening to CDs or listening to streaming music. And that's true for a lot, a lot, a lot of people.

Evans: So audiophiles created a niche market to keep putting new releases on vinyl, and together with DJs and punk and indie bands, they created just enough business for vinyl to hang on.

Mall: The number of pressing plants in the United States dwindled to only a couple. Like, I forget exactly how many, but it was like single digits. As the vinyl resurgence really picks up in the 21st century, like by about 2011 or 12, something like that, one of the main challenges is the lack of pressing plants. No one was making new record pressing machines anymore. The biggest effect is that it created a bottleneck in the supply chain.

Evans: But once it became clear that vinyl was back, plenty of companies invested in vinyl production and it seems now like it's here to stay.

Mall: Many listeners are tired of having their listening catalog and library be ephemeral.

Evans: Andrew and I talked on Zoom and he was sitting in front of his own record collection of 1,500 records.

Mall: Maybe you still have a library of downloaded music on your computer or elsewhere. But it's, you know, it's not the same as looking at shelves like this and browsing and spending time in deciding and pulling out and placing it on the turntable. Another way to think about it is that a lot of people are finding fulfillment in like everyday rituals.

Evans: Spotify's stated aim is to be a quote, "self-driving music app." This is the opposite: Picking your music yourself. Literally picking up a record and turning it over rather than having an algorithm do it for you.

Mall: It's really just building a music collection that I can enjoy, that I can share with my family, and that I can kind of track my own fandom and professional life because I am a music professor, through the things that I own.

Evans: What he means is it doesn't have to be complicated, just accessible and something that means something to you. And that got me thinking about one of my favorite scenes from the movie "High Fidelity."

Todd Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": I guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records.

John Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": Yeah.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": What is this? Chronological?

Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": No.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": Not alphabetical.

Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": Nope.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": What?

Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": Autobiographical.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": No way.

Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": Yep. I can tell you how I got from "Deep Purple" to "Howlin' Wolf" in just 25 moves.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": That sounds…

Cusack as Rob in "High Fidelity": … comforting.

Louiso as Dick in "High Fidelity": Yes.

Mall: That's one thing that I suggest, not necessarily to focus on it biographically, but to come up with, you know, some kind of guiding ideas, principles, whatever, so that you are buying records that are meaningful to you.

Evans: There are no rules. Brendan told me that Lou Curtiss had some wild categories he'd sort his records and legendary mixtapes into, including a whole sub collection of songs about chickens.

[The Hub City Movers' "Set Your Chickens Free"]

Evans: As Folk Arts staffers comb through Lou's vast collection of tangible media, they're putting a commemorative Lou Curtiss' Whimsical Collection sticker on the sleeve and adding it to the bins for sale.

Evans: What, like what's your reaction to that? What does it mean that it's just like going into the world?

Mall: I mean, I love that, but I really do. When collections go to archives, it feels like despite these archives best intentions, it still feels like they've disappeared from the world. And this is one way to ensure that that music gets preserved, right, to circulate it amongst hundreds, maybe thousands of individual users. Many of those people may have very small collections where it actually does get listened to a lot.

Evans: Lou's unique and extremely autobiographical collection is not staying together, and it's tempting to mourn that even just a little bit. But the fact that anyone can pop in and buy a piece of it, this is the sort of thing we mean when we talk about a legacy, a gift or inheritance passed along. The likes of Thomas Shaw, Kathy and Carol, Slim Gaillard and more of Lou's friends are heading into family rooms all over San Diego

Boyle: And we're getting the music out into the community 'cause that's what he would've wanted.

[Thomas Shaw's "Martin Luther King"]

Evans: Special thanks to Brendan Boyle, Andrew Mall and the staff at Folk Arts Rare Records and Part Time Lover for their help with this episode. And thank you so much for listening. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, leave a rating or comment. It makes a real difference and helps stories like these reach more people.

Next week on The Finest, matcha has blown up in the U.S. over the past couple of years, so much so that it's caused a global supply shortage. We talked to a local tea ceremony sensei and even a few tea historians about the philosophy of matcha and green tea's surprisingly long history in the U.S.

I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.