THE INNER GROOVE, PART
2
Here’s part two,
looking at some great record stores.
Disc-O-Mat (River Edge): Like any good record store, Disc-O-Mat was the
proverbial rabbit hole, but in a literal sense as well: black walls, no windows
and the store itself circular shaped. It offered a great selection, priced right,
with no space wasted on classical or jazz; Disc-O-Mat knew its audience: all
rock and R&B. Two moments stand out. Public Image Ltd. was scheduled to
make an appearance on American Bandstand, highly anticipated as a seismic event
as two worlds collide – Johnny Rotten meets Dick Clark – and someone who worked
at the store brought in a television. (I left in time to watch it at home). While I’m sure the kid who
lugged in the TV only wanted to share this moment with his coworkers, his
bigger contribution was creating a connection with the customers and building a
sense of community. He should have been named Employee of the Month. The other
Disc-O-Mat moment came with Born to Run blasting over the store’s speakers. My
brain, which has heard the song 3,000 times, pushes it into the background. But
then something pulls it forward. When I expect the song to end, the last note
goes on, and on, then morphs into the droning note that opens Roger Daltrey’s
It’s A Hard Life (don’t worry, nobody else remembers it either). The two notes
are in the same key and if you appreciate that sort of thing, it was really
well done. The staffer responsible for this turntable wizardry walked out of
the back room of the store triumphant and to the high fives of his coworkers.
Another shoo-in for Employee of the Month.
J&R (New York City): My friend Paul and I made annual pilgrimages
here, always on the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving, to start the Christmas
season by giving gifts to ourselves. The Macy’s of music, J&R offered two
entire floors of records, plus an auxiliary store a few blocks away that
specialized in jazz. The stock spoke to the kind of diversity you’d expect of a
record store in Manhattan, with major sections devoted to third world music,
electronic and 12” inch dance singles. The blues department had a record bin
divider labeled “The Blinds,” to cover Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell and all those other sightless guys who felt
their way through music careers in the twenties and thirties.
Midnight Records (New York City): If you still had money left after
J&R, it was a quick drive up to West 23rd and the
remarkable Midnight Records. Think about the guys in the orange aprons at Home
Depot or the dudes posing inside Abercrombie & Fitch. If you
had a store
with the largest stash of imports, punk and garage rock records, maybe in the
world, what kind of staff would you hire? At Midnight, you brought the empty
album jacket to the counter, where the guy would look up from a cloud of
cigarette smoke and wordlessly hand the jackets to this sullen, scary,
hardcore-looking punk I thought was just hanging out, sitting in the window
drinking a 16-ounce beer. He took the jackets, went to the back room, got the
records. Nothing said. No eye contact. Did I mention their stock? Large enough
that Midnight had a mail-order catalog the size and heft of The Daily News.
Sam Goody (Paramus): Famous for the following: 45s stocked in their
cubbyholes in the same order as that week’s Billboard Hot 100. The staff’s
album reviews of offbeat import records, written on index cards and taped to
the jacket. The old guy who worked in the classical section and smoked a cigar,
which you could smell throughout the store. Great selection, but expensive.
Korvettes (Paramus): Ask anybody who remembers and they’ll tell you that
for a soulless discount department store, Korvettes had an amazing record
department, with label sales every week. Until Disc-O-Mat opened, this was the
place to go. I don’t even know what the rest of the store looked like. I always
entered through the pedestrian bridge that crossed Route 4, which took you
directly into the record department.
Upstairs Records (Morristown): Right on the Green and up a
steep flight of stairs, it existed for a year or two in the nineties. The owner
chain-smoked like mad and there was a carcinogenic fog hanging over the store
(actually a converted office). Mostly older, second-hand albums, but also a
bootleg nirvana. You had to steel yourself for the checkout, which could take
up to 45 minutes as the owner, who was probably lonely sitting there all day by
himself – I never saw any other customers – talked music. I’m sure the longest
conversation I ever had with anybody anywhere about the Souther, Hillman, Furay
Band was with him.
Relic Rack (Hackensack): My friends and I are in a bar across the highway
from Monticello Raceway, watching a woman with a big snake dance to Soul
Makossa, the record that briefly dropped into the Top 40 in 1973. Reminded of
the song’s greatness, I needed to buy it. The next day, I went to the Relic
Rack. Located downtown on Main Street, it stocked every 45 in the history of
civilization, including Soul Makossa. As with Disc-O-Mat, there was a tribal
sharing: on Saturday afternoons a bunch of older guys would hang out in the
store, listening to oldies. I went there looking for some record on May 10,
1982, the day WABC switched to an all-talk format (also known as “the day the
music died” and ironically the day my father died) and the owner was on the
phone frantically telling his wife to “just keep taping” WABC.
Harvest Festival (Denville): Each October, St. Clare’s Hospital thanked the
harvest gods for the season’s fruitful bounty with a festival that featured a
truck selling funnel cakes and yards of second-hand stuff – toys, books,
furniture, clothes and records – for sale. Three garage doors would swing open
on a Saturday morning and tens of thousands of albums saw the light of day for
the first time in seemingly decades. The stuff I found there was amazing. The
Folkswingers. Friar Tuck’s Psychedelic Guitar (sealed!). The Thunderball
soundtrack. The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV soundtrack. The stuff at the
back of the garage was shot from moisture and mildew, but it was also the piles
of records people had been picking over and rejecting for years, Mantovani and
20 Italian Favorites, stuff like that. The hospital still has a used book
store, which is as chaotic as those garages full of records were.
Vintage Vinyl (Woodbridge)/Princeton Record Exchange: The two heavyweight survivors. Vintage
Vinyl is a huge store with a great selection, if heavily tilted towards
“alternative” bands (and probably genres) I don’t know. Situated across the
street from a major PSE&G substation, I’d park a company car at the
substation, then cross the street to the store. The PREX, probably shouldn’t be
on this list since I’ve only bought CDs there. Princeton has a surprisingly
lousy selection of new CDs, but a tsunami of second-hand discs. Look hard
enough and you’ll always find something unique; you’ll also spot trends. The kids who owned a Nickelback or Collective Soul CD in the nineties did not keep
them into young adulthood. Seemingly every Howard Stern fan who bought the
Stuttering John Band CD had buyer’s remorse. All those bleak acoustic albums
Springsteen kept making in the nineties? They’re all collecting dust in
Princeton. The PREX was famous for its cool kid staff, who would often sneer at
the stuff you were buying. Somebody must have noticed and nowadays you’re
always greeted with a smile.
Honorable Mention: Crazy Rhythm (Montclair) had a sparse
selection but interesting bootlegs. Sound Exchange (Wayne) was crammed with
albums, but it was the owner’s pop culture museum in the store that made the
trip. Every board game and character lunchbox from the sixties and the only box
of Space Food Stix left on Earth. Flipside Records (Wanaque) was a hoarder’s
attic of haphazard records and tapes. The Villages at the Bergen Mall (Paramus)
was a weird collection of storefronts in the lower level. The record store was
the size of a bathroom and sold bootlegs and “collector’s items” like the
obligatory John and Yoko’s Two Virgins and the Bee Gees’ Odessa, with the red
velvet cover. Igor Records (Teaneck) was run by a couple of Eastern European
brothers; I’m sure one of them was Igor. Tower Records (Paramus) rivaled
J&R in size and scope, and published a free magazine every month full of
articles and reviews. Singers (Paramus) was a great place to browse as a kid
while Mom looked for clothes patterns.
