Brazilian Zero Freitas began with a pocket-money purchase in 1965 and snapped up a million records in a single month last year – and now he is planning a non-profit exhibition centre and lending library
With evident tenderness, Zero Freitas removes a record from its sleeve, places the vinyl on the turntable and drops the needle into the groove. A nostalgic crackle, a half-second of expectant silence and then, as the room fills with the melody of a gentler age, the Brazilian tycoon starts to hum along: “Morning has broken, like the first morning …”
We are in a warehouse in the suburbs of São Paulo. There is a faint hum from computer terminals in the office, a few shouts outside from workers unloading pallets from the latest consignment, but nothing can distract Freitas from his epiphany with Cat Stevens. “Look!” he says, lifting up his forearm to show how the music has made the hairs stand on end.
For anyone brought up in the era of downloads, such a scene may seem incongruous – even slightly ridiculous – but there is no doubting either the passion or the ambition of this middle-aged former hippy who is now building the ultimate resting place for the golden age of vinyl.
With 6m discs, Freitas has built the biggest record collection on the planet – and now he is building a new home for the hoard so that he can share his passion with the world.
Three homes are being demolished for the five-storey structure. A team of archivists is busy cleaning, photographing and indexing crates full of 33, 45 and 78 RPMs. Meanwhile, his buying spree is gathering pace. When music shops go bust, Freitas snaps up the entire stock. His agents swoop on every major record auction in Europe and the US. Container-loads of singles and LPs arrive at his warehouses each month.
Associates affectionately describe the owner as crazy, but for the 60-year-old with flowing grey hair, it is simply the continuation of a compulsion. With his first pocket money he bought Canta Para a Juventude, by Roberto Carlos, in January 1965. Then came LPs by the Beatles and the Stones, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Doris Day and the artists of Brazil’s own Tropicália movement. By the end of high school he had 3,000 records. A decade later the collection had mushroomed tenfold.
Financed by real estate profits, his buying has kept up with his growing fortune. When he revealed details of his private collection for the first time in a newspaper interview last year, his vinyl stash totalled 5m.
Now he is famous, it is growing faster than ever because collectors and record shops alike are treating him as the buyer of first resort. In October alone, Freitas admits somewhat sheepishly, he acquired a million records from a fellow collector for 200,000 reais (£42,000).
“This crazy Brazilian came here and said: ‘I want you to keep my million as well. Put them all together,’” he recalls with a grin.
In this digital age most records lose value, so they are a dubious investment on financial grounds. But that is not the point. Freitas’s warehouses seem to serve as the vinyl equivalent of an animal rescue centre: when records have nowhere else to go, they come here.
On numerous occasions he has bought up the entire stock of bankrupt shops without checking for duplicates, scratched surfaces or albums that nobody could possibly want. With his fame spreading, Freitas is also receiving more donations, recently including 6,500 classical LPs from the private collection of Terence McEwen, a producer at the San Francisco Opera.
There are many rarities, including thousands of discs signed by the artist, but Freitas cannot possibly listen to his entire collection. It would take several lifetimes to play the 300 years of music stored here – much longer if you accounted for sleep and the time needed to take records out of sleeves, put them on turntables and line up the needle.
The collection is so vast that it has to be housed in several large warehouses, in boxes and crates stacked high on pallets and covered in polythene or plastic sheeting. Many are likely to stay unopened for years. So far just 250,000 discs have been catalogued and filed on shelves.
To accelerate the process, 15 interns work two shifts a day to clean, dust and photograph each record and log it in a computer database. They have a seemingly endless job.
“We can do four or five hundred a day,” says one of the archivists, Lucas Behmer. “Since there are over 6m records and counting, it will take about 40 years to finish.” Even that optimistically assumes that Freitas will not go on any more spending binges.
But he is in an expansive mood. Plans are in full swing for a non-profit exhibition centre and lending library. “My whole life, people have come to me for this, and I want to expand that side of things a lot,” he says. “We are building a space that six months from now will be ready to fit at least 4m records. We’ve already torn down two houses. There is one left to tear down.”
Asked what drives his habit, Freitas calls up a childhood memory. “I inherited this from my mother. Not collecting, but enjoying music and gathering records. She had four or five hundred.”
His knowledge of the cherry-picked 100,000 records he keeps at home is extraordinary. For this English visitor, he picks out a gloriously eclectic mix of LPs from the British Isles: the Queen’s silver jubilee, songs of the IRA, Dylan Thomas narrating Under Milk Wood, Laurence Olivier performing Shakespeare, commentary from the 1968 European Cup final between Manchester United and Benfica, Wee Tam and The Big Huge by The Incredible String Band and comedy from the Rutles and the Goon Show.
But Freitas seems most delighted during our interview by Monty Python’s Instant Record Collection. Demonstrating how the package of this 1977 compilation was ingeniously designed by Terry Gilliam to fold out into a cardboard box that resembles a stack of records, he follows the instructions on the cover with wry self-reflection.
“See! You don’t need to buy lots of records. You can have an instant collection like this. Marvellous!” he chuckles.
Additional reporting by Shanna Hanbury
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