What's your fave rekkid store?

http://www.somanystyles.com/images/amoebalogo.jpeg
In Amoeba We Trust.

I heard that he was selling up or something - say it ain't so!

You do have to feel dirty in fopp though, as it really is just a modern day booksave, with different media.

rotterdam, demonfuzz records
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amsterdam, distortion records
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1/ Rasputin (San Jose, CA)
2/ Ameoba (Berkeley, CA)
3/ Encore (Ann Arbor, MI)

But I tend to shop in Fopp, One Up and The Cavern (all Aberdeen)

Also, the mail order service from Pure Groove is outstanding. I've ordered things at 4.30pm and had them reach me - 600 miles away - in the next morning's post.

No Sasha, my friend, Mark aint selling the store. He was going to, but wasn't happy with a deal or something and things fell through. Currently hes still working there, 11-6 weekdays and working his record label, which i may add, just recently made their 12th release to date since December's inception, Robin Fox's synaesthetic Backscatter DVD for prepared oscilliscope.

For those Melbournites interested, head down to Bennet's Lane (melbourne's shitty jazz club, unfortunately) this Sunday for the launch night of Ataxia (SYN009), the collaborative album of Pateras/Baxter/Brown

Unless you rate record stores by their selection of unfinished wood CD/DVD racks. Then Rasputin kills.

Treehouse (indie, punk, good vintage vinyl - the standard for Mpls record stores)

Let It Be (house techno selection on vinyl is great, good coverage of indie and great 60s-70s rock, r&b everything vinyl - Ad Rock from the Beasties once dropped thousands here in an afternoon)

Roadrunner (covers most indie, but specializes in wierd kraut, forgotten prog, etc...good old country usually too)

Electric Fetus (really good hip hop, covers the basics of all genres well)

Cheapo - larger warehouse, but great for picking up new stuff used (lots of djs + journos sells shit here it seems), vinyl section is HUGE and a big crapshoot, but you sometimes pick up some real gems for cheap --- New CD prices are a bit high though)

http://www.toronto.com/profile/125181

Best store(s) I've been to? Aquarius, Other Music, Mondo Kim's

I've strangely never gotten around to either, so...

Bent Crayon/Cleveland, OH [www.bentcrayon.com]

They have a lot of great, obscure music most other stores don't carry and usually in large quantities. Their mail order is usually quick. Their used bins are filled with tons of amazing shit dumped there by all the clueless/desperately poor critics living in NYC.

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i

I did, however, meet the guy from the band Funboy Five there.

And I totally don't remember but somebody just told me about the band that the guy who runs Rebel Rebel used to be in. Know what I'm talking about?

I'm not a big fan of the store either way.

I'd also like to pubically call bullshit on a store I've supported for a long time called Rocket Scientist. I never minded the owners attitude, I thought it was charming and often well founded. I've gone there periodically for a long time, I've bought expensive 7"s from boxes not on display, I'd asked for his advice and even purched a $100 dollar Syd Barrett bootleg CD set. Recently I went to the new St. Marks location, looked around, and asked him if he ever got the Slapp Happy/Henry Cow CD. His response "that's more of a Kims sort of thing."

How is the more of a Kims sort of thing? First of all, the way he said it implies that I hadn' even thought of looking elsewhere, and as if I was asking for MC freaking Hammer. Now, to anyone who knows their stock, how exactly is a Slapp Happy/Henry Cow CD NOT a Rocket Scientist type of CD? A store that has multiple Soft Machine bootlegs? Anyway, I found this frustrating enough to recall my support.

He also told me nobody would buy a Metal Urbain CD, that nobody would care about the Homosexuals, and so on...

Lauren Podis and I went there once and he read us excerpts from his novel.

That Don guy always seemed SO annoyed whenever I would go in there. I bought a little Danelectro mini-amp from him and felt like the guy was working really hard to be unfriendly. I always thought he and the See Hear guy should team up and open the ultimate retail clerk aloofness emporium.

Oh, I think I mentioned this story on another thread, but I was once going through CDs at that 24 hour fire-trap record store on Ave A and 6th street (can't summon the name right now) and I found an enormous, dangerous looking, live spider crawling around in there. I screamed like a schoolgirl, and the punky chick running the place put it in her hand and ran out of the store to free the spider in the park across the way.

Finally, I once found two $20 bills at the Sam Goody in Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, MD.

Rocket Scientist is now on the north side of St. Marks btw 2nd and 3rd, after many years on Carmine. For the record, the owner was once one of the main guys at Venus records during it's 8th street hey-day.

I can see how Don could go either way, maybe since I befriended him, but he's always been super nice to me.

Accidental Records, I think is the store on A.

For the record, I haven't been to too many record stores worldwide, but the big Reckless in Chicago when I was there summer of 96 was the best shopping I ever did. And Princeton around 95 when they still had tons(or maybe just got some) of cheap Rough Trade 7"s.

dan, how are your negotiation skills?

Don's sounds like Atomic Records in Glendale, CA (suburban LA).

the SF store is 3 times bigger with better selection and deeper catalog titles. but when Amoeba was just Berkeley I would hit it sometimes 2x in one weekend visit.

and i still, despite myself, sort of think of all these places as necessary evils.

rocket scientist is weird. is it still open?

Heheh. And with them you'd be able to just afford two incredibly overpriced pieces of mass-produced pop shit on cd at the same store, no?

Xpost bill heheheh

And Hstencil, I can't believe you didn't mention gramophone! Best store for DJs I've ever been to, some of the most nice and helpful staff....

Ohio
-Used Kids, Columbus. Never found alot there except for some nice cheapo country albums and the occasional oddball thing or two but incredibly nice folks in my experience.

-Bent Crayon, Cleveland. I went there a few months after they opened and didn't really care for it. the guy who ran the store was nice enough but didn't seem to know assholes from apricots (as we like to say in virginia)visited again a couple years later and they seemed to have shifted from a whatever-is-in-the wire magazine-this month selection to mostly dance stuff which suited me just fine.

a bunch of other great shops in Cleveland i can't recall the names of. A great place i think somewhere in Lakeside I found a copy of NWW's Soliloquy of Lilith box for $20 around 94 and some other similar stuff on the cheap. There was another place that was sort of an industrial/anything by wax trax sort of place run by an older guy with multiple piercings with a huge german shepard who could've been mistaken for Al Jourgenson on a good day where I found a copy of This Heat's Health and Effieciency for $5. Another was a mostly punk store that was fairly good sized that had boxes of 45's strewn around the place with an amazing selection of oddball proto-punk and d.i.y. stuff amongst the generic punk and hardcore has-beens. I remember picking up a bunch of Rough Trade stuff like Dr.Mix,Liliput,Kleenex and two Red Crayola singles for about $3 each.

Papa Jazz, or something like that in South Carolina. Bought an armful of FMP/Incus/El Saturn stuff for a fraction of what it'd cost today around 89,90 maybe.

When I lived in north Louisiana there were a handful of used record stores whose stock had been sitting for years and the owners were only interesting in mono-pressings of Cream or Prog or whatever, where i bought 80% of the krautrock I own for dollars a piece. Amon Duul? that'll be a dollar kid but that Zappa record will set you back $35.
New Orleans had some great stores the best of which were in the worst of neighborhoods. Went to a rundown old store that stocked only old jazz albums and discovered their backroom doubling as a weekend flea market space with more Impulse titles than I've ever laid eyes on for dollars a piece. I still dream of that place and lament how broke I was that day.

Reckless in Minneapolis was fantastic. as already mentioned san francisco was and is a treasure trove but especially in the late eighties and early nineties. L.A. was a wasteland except for finding a bunch of artifacts label releases and two homosexuals 45's at a store where the dipshit owner made bleecker bob seem as personable as fred rogers. Pier Platters in Hoboken nearly made me wet myself the first and only time I visited there. Vinyl Ink in maryland i used to make regular treks to. They were overpriced on some stuff (any record that hung on the wall) and ridiculously underpriced on nearly all the rest of their used vinyl. I'll neglect to go into detail about what a first-class prick the owner George could be since he's passed on. Could also ocassionally find some great deals at Yesterday and Today records, in Rockville i think.

countless more i'm forgetting but I'm afraid digging out my little black book of record stores i used to keep will give me a nostalgia attack.

sadly i know live on a mountain and the nearest city with an even passable at best record store is an hour and a half away so mail order is all the shopping i have to look forward to and that's only when the UPS driver feels like braving the one-lane gravel road up the mountain.

incidentally does your email address refer to that situationist detournement of a kung-fu film?

not to mention yr beloved arthur russell.

yesterday at Other Music I heard an employee talk about how the vinyl was out of stock, sporto.

There's this place called Shooting Stars out in Dundee, not far from Spring Hill Mall. This fella who looks like Trey Anastasio runs it. Tons, tons of old used vinyl for very reasonable prices, and a pretty fair amount of the new stuff as well.

Full Cyrkle Records in Crystal Lake, which has a really good vinyl selection, mostly old stuff and audiophile, and an enormous selection of 7" records. Huge.

Record Breakers out in Hoffman Estates, which is overpriced but they have a shitload of stuff and a much-improved vinyl selection last time I was there.

Also a nostalgic shout out to a tiny record shop that I frequented several times a week in Irvine in Scotland, called Orion records. Derek the owner was a lovely chap, realy sociable and patient with endless hangers-on (like myself).
I got to know that store's stock on a macro level, so any new interesting thing that came in was a revelation. I wonder if it still exists? Anyone from Irvine on ILM?

One of these might be Chris' Warped Records on Detroit in Lakewood. Probably the latter. There's also Platter Puss on the other end of Lakewood, which always got a lot of import-only stuff, and the owner (whose name escapes me) is super congenial and gives you a discount if you pay cash. Record Revolution in Coventry has a huge collection of jazz on vinyl in the basement, and local music on the main floor.

Just a thought... Happy hunting, you wacky consumers!

As for you, Duke, your comment is not exactly accurate. A properly encoded digital file sounds virtually identical to its analogue (or digital) source. What, you've got an oscilliscope hooked up to your stereo? Wow, I need to look into that! No offense, but I'm almost positive you'd flat out fail any audiophile listening test. As would all of us.

but you're missing the joy that is to be had from holding the old artifacts, from being the first person in yr circle to have a certain album, etc. collecting is fun, and it's our goddamned money to do with as we choose. okay, so maybe i am living with my mom... at least i have a killer record collection! ha!!

I have a better idea. Why not license the music for re-release, thus promoting the music and getting the artist paid?

And not to speak for everyone, but I'd imagine most of us aren't living hand-to-mouth on our ex-girlfriend's sofas. I have just enough disposable income that I like to send a few hundred dollars to Other Music every now and again to purchase music I want to hear.

I tend to shop at record stores that are owned and operated by people I consider friends. And by supporting them, I'm also supporting an infrastructure that allows artists I like to have an outlet for their material to be sold, gives artists/labels an idea of a city they can play on tour because they know their albums will reach people, etc.

So I see a few posts up there about Vintage Vinyl in Evanston. Had to drop off a package at the post office just down the block, so I thought I'd pop in to see what damage the economy has done to this horrible, horrible shop. The verdict? Nothing. Absolutely nothing has changed. Everything is still ridiculously overpriced, I don't think I saw a single piece of vinyl priced under $30. What kills me is the way the owners justify it, a fairly weathered copy of Neil Young's After the Goldrush was priced at $35. Why? Because, "ORIGINAL 1970 PRESSING!!!!". Which would be one thing, if it was just all crazy overpriced thrift store fodder, but the store actually carries an impressive selection of kraut and psych stuff. Just about every Can album and related side-project, Kraftwerk's first two albums, but not a single one of those priced under $50. Just insanity. I'm shocked that this place is still going in 2009. Oh yeah, saw a sizable section of Steely Dan CDs, every single one of them were $40 burnt copies of bootlegs with shoddy artwork. Stunning really that this place is still going.

ha, jon go to this thread: the pathos of unsold stock , we were just talking about this kind of thing

jon - last time I was in there I looked around and silently cursed the high prices. Lurch was eyeballing me the whole time and seemed to be mad about something - I added insult to injury by buying a single 45 rekkid adapter and left immediately!

Haha, yeah he was eyeballing me too! You could tell he had this look on his face like "this guy isn't going to buy a damn thing, is he?". Of course not!

Here in Chicago I like Laurie's, too, and this place around the corner from me called Deadwax. The latter's prices are always good - $4 to $6 for used vinyl in really good shape. My kind of shop.

Reckless is cool but the other day I saw a used copy of The Wall with some writing on the front for $15. I can't abide that. It sold like 10 million copies on LP, come on. Most vinyl at Reckless is about $3 more than I want to pay.

lol the only fun thing abt vintage vinyl is that one time i ran into billy corgan there

lmao @ my hating on reckless records upthread ... im friends w/ one of the employees now too \oO/

lauries is cool & has saved me from bouncing checks at my bank (by letting me quickly sell CDs) but man id like to see a more non-rock friendly selection sometimes

is deadwax the place on lincoln just east of damen? that place is great, got a bunch of 70s santana in there for under 15 bucks

reckless is great for used / 1.99 vinyl finds. my friend found a dollar bin joint there the other day that sells for like $80 on ebay. they go through so much more stock than anyone else its easy for good stuff to slip by them

i mean, it helps if u like 80s R&B and other not-yet-trendy-enough stuff. basically luther vandross' entire catalog is dollar bin material atm