Photo by Lucie Monk
Have you ever heard of Jim Ford? I hadn’t, but a minute into the clattery country funk of “Workin’ My Way to L.A.,” I was sold with this couplet:
Outta Louisiana in a green Volks van headin’ into Houston, Texas/ With a roll of baloney and a hunk of cheese and a box of Saltine crackers
Thankfully, Lake Charles vinyl enthusiast Paul Dufrene knows about Jim Ford and countless other unjustly forgotten gems from decades past. Rather than saving these stores of knowledge for trivia night trouncings, Dufrene has opted to share his passion through the generous art of making playlists. His website, PlatterPlaylists.com, presents not only weekly playlists, of which the Jim Ford compendium was one of many, but also daily song picks, each bearing a short, personal anecdote about the song. Listening to his compilations is like listening to Paul Dufrene’s heart.
Dufrene started collecting records at age twenty and, in the past year, has become a master of the online playlist, crafting genius cocktails of country funk, psychedelic ramblings, and stone cold R&B for the renowned music blog Aquarium Drunkard, based out of Los Angeles, as well as his personal website, Platter Playlists. His Jim Ford mix alone establishes him as a scholar worth seeking, but once you start to scroll through his Platter Playlists archives, you will discover the endless library of Dufrene’s obsessions, congenially laid out for your perusal.
For Dufrene, a good playlist is a conversation with an unknown listener, one who responds to his musical tastes out in the digital ether.
“First of all, it takes a certain person to listen to my mixes and enjoy them; and luckily, I have found the right kind of people,” he said.
Dufrene’s playlists keep to the deep, often untapped mine of the 1960s and 1970s. “I listen to modern music, but I don’t include modern music in my playlist. I used to include more recent music when I started out, but I found that I can make more cohesive mixes if I stick to that one point in time.”
The precision of Dufrene’s vision doesn’t stop there. Despite the fact that the Internet is now one big library of free media, there is something of the craftsman in how he works, pulling from his own vinyl collection to execute his mixes.
“I follow a strict standard where all the songs I use have to be from my collection,” said Dufrene. “I have to own it. If I borrow a record from somebody, I can’t use that song until I actually own the record. That makes it all the more fun, in my opinion.
“If somebody wants me to make them a mix and all they want is a bunch of MP3s, to me, it’s not as fun as hearing the songs I want, searching out that song … going on a musical expedition to find a certain song.”
One might picture the person behind Dufrene’s fragile voice on the phone to belong to a wizened sage sitting in an alchemist’s cave stacked to the rafters with vinyl. As it so happens, Dufrene is a twenty-eight-year-old who lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana. “I have about two thousand records,” Dufrene said. “Even at two thousand, I’m nowhere near …” And there he trailed off. It’s safe to assume that there can never be enough records for an explorer like Dufrene.
We talked about the magic of the perfect find. For me, it was A Beard of Stars by Tyrannosaurus Rex (just before he became T. Rex), plucked from a bin of Amoeba records in Hollywood.
“Oh, I found that one too!” Dufrene exclaimed. “It was at this place in Rayne called No-Name Records that is only open on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I got a mint copy for a dollar!”
That is the beauty of true vinyl lovers. When obsessions cross, there is a validation that creates a bond that you can’t easily replicate in any other part of life. It can be a lonely pursuit. “Being twenty-eight and being into music from the 1960s and ‘70s is not normal,” said Dufrene. “I’m likely to not meet anyone else that singles out this era.”
Dufrene found a larger connection with all this untold music through places like WFMU, the freeform online radio station in New Jersey that sets the standard for exploratory listening. In getting to know the DJs there through email, Dufrene was spurred to buy more records and do some exploring of his own. He spent two years in Philadelphia where he scoured that music town’s vinyl shops, jumpstarting his obsession. Now living in Lake Charles again, his collecting happens largely online. “I go on the Internet and find at least five records a day I want,” said Dufrene.
Everyone who makes mixes has a secret weapon, something the listener hasn’t heard; mine was always the Tyrannosaurus Rex material. But perusing through the weekly mixes on Dufrene’s website, I see that is old hat to him. He’s unearthed some of that dinosaur’s tunes I’ve never even heard. So what is his secret weapon?
“Michael Hurley,” said Dufrene. Michael Hurley emerged as a fringe element of the mid-sixties folk scene, a hillbilly wildman whose psychedelic cartoons festoon the covers of his albums, wilder still with idiosyncratic titles like Have Moicy! and Hi-Fi Snock Uptown. “Anything by him.”
Dufrene also cited the 1972 self-titled Bobby Charles record. Charles was a songwriter from Abbeville who penned one of Fats Domino’s biggest hits, “See Ya Later, Alligator.” But his album, which features members of The Band, is an under-sung treasure trove of how Louisiana music speaks to the world.
“We are in a great location because Louisiana is the birthplace of jazz and New Orleans R&B. Throughout the South, music is a great mixture of everything—country from Texas, swamp pop from Louisiana, zydeco, soul music from Memphis trickling down, and jazz and soul and funk from New Orleans …” and here he trailed off again. Such is the rhapsodic love of music.
It’s easy to understand how one can fall down the rabbit hole of Jim Ford or Michael Hurley. These musical “discoveries” from the past each offer a fully formed world to explore. But why go through the labor to curate that experience for an unknown online audience?
“When I make a mix, I put it in five different [online] locations,” said Dufrene. “When it’s on Aquarium Drunkard, I’d say two thousand people have access to it and listen to it. When it’s somewhere else, at least five hundred people hear it, and that’s just amazing to me. I’m a firm believer in the fact that if you collect something, and you are passionate about what you collect, you should feel obligated to share that.
“When I lived in Philly, I knew plenty of people who would buy twenty or more records at a time, bring them home, shut the door and lock it. I felt that if I was spending all this money and was making all this effort, I wasn’t just going to buy records and keep them and be selfish.”
His return to Lake Charles momentarily stymied Dufrene. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue this,” he said. “I didn’t think there was going to be an outlet in southwest Louisiana for me to do this. But … getting involved in Tumblr and Instagram and Facebook, now every day somebody new follows me. It’s usually not someone I know but someone way far away. It’s crazy to think that the music that I’m sharing is going that far, and people my age or younger, or older, are still into this music.”
Details. Details. Details.
You can follow Dufrene’s ongoing quest for the perfect song at platterplaylists.com. On the links page of his site, you can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
