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.