Another retail eulogy 

I found my destination, located among shops that sold pagers and had window signs in Spanish, on a main boulevard and tried to park as close as possible to the storefront. Irvington was a pretty iffy place, part of the New Jersey cradle of crime, along with Newark, Elizabeth and East Orange. But unlike most white suburban guys, I wasn’t there to score drugs, but records.

Despite the name, Vintage Vinyl primarily sold new records and in the days before internet shopping, it had an amazing selection crammed into the confines of a pretty small space. I spent a small fortune that afternoon coming across stuff that you’d never find in any shopping center record store, including double albums by Husker Du and the Minutemen – at least that’s what I remember buying. There was more.

Vintage Vinyl eventually moved to Fords, right off the Parkway and Route 1, into a much larger store that allowed for an even greater selection of records. When I worked for the electric utility, I’d check out a company car, park next to the big substation across the street from the store (nobody was going to question a PSE&G car) and spend some time there. (When Forbidden Planet, the NYC comic book store, briefly opened an annex next store to Vintage Vinyl, it was like the call of the Sirens).

Nirvana right off the Garden State Parkway

The store’s tagline was “From the obscure to the obvious” (or maybe it was the other way around). When I heard some weird independent music on WFMU that I needed to have, there were two options. Order it from Midnight Records in NYC and wait two weeks for delivery or drive over to Vintage Vinyl and have it that afternoon. That covers the obscure. On a summer Friday in 2014, I left work early to buy the CSNY ’74 live boxset, which had come out that week, at the Princeton Record Exchange. New, much-hyped set by a major group. They didn’t have it. I was already in Central Jersey and I wanted the thing, so I found my way to Vintage Vinyl. There it was, just waiting for me. Obviously.

Vintage Vinyl is closing at the end of this July. It looks as if the owner is closing the store on his own terms and it’s not another of those pandemic-related or nobody’s buying physical music anymore stories. He kept it going for 42 years, a great run for a record store in this day and age. 

Right now, at my current job, I’m only twenty minutes or so from Vintage Vinyl, which is having a storewide sale. I could drive over at lunch and maybe park in the substation lot for old times, but I don’t work for the utility anymore, and I’d probably get a ticket. I will get over there soon.

 

 

The first, best, worst, etc.

I came across this exercise about live music in another blog, and realized I stumbled across an easy way to update my own blog without having to burn through too many brain cells.

First concert: After my mother won tickets in a WNEW drawing, we saw Tony Bennett perform at an outdoor bandstand at FreedomLand Amusement Park. My memory of this show is a little vague; I’d guess it was sometime in ’63 or ’64.

Last concert: Dwight Yoakam at the Morristown Center for Performing Arts in August 2019 – which means we’re coming up on two years without live music.

Best concert: It changes all the time, but today it’s the Talking Heads in 1980 at the skating rink in Central Park. Held during a memorable New York City heat wave – the temperature hit 97 degrees that afternoon and guys were selling “Welcome to The Baked Apple” t-shirts in the street – the weather perfectly suited the Heads’ new music, which was somewhere between urban funk and African pop. The band was expanded to include musicians from Funkadelic, plus avant-garde guitar virtuoso Adrian Belew of King Crimson. The entire show was cool enough that after a while you forgot how hot and heavy the air was.

I wish I'd picked up one of these

Worst concert: A tossup between Frank Zappa at the Palladium in the early 80s – a bore, plus one of the worst audiences ever and an overflowing toilet in the men’s room – and the Allman Brothers at Roosevelt Stadium in 1974, who couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the audience. Even a “Hello, Jersey City” would have been nice.

Loudest concert: Not so much the concert as the opening act for Radiohead at the Prudential Center, a band called Caribou. The place was only about a quarter full when they came on and their music, loud to begin with, just reverberated off the mostly empty concrete stands.

Seen the most: Ten times for Neil Young. Once solo, with four different backing bands (including Crazy Horse twice), paired with Stephen Stills and three times with Stills, Crosby and Nash. We had tickets for an eleventh show at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, NY, before a band member mangled his hand (caught in a closing tour bus door was the story) and they had to cancel.

Most surprising: In the days before YouTube and setlists.com, you seldom knew just what to expect when you bought tickets for a show. I may have had some knowledge of the details around Neil Young’s 1978 Rust Never Sleeps show at the Garden, but the Alice in Wonderland meets Star Wars meets Woodstock theme that ran through the evening was at times spectacular, and strangely endearing.

Rust Never Sleeps: Neil Young surrounded by giant amps

Not a live show, but seeing a grouchy-looking Lou Reed in the audience at Carnegie Hall for a Brian Wilson concert was kind of surprising. 

Wish I’d seen: I had tickets for George Harrison at the Nassau Coliseum in 1974. I also had a mid-term exam the following day in a class that I guess I wasn’t feeling too confident about, so I sold the tickets to a friend and stayed home to study. I guess I had my priorities straight at the time, but in hindsight, yeeesh. Did I mention Ravi Shankar opened the show?

Unfulfilled bucket list: Bob Dylan, Otis Redding …

Next concert: Who knows?