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      New York Public Library Acquires George C. Wolfe’s Archives

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      More than 50 boxes of ephemera from the playwright and director’s career include notes on “Angels in America” and research for “Jelly’s Last Jam.”When the playwright and director George C. Wolfe moved to New York City in his 20s, he got a job at an archive for Black cultural history, where his work saving newspaper articles and maintaining records fueled a habit of preserving his own ephemera.“It activated this sort of curiosity-slash-obsession about who gets remembered, what gets saved, what gets valued and what doesn’t,” Wolfe said recently.On Thursday, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired more than 50 boxes of material from throughout Wolfe’s career, during which he became one of the most sought-after theater directors in the country. His productions, including “Angels in America” and “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” garnered multiple Tony Awards, and he’s credited with revolutionizing the Public Theater over a decade as its producer.Working scripts, correspondence with theatrical figures such as Tony Kushner (with whom Wolfe worked closely on “Angels in America”) and photographs from throughout his career were purchased for an undisclosed amount. The archive also includes his research for historically driven productions, including for “Shuffle Along,” which Wolfe wrote based on the events surrounding the 1921 musical — a rare all-Black production at the time — and “Jelly’s Last Jam,” a musical about the life of the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton, which is being revived next year as part of the Encores! series at New York City Center.Wolfe, 68, who directed “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for film, cautions that the act of establishing the archive should not communicate that his career is waning. Rather, he views the process as making room for new stories, and — more practically speaking — making space in his home.“They were taking over,” he said of the boxes, “so I let them win.”Wolfe recalled that some of his saved materials included audition forms with his assessments of actors, notes from Kushner on Part 1 of “Angels,” and a scrapbook from his 1986 Off Broadway play “The Colored Museum,” which helped him gain national recognition as a playwright. Some items he said he decided not to part with just yet, including a note from Joseph Papp, the founder and longtime leader of the Public Theater, which Wolfe took over a couple years after Papp’s death, producing Broadway-bound shows such as “Caroline, or Change,” “Take Me Out” and “Topdog/Underdog.” (All three have had recent Broadway revivals.)Doug Reside, the theater curator for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, has sought to persuade artists like Wolfe to begin transferring their collections earlier than they might have expected because of complexities around saving digital material that may be stored on machines that are quickly becoming obsolete. This became a priority for Reside when he was a researcher at the Library of Congress working on the archives of Jonathan Larson, the “Rent” playwright and lyricist, whose three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks were a challenge to salvage.“It has become really important to start preserving this history as close to the moment of creation as possible,” Reside said.Wolfe’s own career spans a period of rapid technological development: He wrote and directed his first play, “Up for Grabs,” in 1975, and directed his most recent Broadway production in 2019. The archives include handwritten letters and telegrams Wolfe received with feedback about shows. Further down the technological timeline, there’s a DVD with a preview of Act 2 of “Shuffle Along,” as well as email printouts related to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”“It’s telling the stories of the shows that I worked on,” Wolfe said of the collection, “but embedded in that, it’s telling the story of those times.”Wolfe has not yet agreed to transfer his digital archives to the library, but he said that he would consider doing so in the future. The collection will be accessible in about a year in the special collections reading room of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. More

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      Wax Cylinders Hold Audio From a Century Ago. The Library Is Listening.

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      The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired a machine that transfers recordings from the fragile format. Then a batch of cylinders from a Met Opera librarian arrived.The first recording, swathed in sheets of distortion, was nonetheless recognizable as a child’s voice — small, nervous, encouraged by his father — wishing a very Merry Christmas to whoever was listening.The second recording, though still noisy, adequately captured the finale of the second act of “Aida,” performed by the German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.And the third recording was the clearest yet: the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet,” also from the Met, sung by the Australian soprano Nellie Melba.Accessed by laptop in a conference room at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the recordings had been excavated and digitized from a much older source: wax cylinders, an audio format popularized in the late 19th century as the first commercial means of recording sound. These particular documentations originated with Lionel Mapleson, an English-born librarian for the Metropolitan Opera, who made hundreds of wax cylinder recordings, capturing both the turn-of-the-century opera performances he saw as part of his job and the minutiae of family life.For decades, the Mapleson Cylinders, as they’re called by archivists and audiologists, have been a valuable but fragile resource. Wax cylinders were not made for long-term use — the earliest models wore out after a few dozen plays — and are especially vulnerable to poor storage conditions. But with the innovation of the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, a custom-built piece of equipment made specifically for safely transferring audio from the cylinders, the library is embarking on an ambitious preservation project: to digitize not just the Mapleson Cylinders, but roughly 2,500 others in the library’s possession.Mapleson’s diaries studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe machine will also allow the library to play a handful of broken Mapleson cylinders that nobody alive has ever heard. “I have no idea what they’re going to sound like, but the fact that they were shattered a long time ago saved them from being played too often,” said Jessica Wood, the library’s assistant curator for music and recorded sound. “It’s possible that the sound quality of those will let us hear something totally new from the earliest moments in recording history.”Some of the Mapleson Cylinders had already been in the library’s collection, but another batch was recently provided by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by another valuable resource: a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that studiously chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. One entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.“The consistent keeping of this diary is much more important than just for music,” said Bob Kosovsky, a librarian in the New York Public Library’s music division. “It’s such an amazing insight into life in New York and England, since he went back every summer to the family.”The library acquired the Endpoint machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring, as NPR reported then. “The Western music at that time was being recorded in the studios, so it’s very unique to have someone that was documenting what was actually going on there at the theater,” said Bergh, who developed the machine as part of his work in audio preservation.Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesAlfred Mapleson soon reached out to the library about the diaries, and the collection of his great-grandfather’s cylinders that had, for years, awaited rediscovery in his mother’s Long Island basement. In November, they were packed into coolers and transported by climate-controlled truck to the library, where they’re now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes meant to mitigate the risk of future degradation. (On Long Island, they’d been kept in Tuborg Gold beer caddies.)These particular cylinders were previously available to the library in the 1980s, when they were transferred to magnetic tape and released as part of a six-volume LP set compiling the Mapleson recordings. After that, they were returned to the Mapleson family, while the greater collection stayed with the library. But, Wood said, “there’s people all over the world that are convinced that a new transfer of those cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.”Wax cylinders were traditionally played on a phonograph, where, similar to a modern record player, a stylus followed grooves in the wax and translated the information into sound. The Endpoint machine uses a laser that places less stress on the cylinders, allowing it to take a detailed imprint without sacrificing physical integrity, and to adjust for how some cylinders have warped over time. The machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played, which can then be digitally reconstituted into a complete recording.Within the next few years, the library hopes to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries, and make them available to the public. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, though Wood said that process will be determined based on requests for certain cylinders. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and with a backlog of thousands, she said, “We have to wait our turn.”The wax cylinders comprise just one aspect of the library’s ongoing audiovisual archival projects. Its archives of magnetic tape were recently digitized thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And curators are in talks with Bergh about a new machine he’s developing that can play back wire recording, a midcentury format that captured audio on a thin steel wire. Wood estimated that about 32,000 lacquer discs — a predecessor to the vinyl record — at “very high risk of deterioration” are also in the digitization queue. These discs contain all types of audio, including radio excerpts, early jazz music and recordings made at amusement parks.The Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine can retrieve information from broken cylinder shards that are incapable of being traditionally played.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“Libraries, in general, are very focused on books and paper formats,” Wood said. “We’re getting to a point where we’ve had to argue less hard for the importance of sound recordings, and that’s allowing us to get some more traction to invest resources in digitizing these.”Alfred Mapleson said he was simply happy to put his family inheritance to good use. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders had sat untouched in his mother’s basement ever since.“There’s an important obligation to history that needs to be maintained,” he said. “We don’t want them sitting in our possession, where they could get lost or damaged.” He waved off the possibility of selling them to a private collector, where they might find no public utility: “That’s not something that would sit well with my family.”His great-grandfather’s archives had offered him plenty to reflect on. His wife had gone through the diaries, he said, and pointed out the behavioral similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice — the one wishing a Merry Christmas — resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in repossessing the materials once the library had finished digitizing everything.“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.” More

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      Earl McGrath Was a Character. His Closet Was Filled With Rare Recordings.

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      When the art and music world figure died in 2016, he left behind a trove of reels from his years scouting for his own label and the one he ran for the Rolling Stones.An outsize character, Earl McGrath had variously worked as a record company head, film executive, screenwriter and art dealer before he died in early 2016 at age 84. Afterward, the contents of his Midtown Manhattan apartment were carefully cataloged and valued. His art collection, including prized works given to him by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Ed Moses, was sent to auction at Christie’s. His papers, containing correspondence with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Stephen Spender, were donated to the New York Public Library’s archives.But the boxes stored at the top of McGrath’s large walk-in closet — filled with old reels of recordings — were largely overlooked. They were about to be sold blind to a record wholesaler when the journalist Joe Hagan stepped in.Hagan had been researching “Sticky Fingers,” his biography of the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, when he stumbled upon McGrath. “Little known outside a rarefied ’70s jet set of rock ’n’ rollers, movie stars, socialites and European dilettantes,” Hagan would write, “his name was once a secret handshake.”Rummaging through McGrath’s closet in the spring of 2017, the first tape Hagan discovered was an unedited master copy of the Rolling Stones’ 1978 album, “Some Girls.”“I instantly broke into a cold sweat,” Hagan said in a phone interview. He also found rare and unreleased recordings from Hall & Oates, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, Terry Allen and the Jim Carroll Band. “It was like peeking through a keyhole in time. I thought, This is a real treasure trove — wouldn’t it be great if people could hear this stuff?”After purchasing the roughly 200 tapes from the McGrath estate, Hagan spent several years researching and compiling the material, along with a co-producer, Pat Thomas. This week, “Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980” will be released by the reissue label Light in the Attic. Its 22 tracks feature material collected by McGrath during his years as an Atlantic Records executive, where he operated his own imprint, Clean, before he later ran the Rolling Stones’ label.Moving musically and geographically through the 1970s, from California country-rock to New York post-punk, “Earl’s Closet” is a fittingly eclectic sampler that places the hillbilly soul of Delbert & Glen alongside the surrealist warbling of the Warhol “superstar” Ultra Violet.“I wanted the record to capture Earl’s spirit,” Hagan said. “He’s really the muse of the whole thing. It’s almost like being at a party at Earl’s house: You don’t know who you’re going to meet.”To that end, the collection’s through line is McGrath’s role as an exuberant social connector.“If you were to add up Earl’s achievements in terms of record making or art sales, that wasn’t who he was,” Jann Wenner said in an interview. “He thrived on his friendships. He loved talented people, interesting people — and his range of acquaintances were remarkable, literally from Zen masters to Z Listers.”In an email, the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger remembered McGrath as a “joker,” who “knew everybody in New York and beyond and was a lot of fun to be with.”McGrath introduced the actress Anjelica Huston to her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham, who died in 2008. “He was funny,” Huston said of McGrath. “He was daring. In his own way, Earl, he was the glue that held a lot of people together.”From left: The poet-turned-rocker Jim Carroll, McGrath and Mick Jagger. Camilla McGrathMcGRATH’S HUMBLE CHILDHOOD in the Midwest was far from the A-list world he would navigate so easily as an adult, but he could spin it into a more stately tale.“If you asked Earl, ‘Where are you from?’” the artist Ed Ruscha said, “He’d say, ‘I’m from Superior — of course — Wisconsin. And I lived on Grand — naturally — Avenue.’ That’s the way he talked.”McGrath’s blithe manner belied the troubled home life he endured as a youth, which included physical abuse at the hands of his father. “He would get drunk and beat him,” said Valerie Grace Ricordi, a family friend who now serves as executive director of the McGrath family foundation. “Earl never understood what he’d done wrong in his father’s eyes.” According to interviews with several of McGrath’s friends and biographical details included in Hagan’s liner notes and an essay in a 2020 photo book, at age 14, after his father broke his arm, McGrath left home for good — moving into a local YMCA and supporting himself as a dishwasher until he could get out of town.Largely self-educated, McGrath found solace devouring literature, poetry and philosophy, and came to see himself as a Proustian character. Transforming from dishwasher to aesthete, as a young man McGrath evinced the qualities that would carry him through life: a disarming sense of humor and an uncanny ability to befriend the cultured, the famous and the wealthy.In between stints as a merchant seaman, McGrath drifted out to California, corresponding and visiting with Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles and Henry Miller in Big Sur. He also developed an unlikely friendship with the English poet W.H. Auden, who would provide introductions for McGrath when he moved in the early ’50s to New York City, where he fell in with a lively crowd that included the writer Frank O’Hara and the pop art godfather Larry Rivers.In 1958, the 27-year-old McGrath began working as an assistant to the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, helping organize the inaugural Spoleto Festival in Umbria, Italy. There, he struck up an unlikely romance with an heiress, Camilla Pecci Blunt, the daughter of a Florentine marchesa and an American financier. The couple married in 1963 against the wishes of her family, and while they endured long stretches of physical separation in subsequent decades, he remained committed to their union.One of his next moves was to Los Angeles, where McGrath found his way into the movie business and developed a tight social circle of Hollywood literati, including Joan Didion, who dedicated her 1979 essay collection, “The White Album,” to McGrath. The writer Eve Babitz’s biographer, Lili Anolik, said McGrath “was one of the most influential and damaging people in her life,” explaining how Babitz was working as a fine artist and album designer in the early ’70s when McGrath offhandedly questioned one of her color choices. Her confidence shot, “she switched her focus to writing,” Anolik said. “So, we, the culture, owe Earl big in a way.”Joan Didion and McGrath in the early 1970s. The writer dedicated her essay collection “The White Album” to him.Camilla McGrathBUT McGRATH MADE perhaps his biggest impact with Atlantic Records.When he met the label’s co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in the early ’60s, the two sparked an immediate friendship. “Earl made him laugh,” Hagan said. “Ahmet really just loved having him around.” McGrath’s European society connections also helped Ertegun impress Mick Jagger, who brought the Rolling Stones into the Atlantic fold in 1971.That same year, Ertegun — along with Robert Stigwood, manager of the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton — decided to back McGrath and give him his own Atlantic-distributed label, Clean Records (the company motto: “Every man should have a Clean record”). McGrath’s West Hollywood home became Clean’s headquarters, where he’d regularly throw parties — attended by a mix of Cool School artists, Old Hollywood grandees and New Journalism figures — in lieu of A&R meetings.“He’d have these afternoon soirees where there’d be some 18-year-old musician on the edge of OD’ing in one room, and outside Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina would be strolling through the lawn,” said the Texas singer-songwriter Terry Allen, among the first artists McGrath signed. “You never knew what was going to happen when you went to Earl’s.”One of the groups that McGrath discovered was a fledgling folk-soul duo from Philadelphia, Daryl Hall and John Oates, who had been struggling to find a record deal when their music publisher flew them out to meet McGrath in 1972.“There was all these interesting people hanging out,” Hall remembered in an interview. “One of the Everly Brothers was there and I think a young Harrison Ford, too.” They played McGrath a few songs. “Next thing we knew, we were signed.”Clockwise from left: Robert Stigwood, Ahmet Ertegun, McGrath and Eric Clapton returning from Barbados in 1974.Camilla McGrathThe history of Clean Records might have turned out quite differently had Hall & Oates actually recorded for the company. Ertegun, sensing the duo’s hit potential, snatched them from McGrath and put them on Atlantic proper, where they sold millions of records. Clean, meanwhile, would release just a handful of poorly selling titles before ceasing operations in 1973.Moving to New York in the early ’70s, McGrath became an omnipresent figure on the city’s pre-punk scene. “I used to see him everywhere,” said Johansen, the New York Dolls singer whose earliest solo work appears on “Earl’s Closet.” “Funny thing is, I didn’t know Earl as a music business guy — it was just one of the things he did.”McGrath’s real passion was bringing together his many fabulous friends. The McGraths’ West 57th Street apartment, opposite Carnegie Hall, would become the site of endless dinners and parties attended by a cross-section of cultural giants: where the cast of “Star Wars” might run into Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg; where the poet-turned-songwriter Jim Carroll mingled with the silent-film-era pioneer Anita Loos; and where Jagger first laid eyes on his future partner Jerry Hall. (The gatherings were often photographed by Camilla McGrath, with a collection of the photos published in a 2020 book from Knopf, “Face to Face.”)In 1977, the Rolling Stones were looking for someone to run their record label, replacing the longtime company head Marshall Chess. With Ertegun’s backing, McGrath lobbied for the gig in a letter to Jagger, admitting that he hadn’t been very successful in the music business, but “I was successful enough to marry a princess in Italy.” He got the job.“He was a very unusual choice to run a record company,” Jagger said. “But he had a great flair.”A number of the artists represented on “Earl’s Closet” are acts McGrath considered for the Stones label — including the Detroit saxophonist Norma Jean Bell and the Texas soul combo Little Whisper and the Rumors — but whose signings never came to fruition. “Earl was good at recognizing talent, but he wasn’t much for following through,” Hagan said.McGrath’s tenure did ultimately produce some successes: He negotiated a deal to bring the acclaimed reggae star Peter Tosh to the label in 1978, and a year later, he signed Carroll. Carroll, who died in 2009, noted in a 1981 interview with Musician magazine that McGrath was an anomaly in the music business. “He understood very well what I was doing,” Carroll said then. “He had some literary references that no other record executive would’ve had.”McGrath and Jagger after one of the legendary dinners at the McGrath home, where artists of different types mingled.Camilla McGrathAfter a few years in the Stones’ employ, McGrath found himself caught in the middle of the increasingly fractious relationship between Jagger and Keith Richards. As the guitarist recounted in his 2010 memoir “Life,” at one point he threatened to throw McGrath off the roof of Electric Lady Studios if he didn’t rein Jagger in. Angling to launch a solo career, Jagger was more than happy to let band relations, and the label’s business, sour. McGrath resigned his post with Rolling Stones Records in 1981, effectively ending his career in the music business.OVER THE NEXT three decades, McGrath would bounce between coasts, opening and closing art galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Although he and Camilla never had a family of their own, over time McGrath became godfather to nearly 30 children. Late in his life, McGrath’s older sister finally revealed the secret that had been kept from him: His birth had been the result of an affair between his mother and his father’s brother.As McGrath reckoned with his complicated past, an even bigger blow came with Camilla’s death in 2007, following a series of strokes. Within a few years, McGrath developed serious health problems. On Jan. 7, 2016, he died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage.McGrath had been happy over the years to remain out of the spotlight. “He didn’t want to be a public figure, he only wanted to be well known amongst the well-known,” Hagan said. With the release of “Earl’s Closet,” McGrath’s legacy — his unique gifts as a kind of artistic alchemist — is finally being given its due.“It feels like we tapped into some kind of core sampler of the ’70s,” Hagan said. “It’s the story of the culture and where the artistic emphasis was going, about the end of a certain period and the beginning of another. And, of course, the element that threads everything together on this record — just like he did in life — is Earl McGrath.” More

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      Lesley Gore’s Archive Arrives at the New York Public Library

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      The collection, which includes family photos, scrapbook pages and annotated music, traces the singer’s arc from releasing bubble gum hits to creating a powerful feminist statement.As a teenage singer in the 1960s who fit the all-American girl mold, Lesley Gore may have seemed like an unlikely figure to carve out a lasting legacy of feminist resilience and independence. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has now made the musician’s archive available for anyone interested in her artistic evolution, giving fans a chance to browse through notated music sheets and an unfinished memoir.Lois Sasson, Gore’s partner for more than 30 years, began working with the library in February 2016, sifting through storage boxes and cataloging each object with help from the singer’s family and friends. Sasson emphasized that the collection should remain free to the public and housed in New York, where Gore lived, said Jessica Wood, the assistant curator of music and recorded sound at the Library for the Performing Arts. Gore died of lung cancer in 2015. Sasson, a fierce defender of women’s and gay rights, died of Covid-19 in 2020.The archive, which contains scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, fan club files, music theory books, a birthday invitation, family photographs and album covers, was first made available on May 31, and all printed and written works can be examined on request. The library is still working to digitize the audio and movie image recordings that document Gore’s rehearsals, performances and television appearances, as well as visual works like a 1968 Robert F. Kennedy ad campaign.“By studying her archive, it elevates all of the women performers who sang other people’s materials but really brought a lot of genius to the way they animated those songs,” Wood said.Gore, known for bubble gum classics like “It’s My Party,” the No. 1 hit from 1963 recorded by Quincy Jones, and “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” focused largely on love and heartbreak until the 1963 release of “You Don’t Own Me.” The song, written by John Madara and David White, became an early feminist anthem, rebuking the idea that the singer should bend to the whims of a man. “I’m free and I love to be free,” Gore sang, “to live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please.” All three songs were recorded before she turned 18.Brad Schreiber, an author who chronicles social change through music, said that while Gore lacked power as a young female recording artist, “You Don’t Own Me” echoed a strong statement about reclaiming respect and dignity.“She didn’t have to dedicate her entire career to do socially conscious music,” Schreiber said. “She did one very important song that has had a far-reaching effect.”The archive includes music scores of “You Don’t Own Me” that were used for performances to promote Gore’s 2005 “Ever Since” LP (her 11th and final studio album), along with musical arrangements of the release by Claus Ogerman, Joe Glandro and Mariano Longo.Susan Kahaner, Sasson’s sister, said Gore admired the activism of the pioneering feminist Betty Friedan and was particularly drawn to the civil rights advocate and politician Bella Abzug, who chanted, “This woman’s place is in the House, the House of Representatives!” as she ran and won a seat in the House in 1970.“Bella and that whole group of feminists opened up Lesley’s eyes to what is possible,” Kahaner said.Gore was devoted to her education, majoring in English and American literature at Sarah Lawrence College during the peak of her pop career. Kahaner said that as an avid reader of fiction and nonfiction as well as a lover of jazz and pop music, Gore would be proud to share her work with researchers and students at the library:“We couldn’t be happier that this is the home that will keep Lesley’s legacy alive.” More

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      Digging Into Bob Dylan and Lou Reed’s Archives

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLast month, the Bob Dylan Center opened in Tulsa, Okla., offering researchers unparalleled access to Dylan’s archives and peeling back the layers on his songwriting process, long the object of study and fascination. And this month, “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars” opened at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center — it’s the first exhibition drawn from Reed’s archive, which was acquired by the New York Public Library.Both of these seek to offer deeper understandings of these rock icons, but they also offer the opportunity for alternate narratives to emerge. Dylan and Reed always carefully tended to their own mythologies — now the behind-the-scenes tools are available for all to see.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the value of even the unlikeliest ephemera, the difference between public and private archives and the specific ways Dylan and Reed found methods to distance themselves from their pasts.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music business reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Christopher Coover, Auction Expert in the Printed Word, Dies at 72

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      At Christie’s, he managed sales of rare books, manuscripts and documents by the likes of da Vinci, Lincoln and Kerouac. On TV, he lent his eye to “Antiques Roadshow.”Christopher Coover, who made a career out of reading other people’s mail as an expert in rare books and manuscripts at Christie’s Auction House, where he oversaw the authentication, appraisal and sale of documents ranging from the original texts of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to George Washington’s annotated copy of the Constitution, died in Livingston, N.J., on April 3, his 72nd birthday.The immediate cause was pneumonia complicated by Parkinson’s disease, his son, Timothy, said.As a connoisseur of curios, Mr. Coover was enlisted as an appraiser for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow,” where at a single glance he could transform an all-but-forgotten autographed book or letter, retrieved from a starry-eyed guest’s basement or attic into a valuable historical heirloom.“The sense of discovery never fails,” he told The Colonial Williamsburg Journal in 2011. “I like the challenge of seeking out the larger background, the hidden meanings and connections of a given document. This means I am sometimes overworked, occasionally out of my depth, but never bored.”Mr. Coover in 2004 with letter from Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses S. Grant. “The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he said. Ruby Washington/The New York Times)For 35 years as senior specialist in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department at Christie’s in Manhattan, he would authenticate material offered for auction, describe its provenance and history for the catalog, and suggest the opening price.Among his career milestones was assisting in the sale of the oil magnate Armand Hammer’s copy of an early 15th-century scientific manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci — known as the “Hammer Codex” — to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, for a record $30.2 million in 1994.Mr. Coover appraised and managed the sale of the publisher Malcolm Forbes’s collection of American historical documents in six auctions from 2002 to 2007. The sale set records for letters by 15 presidents and generated more than $40.9 million. The sale’s catalog included a manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s last speech; Robert E. Lee’s message to Ulysses S. Grant, in which he said he was ready to discuss the “cessation of hostilities” to end the Civil War; and a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb.Mr. Coover also wrote the catalog for the sale of Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript, typed on a 119-foot-long roll of United Press Teletype paper ($2.4 million); and appraised and managed the sales of Lincoln’s 1864 Election Victory speech ($3.4 million), Washington’s letter on the ratification of the Constitution ($3.2 million), Washington’s personal annotated copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress ($9.8 million) and the original manuscript of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”Christopher Coover was born on April 3, 1950, in Greeley, Colo. His parents left his middle name blank on his birth certificate so that he could choose one later himself. He selected Robin, from his favorite childhood books; his full name became Christopher Robin Coover.The family moved shortly afterward to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where his parents were hired by Vassar College — his father, James Burrell Coover, as a professor and music librarian, and his mother, Georgena (Walker) Coover, as a teacher and specialist in early childhood education.Chris attended Arlington High School in Poughkeepsie before his father took a teaching post at the State University of New York at Buffalo, bringing his family with him. Chris graduated from Kenmore West High School in Buffalo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.He subsequently formed a band that played at weddings and other receptions, drove a school bus, worked for The New Grove Dictionary of Music in London and in the rare books room of the Strand book store in Manhattan before he was hired by Sotheby’s in 1978.He left for Christie’s in 1980. While working there, he earned a master’s in library science from Columbia University. He retired in 2016 as senior specialist and vice president of the auction house.Mr. Coover also lectured on American documents and built his own collection of literary and historical books and manuscripts, which he donated to Columbia.Mr. Coover, who died in a hospital, lived in Montclair, N.J. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Lois (Adams) Coover; a daughter, Chloe; and two sisters, Mauri and Regan Coover.In the authentication of documents, Mr. Coover said, most forgeries are readily apparent, typically because the paper cannot be faked. Such was the case with a supposed 1906 first edition of “Madame Butterfly,” purportedly signed and dedicated by the composer, Puccini, which a reader of The Chicago Tribune asked Mr. Coover to authenticate.Sight unseen, he was able to recite the dedication, in Italian (he said he had seen 10 to 15 copies of the score with the same words), and identified the reader’s find as only a photolithographic copy.Then again, he said, ordinary-looking documents can contain surprises.“An otherwise boring diary or series of family letters mainly recording weather and local news may contain a long description of an election campaign, demonstrations against the Stamp Act, the convening of the Confederacy to draft a constitution, or a raid by Pancho Villa,” he told the Williamsburg journal.“The historical nuggets in original manuscripts are often buried, but rarely deeply,” he added. “I once discovered an exceptional letter of Ethan Allen at the bottom of a pile of old deeds, copies of minor poetry and otherwise uninteresting papers.”Assessing the monetary value of an item is highly subjective, he said.“Family bibles and birth and death records are valuable for their genealogical information, but they have very little commercial value,” he was quoted as saying in Marsha Bemko’s book “Antiques Roadshow: Behind the Scenes” (2009), “and I think it is a shame to see little old ladies waiting in line for hours while hefting a 40-pound Bible that is worth very little monetarily.”“You have to trust your innate instincts and perception of the size of the potential market,” he said. “The value of some letters and documents can only be determined by letting the free market operate, at auction.”Mr. Coover recalled that in 1992 he was asked by the grandson of a woman who had recently died to appraise her collection of books. He visited her Manhattan apartment and immediately realized that the books were not very valuable, but as he was leaving, the grandson asked him to look at some papers in a tattered Manila envelope.Inside, Mr. Coover told The Times in 2004, he found an old black leather book with the word “autograph” embossed in gold on the cover. On the very first page, he recognized Lincoln’s signature, followed by the last handwritten paragraph of his Second Inaugural Address. He told the young man that that one page alone was worth at least $250,000. When it finally went to auction, it sold for $1.2 million. More

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      in Music

      F.D.R. Speeches and Alicia Keys Album Added to National Recording Registry

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      A hit by the band Journey, radio accounts of the 9/11 attacks, “Buena Vista Social Club” and a recording of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run also made the registry.Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech about “a date which will live in infamy.” The rock band Journey’s song about “a small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world” who takes a midnight train going anywhere. And firsthand descriptions of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.Each of those are “unforgettable sounds of the nation’s history,” the Library of Congress said on Wednesday, adding that they are among 25 recordings selected this year for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.Since 2002, the Librarian of Congress, with advice from experts, has picked recordings that are at least 10 years old and are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” for inclusion in the registry.The program, library officials said, aims to provide a long-term archival home for the preservation of the recordings and to acknowledge their importance.The registry “reflects the diverse music and voices that have shaped our nation’s history and culture,” the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, said in a statement.“The national library is proud to help preserve these recordings,” she added.Other recordings selected this year include Alicia Keys’ first album, “Songs in A Minor”; the 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club”; a 1956 recording of Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival; and the 1974 radio call of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, which broke a record previously held by Babe Ruth.The 575 recordings already included in the national registry include classical music; opera performances; blues and pop songs; monologues and poems; and speeches and radio broadcasts reflecting momentous news events. Among those are Robert F. Kennedy’s speech upon the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the 1973 Wailers album “Burnin’” and a 1977 recording of a Grateful Dead concert at Cornell University.That diversity can also be seen in this year’s selections, which include all of Roosevelt’s speeches as president and the 1981 Journey single turned karaoke favorite, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which the library described as “the personal empowerment anthem of millions.”One of the more somber recordings chosen this year consists of the Sept. 11, 2001, broadcasts by the radio station WNYC, which was located at that time in Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center.That morning station employees broke with scheduled programming to describe the chaos of the terror attacks on the Twin Towers, broadcasting what the library called “the tragedy’s first eyewitness accounts.”“As the story unfolded,” the library wrote, “the dedicated staff of WNYC remained on the air.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Witches of the Orient’ Review: Symphony of a Sports Team

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      This experimental documentary shows the anime-worthy triumphs of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team.In the experimental documentary “The Witches of the Orient,” the women of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team recall their whirlwind rise to gold-medal glory. The former champions wryly and modestly narrate their own story in new interviews, while the movie uses chic archival footage to set up a mythic reconsideration of their triumphs.The team members met when they were workers at a textile factory in Kaizuka, Japan, where they were known as Nichibo Kaizuka, after the name of the company and the name of the town. To their European competitors, they were known by the racist moniker Oriental Witches. Some onlookers joked that their skills resulted from magic, but the film shows that their ability of course came from meticulous practices. Players somersaulted, dove and leapt for the ball, and their efforts were filmed by the Japanese Olympic Committee in 1964. That footage has now been recycled into this documentary.In these remarkable archival recordings, the team’s youthful faces glow against bright green, red or white uniforms, and they are shown to be as precise on the court as they are in the factory. When the director Julien Faraut begins to splice the sequences of the team’s practices with shots from a 1984 animated series that they inspired, the cuts from real events to illustrations appear seamless.Faraut filmed the members of the Nichibo Kaizuka in the present day, but he wisely centers the archival footage and the animation in his movie, building a collage from fragments of the past and present. Montages are set to a hip electronic score, complete with Portishead needle drops. If the team was derided by their prejudiced (and defeated) foes in the moment of their success, this documentary elegantly restores the glow of legend, saving the champions the trouble of having to explain their heroism in words.The Witches of the OrientNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More