His mail averages some 15 tune-packed tapes a week, along with letters from fans, such as the fellow in Boston who writes four missives a week, replete with his lengthy ruminations on episodes from “The Brady Bunch,” or the fan who will hand-print 10 identical letters and mail them separately. As if all this weren’t enough, there is a legion of cottage industry Carusos who routinely send him their homemade cassettes of oddball songs. Neuman burps, a lunatic raves or a Martian sings, Hansen is likely to have it in his shelves, which also house 1920s exercise records and a section devoted to songs about the Mt. Then there’s “The Best of Marcel Marceau,” which is also silent except for a burst of applause at the end. He has several albums, such as “Silence in Stereo,” that have absolutely nothing in their grooves.
That’s a tall order even for a dream, since he already has well more than 200,000 discs, including titles by such diverse recording artists as Lee Harvey Oswald and Elmo Madwell, the Singing Mayor of Muskogee. Hansen has dreams of finding records-bizarre, unimaginably weird records he’s never heard of before.
Mugging for a photographer, the bewhiskered 52-year-old huffs, puffs and growls like a werewolf, grabs a black vinyl 45 off the top of the stack and takes a splintery bite out of it. Dressed in a top hat and tux, Barry Hansen sits in his Lakewood back yard with a crushingly heavy stack of old records sitting on his knees.