THE RUN-OUT GROOVE

Watching the CBS special on the 1968 “Game of the Century” between unbeaten UCLA and the University of Houston basketball teams got me remembering watching the game on the portable TV in my parents’ bedroom, probably on Channel 9 since the networks barely acknowledged the existence of college basketball back then.

Even for those days, the buildup was intense. UCLA had won 47 straight games and was ranked first, Houston second. Lew Alcindor missed the two games leading up to the showdown with a scratched cornea. And just to pump things up to an impossible level, the game was being played in the Astrodome. The Astrodome! Our minds reeled with the thought of a basketball court anchored in the infield with the fans, I don’t know, like five miles away from the court.

During the special, Elvin Hayes, the Houston center who completely outplayed Alcindor that night, reminisces that he and Alcindor were friendly and had once gone “record shopping.”

Record shopping.

I went record shopping with nearly every friend I had from high school on. With Mary when we were dating. After we got married. When I worked for the utility, I would take a company car and skip out for an hour or two to hit a record store across the road from one of our substations, where I’d park the car. Company business.

Check out the new releases, then the cut-out bins to see if anything cool had found its way there. And there was the internal discussion with the record hound in your head. Was this the time to buy the only Beatles record I was missing, the Yellow Submarine soundtrack? (not this time). This two-record greatest hits set by the Marvelettes, does it have “My Baby Must Be A Magician”? (buying it). Time to finally check out that Wes Montgomery Trio disc? (pass). Am I interested enough in this Springsteen cash-in, Welcome to Asbury Park, with songs by Jersey Shore artists, to buy it? (another pass).

When the first CD store opened around here (Square Circle at the Garden State Plaza in 1986) I entered cautiously and got the same feeling I have today when I drive through Hackensack. Everything is familiar, but somehow misplaced. There are houses and stores I recognize, but the context is out of whack. At Square Circle, albums were reduced to a size that fit in a coat pocket. And they were charging $18.99 for a disc? Seriously?

But it was more than just losing the end-product, the process was wrecked as well. Shopping for CDs had no mystery, no drama. All the stock was new, so you weren’t going to come across some weird, marked-down record like Drums of Passion by Olatunji. There were no CD 45s, no import section. The thrill was gone – and if you wanted the 45 version of BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone, you were going to have to look pretty hard to find it.

I’d hit the run-out groove, the dead space on an album between the last track and the label.

Those couple of years from the mid-eighties into the nineties marked a rocky transition if you were into these kinds of things. Ironically, there has been the comeback of vinyl albums, although I often suspect that story is more hype than anything. Their price today is pretty close to the $18.99 Square Circle once charged for CDs and those measly album displays in places like Barnes and Noble, and Bed, Bath and Beyond (Jesus, does anybody want to buy records there?) give them the feel of impulse buys, like the cold soda Home Depot sells by its checkout registers.

Too late for me. I moved on to CDs when their prices eventually dropped and the market for used CDs became a major retail sales driver. It was the music, the songs, I wanted, but when the record hound scratches nowadays, I just go online.  

Coming up: Part Two – the greatest record stores of all time.