'Mind blowing': Freehold DJ keeps vinyl records alive with collection of 150,000

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP - About five years ago, Dave Kapulsky dropped into his local post office to pick up a package when one of the employees posed a question.

“What do you do?” the man asked. “We’re getting packages of records for you all the time.”

He wasn’t kidding. Kapulsky is a disc jockey, and his collection of vinyl records is enormous (more on that in a bit). As Dave explained this, the postal worker said he was once in a band that cut a record in the 1960s, but added, “you’re not going to know it, because it wasn’t a hit.”

Kapulsky’s response: Try me.

“We were The Hallmarks,” the man said.

“As in ‘Soul Shakin’ Psychedelic Sally,’” Kapulsky said. “I have it.”

The postal worker, Nick Masi, was gobsmacked. He’d played keyboard for The Hallmarks. Masi put the disc jockey in touch with Russ Scalzo, an Oceanport resident who was the band’s lead singer and songwriter.

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Kapulsky hosted Scalzo as a guest on his show “Dave the Rave's Relics and Rarities,” which airs on the internet and satellite radio. It’s recorded in Kapulsky’s spacious Freehold Township home, and when Scalzo walked in the door, his jaw dropped.

Dave the Rave has 125,000 vinyl 45s — small discs containing one or two songs — plus 25,000 full-sized vinyl albums and 35,000 CDs.

“He showed me around and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” Scalzo said. “Room after room, where people have furniture, Dave has records. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

“And he knows where everything is. It was mind blowing.”

The collection is stunning. What hits home, though, is the underlying message.

'Great records that fell through the cracks’

Kapulsky is an interesting guy. Raised in New Brunswick, he earned degrees from Trenton State College and Rutgers University (he’s owned season tickets to Rutgers football and basketball for 40-plus years), and worked as a tennis teaching pro before going into the insurance business. All along he moonlighted as a disc jockey, focusing on 1960s music that flew under the popular radar.

“Dave plays all the great songs that radio stations fire DJs for spinning,” one promo for his show says.

“It means something to me personally to play these records that were on small labels, or maybe they were on major labels that never got around to promoting them,” he said. “There are a lot of great records that fell through the cracks.”

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Like The Hallmarks, who were signed by powerhouse Mercury Records. Dick Clark played ‘Soul Shakin’ Psychedelic Sally” on the hit TV show American Bandstand in 1967.

“Record labels would release stuff in small markets to see how it did,” said Scalzo, who is president of Lighthouse Productions, a nonprofit family theater company. “A lot of people heard songs that never made it big across the nation, so they’re into that stuff.”

It’s a niche, and Kapulsky has a following. He’s been a guest host on the popular satellite radio show “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” featuring E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt. A photo with Bruce Springsteen, circa 1995, adorns Kapulsky’s living-room wall.

As he tells it: Bruce’s team once called him from a tour stop in Alabama because The Boss wanted to cover the 1962 Otis Redding song “Shout Bamalama” but, in the pre-digital age, could not find the lyrics.

They knew Dave the Rave would have the record.

“I wrote the lyrics down and faxed them down there,” he said.

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A million-dollar collection

Kapulsky estimates his collection’s value at “well over $1 million” and said it’s covered by a $1 million insurance policy (he also had it written into a prenuptial agreement with his ex-wife). Much of it resides in a large second-story room, packed in floor-to-ceiling shelves. It’s organized alphabetically, though there are no markings or labels.

More records are stacked in his bedroom, his basement and even the master bathroom.

“I am a record geek,” Kapulsky said. “A serious record collector.”

The first vinyl he purchased was The Beatles’ seminal debut album, “Meet the Beatles.” His oldest might be a 1954 cut by Bill Haley & His Comets.

His most valuable? A “script cover” version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — the early, promotional version of the album cover that features Springsteen’s name and the title in a script font — is worth about $5,000, Kapulsky reckons.

Most of his collection is from the 1960s, and a particular genre is closest to his heart.

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“The original songs Black artists did that went nowhere because they didn’t have the access that white artists did at the time,” he said. “I’ve always been a champion of theirs."

At that, Kapulsky pulled out Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers on a label called “Confederate Records.” Pictured on the vinyl is a huge Confederate flag (Redding must have been desperate for a deal).

“The Black radio stations said, ‘We’re not going to play this,’” Kapulsky said. “So this same label created another label, Orbit Records, and produced the same exact record without the flag. Now Black stations would play it.”

Of course, Kapulsky has the Orbit Records version, too. Every disc tells a story. That story is more palpable when there's a tangible object, as opposed to today’s digital music world. When Dave the Rave pulls a record from the shelf, he's cradling someone's dream.

“You can hold it in your hands, feel it, read the label and learn more about it,” he said. It’s a souvenir, a possession that carries meaning — something digital downloads can never match.

One day, perhaps, Kapulsky’s collection will be obsolete. Big band records from the 1940s are just about unsellable, he said, because that era is so far in the past.

“That doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “I didn’t buy these as an investment. I bought them because I love the music.”

Find Dave the Rave's shows through his Facebook page (Dave the Rave Relics and Rarities) or his website www.davetherave.com.

Jerry Carino is community columnist for the Asbury Park Press, focusing on the Jersey Shore’s interesting people, inspiring stories and pressing issues. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Freehold Township DJ has amassed a collection of 150,000 vinyl records