CRATERY 83: Dan Zacks

Toronto-based collector Dan Zacks pops his Cratery cherry on this month’s episode. I first came to know of Dan through the two Cuban funk compilations he released between 2006 and 2009: Si, Para Usted, volumes 1 and 2 (Both very well put together). Soon after, I realized he shared mutual friends like the hommies Kaewonder and Alister Johnson. It wasn’t until hanging with Zacks and some friends at his home that I became more familiar with this unassuming, bespectacled gentleman with a penchant for the foreign and the funky. We’re happy to finally welcome him to Cratery. Track list and audio below.

How did you start collecting? What type of records were you buying early on?

I started collecting because of Jason Palma’s Higher Ground radio show. I grew up in Toronto and in the mid-90s, when I was about 15, stumbled on CIUT, University of Toronto’s campus community station. I became an avid and rather indiscriminate CIUT listener. Initially, I was into a show that played a lot of Joe Frank monologues, but one Thursday I stumbled on Higher Ground and that was it. I remember hearing Roy Porter’s Jessica and Candido’s Thousand Fingered Man and wondering what this stuff was and why I’d never heard it before. I didn’t appreciate at the time that it was already two decades old. I went to HMV and asked if they had anything by Roy Porter and got the blank look you’d expect.

I listened to Higher Ground with an adolescent obsession. Once Movement started, I started sneaking my way in. I bought a lot of CDs, mostly used, and read Straight No Chaser while loitering in HMV.

In 2000 I went to Montreal for university. There were quite a few records stores there at the time, and a lot of them had reasonably inexpensive vinyl. There was no scene equivalent to what was developing around Movement, and so the collecting culture was different. To the extent that people were digging for the kind of stuff you’d hear on Higher Ground, it was mostly because they were chasing breaks and samples. The result was that some of the records I was into were available at reasonable prices. I started buying.

In the winter of 2000, I got my first radio show on CKUT, McGill’s campus-community station. I decided that justified buying more seriously, and that’s when I really began collecting in earnest. In 2001, I probably spent as much time in record stores as I did in class.

Jason Palma is the man. He’s responsible for so spreading so much good taste around this city. For some reason, I was under the impression that you were originally from Montreal. Or at least spent a great deal of time there.

I spent five years in Montreal and then moved to New Brunswick for some more school. I returned to Toronto in 2008. New Brunswick was then a surprisingly decent place for records, especially Canadiana–I found Henri Pierre Noel LPs in St. John! I cleaned out the province pretty thoroughly, so don’t even bother. All that’s left are white baptist choir records and you don’t want those, trust me.

Ha! Montreal has always been such an amazing city for records. What were some of your favourite stores while you were out there?

Montreal hugely influenced my tastes. I developed an interest, verging on a passion, for Quebecois recordings. Ultimately, I began selling collectible Quebecois vinyl on a semi-professional basis.

I mentioned that there were quite a few quality shops in the early 2000s, but nothing in Montreal, and really anywhere else that I’ve been, compared to the glory of the late Mars Records.

Mars was then a cavernous basement on St. Catherine, a little west of St. Laurent. It was evenly split between porn, posters, and records. At any given time, the record section held hundreds of thousands of records–maybe millions–overflowing from shelves, stacked beneath them, stacked above them, stacked in towering piles on the floor, stacked in heaps in a mysterious roped off section. Most records were covered in mould and dust and indeterminate filth that left your sk