RECORD STORE DAY.
It's the one day in the year anybody cares about "Mom and Pop" stores.
And what have the surviving ones become? Effete boutiques. They aren't run by "Mom and Pop," but usually some obese, smelly over-charging goon.
The way these stores survive now is by either insisting they've got "collectors item" rare pressings (ooh, "Rubber Soul" on Venezuelan vinyl!) or they appeal to Millennial twits and Beats-loving bozos. In those cases it's, "Hey, don't bother getting Roger the Nazi's "The Wall" on CD, get it on 180 gram vinyl and impress your hipster-hat-wearing pals. Or..."Yo, brutha, scratch DIS thang! Da new copy of "Haters Gotta Hate" on 12 inch, wid two remixes on da flip side, yo. Put DIS on and plug in yo Dr. Dre's and do watcha gotta do wit yo synthetic drug of choice!"
Here's a ridiculous, pandering NY Post headline that pretends that Bowie and Lennon were denizens of a notorious tourist trap record store.
HUH? You're not saying "House of Oldies" was THE record store Bowie and Lennon LOVED, are you?
Is the DNA from their kisses still on the window somewhere? Even if the owner had somebody take some photos, that doesn't mean it was THE record store, or that anyone LOVED the place.
At best, it was convenient to any star living in the trendy Village at the time. If John was hanging around with the late David Peel, sure, he could stop in there and know that he'd very likely be able to get any 45 rpm he wanted. FOR A PRICE.
But John, living at The Dakota, could easily have gone to record stores that, at the time, were all over the West Side. A quick cab ride and he could get to Colony and Broadway, which was THE tourist trap record store for out of print vinyl, quite a rival to House of Oldies.
Back then, there were huge, authoritative record stores for anything new, including Sam Goody and King Karol. The East Village was loaded with used book and record stores. Dayton's on 12th was a mecca for budget-minded vinyl lovers like me. IF I'M BEING HONEST, I never bought anything at House of Oldies. Nice guy running it, but the prices were (and are) outrageous.
If I desperately needed that 45 rpm of "Homburg/Wee Small Hours of Sixpence" that wasn't on a Procol Harum album at the time, there were record stores with mammoth cubby holes on the wall, and in less than a minute, the single was on the counter for me. There were record stores in the subways, even! I can't even remember the names of all of them.
When I was editing ROCKET magazine and when I was the music editor of OUI, record stores were still in good health. I could make a weekly jaunt down from Dayton's through either the East or West Village, or both, and come back lugging a LOT of vinyl. Sometimes Dayton's had bargain bins full of 2 for a dollar or even 3 for a dollar goodies. Max Becker's "Hall Place Book and Records" was a favorite destination. I was such a regular customer, he'd bring stuff out from the back for me, things he figured I'd be interested in. "You go for this?" he'd say, putting a stack on a table that might include Phil Ochs or Mort Sahl.
Now? Now there's a feeble "Record Store Day," and who really supports them? It sure isn't the RIAA, who allow pirate bloggers to celebrate 14 years of brazenly giving away a half-dozen albums a day right out in the open. It's not the record labels, who never pressured politicians to update idiotic DMCA rules that allow anyone to upload anything, and place insane hoops in the way of rights owners doing takedowns.
A record store owner can't contact Google (owner of Blogspot) and say, "Hey, I sell David Bowie and John Lennon, and I have a good faith belief Hansy Wormhole doesn't have the right to give them away on his blog." Nope, a record store owner can go out of business (as Colony did a few years ago) or, if he has a good landlord or an obscure location in Brooklyn, thrive on a very narrow clientele of maniacs who don't trust eBay dealers to send them vinyl that actually is VG+ or "Mint."
Yes, in most major cities, there are still a few good record stores, but not many. When I was writing the "Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide," I sampled what was available in key cities around the country, from Boston to Chicago to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Odds were good, at the time, for getting used vinyl for $2 and not $20. Only truly nasty stores would slap a $20 tag on a Bill Dana or Pearl Willams record, and only truly naive owners would think they could get it. Colony fit the latter two categories, by the way, charging idiot tourists $20 or even $30 for "The First Family," which was in every thrift shop for a buck. A million copies were printed, and after JFK died, a million were tossed away by people who didn't find that record funny anymore.
The article mentions, in quite a misleading manner, that vinyl sales are UP. Yeah? For WHAT? For hipster-idiot 180 gram vinyl on "Abbey Road?" For disco junk? You can be sure that the dwindling number of people out there buying the new Ray Davies or Procol Harum that "dropped" the other day, will get it either by iTunes or Amazon download, or CD via Deep Discount or eBay. More likely, they'll get a bootleg off a torrent or blog or hidden "forum," OR, not buy it at all and be content to stream it on Spotify. Or maybe Google's bootleg-friendly YouTube will have people posting every song.
Yes, I've been to Williamsburg, and I've NOT seen the future. I've seen one or two old fashioned record stores turn up in converted garages, and offer for $4 or $5 the same tired out of print vinyl that eBay sellers can hardly unload for $2 and the $4 media mail postage. Anyone out there really collecting the Good Rats or Genesis anymore? Catching up on the back catalog of Billy Joel or Barbra Streisand on vinyl?? More often, people leave "nice comments" to uploaders: "Thanks, glad to find this. I no longer have a turntable so even if I bought it on eBay I couldn't play it!" Besides, vinyl buckles your shelves.
Happy Record Store day to whoever can point to David Peel albums, say, "These are rare, $40..." and GETS $40. Happy Record Store day to a dealer who can unload Alice Cooper's "Schools Out," with the paper panties in like-new condition, for $50. And Happy Record Store day to the thousands of people who once owned stores, once brought their boxes of vinyl to memorabilia conventions, and are now working 9 to 5 at Amazon stuffing Dr. Dre headphones and cans of Hormel Chili into shipping boxes, and remembering which is which.
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