record stores you stumble across that look like a treasure trove and then it's just a bunch of battered sub-$1 bin LPs being sold for $7 a pop minimum

>: (

i went to a store yesterday in ventura that looked really promising but they clearly felt that they were the only game in town, because the place was selling scratchy crosby and nash LPs for $10. most egregious: black sabbath's 'live at last', corners cat-scratched down about an inch on each side, LP itself in poor shape, priced at $6.

I may have an addition to this entry tomorrow, will have to wait and see what my crate digging turns up. I'm in Virginia visiting family and tomorrow is my day to search the two (?) remaining record stores in Charlottesville.

When I was in Bloomington Indiana last summer I went to this one store that was trying to sell a fairly worn copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue for $29.95. I didn't even have the heart to yell at them.

there's this huge book/record place on the way to newtown in sydney.. and pretty much every record there is filthy from having been in this place way too long, and very overpriced ($5+ for 45s with scratches and torn sleeves).

though to be fair i did find a couple of nice things there (including a whole bunch of aussie-pressed decca 45s, which were probably the only clean records in the whole place)

dynamite records in northampton MA is kind of becoming this imo. used to pretty good tho, say 2-3 years ago

dynamite closed recently.

um, but anyway, these kinds of stores used to be really good for their dollar bins. old men who think/thought that only classic rock was worth any money often threw/throw tons of good dance/rap/funk/weird rock into their dollar bins. the internet has made it easier for even the most clueless, but plenty of people are still stuck in that only beatles = gold mode.

I was in my local Half-Price books this last weekend for the sale, and all the records were $5.98 to $9.98 instead of the $3.98 I was used to.

I was scared to even look at what was in the locked "collectible" case. Good luck moving that product.

I remembered my real record store still has a 2 dollar area, along with 10 dollar records in in sleeves and clean, and went back there.

"Record & Tape Exchange" in Park Slope, Brooklyn pwns this thread. I got some Kate Bush LPs there for $3 per a while back, but at the same visit dude wanted to charge me $5 for a Buckingham-Nicks 45 that I found in the $0.50 section. Of course, not having price tags on anything in the stores leads to this kind of problem.

aka "the old man store" on 5th ave. I spend an hour or so there once looking through the 78s he had, but came away with nothing.. mostly overpriced vocal groups, no country to speak of :(

i've had a 1959 folkways science fiction sound effects record on my wall since i opened and i priced it kinda high at 20 dollars cuz i wanted the person who bought it to REALLY want it. cuz it's so cool. yesterday i sold it to a guy who will be incorporating it into his spaceship installation at mass moca. he's been BUILDING a spaceship for three years. i thouht that was a proper home for that album.

dunno why i'm posting that here though.

That dude totally deserves that record.

the ultimate store for this sort of thing was this one i went to in santa barbara last year. same deal as described above; no price tags on the records, huge, huge selection (i feel like these places always do), and a crazy dude behind the counter who tries to sell you an iffy copy of 'taking tiger mountain' (scratches and held together with scotch tape) for $35. it's like those guys on ebay who price their CDs and LPs 300% higher than everyone else, hoping someone will bite.

There's this odd ancient 2ndhand place on Chapel st st kilda next to the cop shop... I should check it out, the owner is the crankiest old fossil known to man, the place is like a Black Books of vinyl. I think its mostly jazz though so I would have NFI what it'd be worth anyway.

the time i went in there was one of the most pointless couple of hours i have ever spent

either it's been long since picked clean or never had any heat whatsoever

plenty of people are still stuck in that only beatles = gold mode.

welcome to EVERY RECORD STORE IN NJ (with a couple of exceptions).

there are a couple of places in los angeles that are in areas frequenting by the more moneyed set in town (equator books and records in venice, counterpoint books and records by beachwood canyon) which are similar insofar as pricing, but instead of endless dusty rows of poor condition records overpriced by some cranky dudes, these places try to give the impression of having carefully cultivated and curated their stock, so that the worn-out copy of 'let's dance' by bowie gains some sort of weight by being in an impressive looking sealed record sleeve and priced at $15.

Aw I always felt like I had to fight to prevent our store from turning into this when I was in Seattle. A couple of our key vinyl people simply never shopped outside of our store for records, and so overvalued anything that came in. I remember a Gong record being priced at $20 (it was messed up and missing an LP!) and a THRASHED Sgt. Pepper's (the sleeve was actually in two pieces and the record was about unplayable) being priced at $8. It would drive me up the wall and I used to argue endlessly about the pricing (me: "Really? I see that around for $2-3 most places!" other employee: "Well check GEMM and you can see that people are selling it for much more! And it's an original pressing!").
This always seems to be a symptom that you find in stores that simply don't get many good titles coming in. So the few good ones they do get must be AMAZING! RARE! RECORDS!

PS. never shop at Big Al's Record Barn in San Jose

chinavision did you work at s3cond t1me ar0und?

nah I was at a the seattle location of a cerain Pacific Northwest chain that is located on Broadway. We actually had a great selection of used cds, but since we didn't go out and buy collections, we were strictly limited to what people walked in with to sell to us re: records, meaning not much great stuff.
I mean, some insanely great stuff came in, but it never made it to the floor! Hooray working at a record store (still very psyched about the Metal Boys record I picked up, or the complete collection of Parlophone Beatles LPs (reissues from various countries and decades, but all in suuper good shape)!!

And for the record all my coworkers were and are great people. We just have massive disagreements about LP pricing. I think I was also spoiled coming from the Bay Area, where I feel like there are just more good records available at cheaper prices, generally.
(But seriously if they'd just walked down the street to the Jive Time annex they would have seen many of our valuable, first pressing, rare records, etc. in the bargain bin).

my sub-$1 records are really clean and i only sell them for four dollars. not seven.

hey i dont give a fuck, happy right now but willing to get some shit talking off my chest:

ian's Record & Tape Exchange - i really can't hate. that place is a joke. if you see a $25 Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band in the first five minutes it's pretty easy to see what the score is. also that guy's black dwarf assistant looks just like Beetlejuice from howard stern. shit freaked me out.

eat records - good fucking riddance. sorry if some of you are friends with then. they had a sketchy reputation on ripping people off buying collections. word got around. and i'll never forget when they first opened me barely knowing dick about records seeing In C on their wall for $25. even then i thought that was a bit pricey but its a great recording. oh wait, what's this "as is"? with a giant gash on the b side. total joke, half their shit was straight from the canarsie liquidator, as is out the ass. fuck those two guys and their double leopards in stores, scammers.

second hand rose - wow, just wow. possibly the worst record store on earth. must have some sort of rent control or they own the building or something. bizarre pricing, no good records. ive spent about 20 minutes in there twice just killing time and it was straight comedy. ive heard stories of people investing hours and bringing stuff to the counter only to have it offsided as not for sale.

treehouse records - maybe i was just amped from getting cool stuff at hymie's and cheapos then i walked into this shitpit. serious indie dude attitude from the clerks and they were selling VG classic rock cheap but didnt understand that a Blue Note that says "reissed by Fantasy Records" is not a $40-$60 record. probably more inept than deliberately misleading.

Gee's Records - a classic front for buying records only, i've heard raves abut this place but it must have been from people hitting it up in the 90s. about 8K chudly mcdudly dross at $5 a pop and about 50 rare records vastly overpriced. heliocentric worlds og on esp is not $90. and i've never walked into a store and seen 4 or 5 different dealers leave their cards at a table by the door that "i buy records". in anothers man's shop? i think this dude just buys from poor bridgeport people and the cream goes down to the nyc boutiques.

ez2collect, nj - ez2suckmyballs, giant warehouse with about 20K records you can't even go near. little spanish lady directed me to the skated $10 a record, $20 for double albums as the boss man wasn't in. shit was 150 classic rock records organized A-C. that's about as far as they gotten through all the collections they've raped people for. classic case of a dude who sells one thing on ebay for $200 then gets paranoid frozen mode afraid to make a selling mistake, thus never selling anything ever again.

some antique mall, new london, ct - i will give this #1 worst ever status over second hand rose. they have about 10K records going $8-$10 each in one room. shit was so horrible i was afraid to look in the 40K records .99 cent room. at one point this old lady screamed at me as i wasnt supposed to look in their "ebay box". of course as soon as she walked away i went thru that shit, shocked to find that seam split buddy holly and elvis reissues was the best they could sell online.

investing hours and bringing stuff to the counter only to have it offsided as not for sale.

this has happened to friends of mine, k-lame.

I take it these are in and around NYC? Good to have this thread for future reference.

uh sorry if i got a little too yelped out there. wasn't mad either, people can run their businesses anyway they want.

the only dead center nyc one visitors might bump into is second hand rose, the one you quoted. the others are minneapolis, NJ, and CT. and brooklyn, but no one goes out of their way for those BK stores.

just to prove i'm not totally salty here's a great record store that has absolute crap, knows it, and revels in it:

records surplus on west pico in la
miles and miles of deadstock crap. if you've seen knocked up, they shot the record store scenes there. tons of random, nonvaluable yet plenty of fun take a chance records from $1.80-$4.80. good people.

ooh neato. i would love that place.

whoa awesome i gotta get there sometime

another record surplus bonus is that all of their records are actually in exceptional shape and there are a few treasures to be found in there

the basement of 101 records on the corner of Grant & Green where this cover photo was taken is the worst. so fucking stacked with records, everything five dollars and you can spend hours in there, come out with bleeding fingers and hella allergies, and not find anything.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3135/2841382049_f91f6af893.jpg

good to know!

honestly, the folks who ran it were real nice but hymie's in minneapolis was a bit like this

this cover photo was taken

haha, i thought that was going to link to the dj shadow cover record store

i liked hymies the one time i was there. lots of crap but lots of cool stuff.

just found this in the 77 3d thread. the store i said upthread sucked it

http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/ec56f382b2baa125b635dbbbf3fb375f19e78ff7_m.gif

PDQ Records in Tucson to thread.

Rockaway Records in Silver Lake was the king of this thread throughout the 1990s. Their specialty was so narrowly focused on Beatles and west coast major label rarities (Doors test pressings for $300 anyone?) that they (and their customers) had no clue on anything outside that perspective. This led to some spectacular deals: most of the Flying Nun catalog for a buck each. Sub Pop singles for a buck, etc.

Also, Mr. C's records in Orange to thread. Prepare to spend $30 for a vinyl copy of Pet Sounds.

the best story about one of these places was a friend who was shopping in upstate new york. some guy was selling tons of records, all for $7 or $8. 99% totally useless crap for $8. horribly beat up copy of the eagles greatest hits? $8. andy williams album? $8. you know the place.

but my friend dug around and found a few extremely rare--almost hapax legomena--private-press charles mingus LPs. which he dubbed then sold to some place in the village for like $600 or more apiece.

he published a story about this in a magazine whose name i am forgetting.

rockaway is still sort of the king of this, at least in terms of overpricing stuff. you can get some good deals on jazz, blues, and not-bad CDs but rock vinyl? forget it.

That's a bummer about the aforementioned place at Grant & Green. I've had several people give me the, "Oh you like records? You've GOT to check *this* place out!" spiel about that location. I was feeling guilty for not going, actually.

im gonna go check it out just in case jaxon is deliberately misleading us LOL

I just need to get back to record shopping at places that aren't Amoeba. It's just too easy to make that my stop!

when i leave l.a. i'm going to miss amoeba but at the same time i'm kinda not going to miss it. they've got a lot of good shit but i think the store's size masks a lack of depth in some areas. i dunno, i'd rather live in a city with a handful of small, awesome record stores than one with a giant behemoth store and a bunch of middling shops.

does amoeba have a good dollar section? they must.

i forget if yr in the bay area chinavision but id like to pimp for the KUSF rock and swap at the KUSF campus. it's this coming sunday from 7am-5pm, and it rules. ive gotten a ton of my wishlist-records there. normally, id be working it for the station, but im traveling for work and to see friends in NC (and catching the carrboro record fair on sunday).

LA amoeba has a pretty great jazz-buyer, but ive never been totally thrilled with anything else there.

my next frontier is the weekly oakland coliseum flea/swap and the monthly alameda flea market.

amoeba has a really good dollar section but i've never really been blown away by anything i've found there as far as something totally unexpected, though i totally filled in my poco collection there! actually scott you'd probably love it.

Yeah I'm in SF. I went to the record swap once before, but ever since then never managed to keep track of when it's happening. I'll def. try to make it out this weekend.
I actually don't really have any complaints about Amoeba. I find great affordable stuff there all the time. I just need a little variety in my life you know? (I've had visiting friends act let down there, but I think that's because they thought it would be a magical store with everything on their wishlists. Like anyplace it's best over repeated visits... I think its one big advantage (maybe more than its size) is the rapid turnover in the product.)

i friend of mine got an original FJ McMahon LP from the Amoeba dollar section before! and that record is fucking amazing and $$$$.

man i remember my first amoeba visit -- hollywood store, summer 2004. i was BLOWN AWAY by the supermarket-of-records effect. i still sort of get giddy every time i go in, though i echo the concerns that it drives out smaller diverse stores.

yeah i'm maybe just jaded by amoeba now, also because i think their selection isn't as good now as it was during the first couple of years it was open.

I kind of think the selection at every record store isn't as good as it was maybe five or so years ago. I think I'd end up spending a lot more money now if I were just starting out buying the same records I did back in college.

well, less competition five years ago. and even less ten years ago. as far as people buying stuff. in the 90's in philadelphia i could count on one hand the people i had to compete against at flea markets and thrift stores. ONE HAND. this is, like, the 4th largest city in the counry or something like that that we are talking about.

i used to go to little side-street flea markets in philly and be the ONLY person digging thru records. ah, those were the days.

okay one more trip down memory lane: once at a sidewalk sale near my apartment on a sunny saturday afternoon in center city - this is mid-90's - this truck pulls up and these two guys start pulling out box after box of records to sell. thousands of records. they were junkmen. my collecting pal george and i sat on milk crates in the street and went thru every single box. took us hours. we were the only people who looked at them all day!

god i wish i could find a thrift store around here that even once in a great while yielded gold. pertty much everyone's too aware of the value of records to just drop them off with goodwill, though.

yeah I would never even consider looking through records at thrift stores anymore.

pertty much everyone's too aware of the value of records to just drop them off with goodwill, though.
plus goodwill has people who sell on ebay for them now!

i still do okay at thrift stores. nothing, you know, monumental, but good stock stuff for the store (like finding 6 minty crusaders albums one day, you know?) and good old country records for me. got amazing 60's decca and capitol country stuff this year. good folk stuff too around here. found an amazing album last week of modern classical stuff including excellent orchestra + tape piece. oh yeah, good classical for me too. nice minty 70's imports.

hmm... I think the other thing about thrift stores is that they've gone up in a price a bit too. they all seem to be in the $1.50 to $2.50 range now, which isn't *that* cheap for what they offer. I lied a bit, cuz I did get a nice copy of The Cure's "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" at a SJ Goodwill a while back.

although one side is kinda noisy

yeah I would never even consider looking through records at thrift stores anymore.
― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Monday, November 2, 2009 10:39 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

found this at goodwill
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280415568908&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT#ht_500wt_1182

That's a bummer about the aforementioned place at Grant & Green. I've had several people give me the, "Oh you like records? You've GOT to check *this* place out!" spiel about that location. I was feeling guilty for not going, actually.
― lou reed scott walker monks niagra (chinavision!), Monday, November 2, 2009 9:19 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

im gonna go check it out just in case jaxon is deliberately misleading us LOL
― 69, Monday, November 2, 2009 9:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i still go to that 101 records (grant&green) store occasionally (and they have a nicer $10+ store across the street), but usually spend the afternoon w/my portable and leave w/3 things. i'd happily go w/either of you guys

I find tons of good disco at thrift stores. or at least I used to in Astoria, less so in Brooklyn

hey if any SF people ever want to have a solid record-trawling day, that sounds good to me.
also, since it was mentioned up thread, maybe a meet up at the record fair on Sunday?

i don't actually like the rock'n'swap. it's a bunch of stinky old men buying & selling rare beatles and stones records. there's usually one or 2 guys selling pretty rad prog for more than i can afford. and if there's any table w/decent black music, you can't get close enough to look.

that said, i keep going back :(

hit me up on fb or email w/your number.

fuuuuck ill be in NC 11/7-15, so if you guys can wait a week, id really love to do that. i could be interested in hitting as far south as SJ or as far north as santa rosa, and im 90% sure i could drive us.

aw man, I need to organize something like this for Portland!

Last time I went to the record fair there was a lot of too-expensive-for-me stuff, especially at one booth where the guy was actually selling quite a bit of cool German stuff that I would have liked (though I've definitely seen some of it elsewhere cheaper), but I picked up a cool Hawkwind record for reasonably cheap, and stupidly passed on a similarly cheap copy of their first, so I have hopes that there's still some stuff for me there.

Have any of you been to that White Elephant sale or whatever it is that they hold in the parking lot of that Berkeley BART station? There was one decently stocked and decently priced booth there.

nope but lets hit it

i've never been here http://www.the-last-record-store.com/

^ santa rosa

also, longer i wait, more money i have (ebay bids'll finish and i think mrs jaxon might take a job)

niiiiice. ive been meaning to unload a bunch of stuff at red devil in san rafael, too, which id be happy to do on the trip, or before the trip. basically, i buy records as much as possible. ill go whenever.

This is what I was thinking of:

http://www.berkeleyfleamarket.com/

I think it's weekends, 7 to 7, and maybe the record guy I went to was Dapper Dave? Gave me some kind of small break on what I bought that he seems to give to everyone.

And according to the website, the flea market might lose its spot soon.

is the Berkeley BART sale you're talking about the flea market at Ashby? I dropped by the record guy's booth there a couple of times, and saw some ok stuff, not in super great condition, maybe priced just a little on the high side, but then whenever I've been subsequently, he switched to selling more bargainy stuff (I think he was trying to clear out his less desirable titles)... it was all pretty cheap (maybe $3 apiece, but also 3 for the price of 2 I think) but nothing that wasn't in every bin ever.

xpost yes it is.

I'd check it out again if he's over the bargain bin phase

I got that Dream Syndicate with "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" on it, and a Gleaming Spires thing I didn't have, the one with "Funk for Children" or something like that, and the Waitresses record with the "Square Pegs Theme" and "Christmas Wrapping." They were in the $3 price range. I don't know if those three records are every bin ever types. This was not quite two years ago.

You're right about condition, too.

i went to a store yesterday in ventura that looked really promising but they clearly felt that they were the only game in town, because the place was selling scratchy crosby and nash LPs for $10. most egregious: black sabbath's 'live at last', corners cat-scratched down about an inch on each side, LP itself in poor shape, priced at $6.

― the moreno you knowshon (omar little), Wednesday, September 9, 2009 5:01 PM (1 month ago)

haha, i have a feeling this is my bro's shop amirite

this one was called buffalo records or something...

is salzer's still around?

yeah...it was pretty disappointing tbh

he published a story about this in a magazine whose name i am forgetting.

Wax Poetics I believe.

if anyone's in mississippi, a small town called raymond has a shop called little big store. it's worth checking out cuz it has an amazing selection. but they go "by the book," which is soo annoying. everything ends up being double what you could buy it for elsewhere.

i've found some tite stuff there. dj shadow came by once, which was exciting for us mississippi folk.

o ya. speaking of dj shadow, and shitty record stores, the one where the cover to endtroducing was shot sucks big time. it's in sacramento.

www.rare-records.net/index.html

from my yelp

Funky Soul Stop Records
1811 Jefferson St
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 452-2452
1 star

Easily the worst record store I've ever been in. We walked in and thought we'd found a great store, but were we wrong. Most of the records aren't priced. You're supposed to bring them up after you're done shopping so that the owner can subjectively tell you the prices. Some of the records are actually priced, but when I saw the numbers on the back, I thought maybe it was some sort of filing system. There's no way these 2$ records were really being sold for $40! This guy must be out of his mind. Honestly he must be. We walked out of the store and randomly someone threw an orange at us from their car and we laughed. Think the owner thought we were laughing at him, so for the next 2 minutes as we walked to our car, he hysterically laughed at us at the top of his lungs with a serious devil laugh. SCARY! don't waste your time with this store.

Funky Soul Stop, cool I'll check it out! Thanks!

!

i read that store name like it's a telegram:

"Funky soul. Stop. Records. Stop."

brandon, u missed out. i found some EPIC records this weekend. bought a ton of stuff at on the corner.

did you used to work at that sj streetlight? they have a whole prog section and a whole psych section. and not just reissues. pretty impressive.

the rasputin down there is terrible, but i did find a copy of this record i LOVE. wait for the orchestration that starts at 1.50 and goes till the end. pretty mindblowing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUogmaP_PE

Nope I worked at Rasputin, and I agree it's horrible. It was even worse working there, trust me (unless you like pat-downs and extremely paltry discounts).
SJ Streetlight is simply one of my favorite record stores... I find surprising affordable great stuff every time I go there, and I love their prog, psych, and new age sections. I think it's the prog section that's the best of those if I'm remembering the layout correctly (new age can get a bit bargain bin-y and psych tends towards reissues right?).
I have to wait till I get home to view any youtube stuff though.

Has anyone else in SF done a really heavy double-take when walking down 24th, just east of BART? There's an empty storefront there with some Streetlight signs on display, but on closer inspection they have a note saying that it's just an office, with no plans for a storefront there. How much of an office do they really need? And who ever heard of a record store having an office at a separate address anyway? Just open a store there... it's right by BART and I'll shop there every day I promise! Am I crazy or isn't that just the most obvious stupidly-simple thing to do when you're a retail business renting semi-prominent storefront retail space???

yep. saw that. and asked the guys in the castro streetlight. no dice.

i feel like if i start ranting about people who don't price their records i'll hurt my brother's feelings. ha! but most people who don't price their records haven't provided decades of entertainment to dozens of psych/noise fans the world wide, right? so i'll give him a pass. plus, he's got amazing records and gives people great deals. the only problem with his stores is that if you don't have 24 hours to spare you will cry cuz you will never see it all.

did i tell you guys about the deejay who came up on the train from brooklyn to my brother's store? my brother locked him in the store all night to dig. came back in the morning and the guy had a huge pile and hadn't slept a wink.

haha I spent a total of at least 6 hours over two days there when I was visiting my wife's family. the second time I focused on the 45s for a couple of hours. There was a whole room I couldn't do more than skim. And the pricing was quite fair as you note, so no complaints here.

many shops do use this no-pricing policy to make other people do the work, though, as noted on the other thread in a rant.

it really is crushing to go somewhere and see some great stuff that should be $3-$4 and they're pricing it $30-$40. i went into a used books/record shop in pasadena and saw bob seger's first LP on a shelf, pulled it out, it was $65(!) and in (maybe) VG condition.

yeesh!

Think the owner thought we were laughing at him, so for the next 2 minutes as we walked to our car, he hysterically laughed at us at the top of his lungs with a serious devil laugh.

he's been my downstairs neighbor for 14+ years. you should see his portion of the garage.