Tales from a Record Store

April 16, 2011

April 16 is the fourth annual Record Store Day. A day dedicated the small town record shops that are struggling to hold onto the dying art of vinyl records. If the hip-hop DJ community can’t save them than leave it to the die-hard hipster types to embrace their love of vintage and fuel the resurgence of vinyl with all their skips and scratches.

All this talk about records has brought back some memories of visiting my favorite stores in a time before anything digital existed. So in honor of the day I thought I’d share those stories with you.

The Record Store.

I have fond memories as a kid visiting the record stores and spending an hour flipping through each album. The sales bins usually didn’t offer up much of a choice a 12-year-old would really want. It usually was filled with something your parents would most likely buy such as a Steve and Edie, Robert Goulet 45 or who ever was performing on the Laurence Welk show at the time. I’m sure the Trololololo guy had a few singles in that bin.

There was one shop I would go to often where the walls and ceilings were covered in promotional posters. There were classic posters like the Milton Glaser poster of Dylan and his rainbow hair or The Grateful Dead’s iconic red white and blue skull. Every time I went in, there would be something new that I immediately wanted for my own. The posters on the walls would never be for sale and the ones that were for sale were never as good as the promo’s.

I knew from my frequent visits that the posters that hung in the window were usually in heavy rotation and may not end up in the massive Rock N’ Roll collage. During one visit I noticed a new poster for The Rolling Stones album “Tattoo You”. I love the red background the Bowie look-a-like with the tattooed face. I had to have it. I took a shot and asked the owner what he did with the posters after he was finished with them. He told me to come back the following week and he’d give it to me. I was so excited, i felt like I just scored the biggest find of my life.

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Plastic Fantastic was a pretty well-known store specializing in Old LPs in our town. The sales people were hard-core music lovers who were familiar with every single album they had in stock and could give you the value of any vintage record that came into the store in a matter of minutes. I bought my first “investment” album there which was, “The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball”. It cost me $16.00 which was astronomical back then. I recently checked on eBay to see the selling price and last I looked it was around $75.00. I still have it and it’s in great condition and I’ll never part with it.

Plastic Fantastic is still around but under the new name Gold Million Records and owned by the same couple, Harold and Maxy Gold. The couple are determined to bring back the record. You won’t find any DVD’s, or CD’s but you will find a half million albums, reels and 8-tracks.

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The first import record store I ever went to I was in college. It was the new wave/punk era and I was going through an anglo-phile period. The store was teeny tiny and the albums were displayed on open shelving like trinkets on a mantle piece. It was the Neiman Marcus of record stores specializing in over-priced UK and European releases.

I bought Alison Moyet’s solo album “Alf” that day. I was amazed by the fact that it was in a thick quality plastic sleeve which slipped over the regular album sleeve and not in cheap shrink-wrap and that said quality to me. I still own that album complete with thick plastic over-sleeve.

Check out the official Record Store Day website to find stores that are participating and what special vinyl recordings are being offered.