SUCKING IN THE ’70s: Inside the Booming Business of Punk Rock’s Past.
And yet, the dealer du jour for these sort of collectables is not some venerable auction house, but rather a 40-year-old New Jersey resident who has become arguably America’s most in-demand collector of rare punk memorabilia. His name is Brian Gorsegner, and he exhibits his envy-inducing loot on the Instagram account @AncientArtifax, whose 25,000 followers include an impressive array of illustrious cool kids: Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Lars Frederiksen (Rancid), Brian Baker (Minor Threat), Mac McCaughan (Merge Records), Violet Grohl (daughter of Dave), Roger Gastman (art dealer/graffiti guru), Lance Bangs (music-video director to the indie elite), Les Savy Fav (the band) and—who knew?—Brooke Smith (Silence of the Lambs/Grey’s Anatomy).
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“I’d come to realize that as important, or perhaps even moreso, than the items I was acquiring, was the first-hand tales that accompanied them,” Gorsegner writes in the intro. “I feel a great sense of pride and responsibility that the items in this book have been entrusted to me to survive another 40 years. This wasn’t memorabilia, and it wasn’t ephemera. These were artifacts of a time and a place that would shape my way of life.”
Gorsegner began collecting and selling as a teenager in central New Jersey. After touring the world as the vocalist for his own successful band (Night Birds), and establishing a career as a booking agent (whose clients include OG punk legends like Alice Bag and T.V. Smith), he saw his hobby take off during the pandemic, when everyone was at home “digging in their attics and their basements, either doomsday selling or doomsday buying.”
He began traversing the country to rummage through the mementos of aging punks, at times accompanied by a film crew for a four-part documentary produced by the rebooted Creem magazine. (The series is still looking for a home.) He pays good money for collections, often in the mid-five-figures. (“That’s me emptying my bank account.”) He keeps the items he can’t bring himself to part with and tries to break even by selling the rest either on Instagram or at occasional pop-ups, like the one Gorsegner is hosting at the Queens music venue-cum-gallery TV Eye as one of several book release events. Reflecting on punk’s evolution as a luxury commodity, Gorsegner is as astounded as the next guy. “This stuff was made by delinquent children,” he says, “and now it will sell for $10,000.”
Speaking of the ’70s, as original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”