CHAPTER TEN

OUR FAVORITE SHOPS

Every vinyl junkie of a certain age went to that same record department, they just found it in a different store in a different city. Long before the Internet supposedly brought everybody together, we were getting the same signals in different cities. It could have been Big Scott’s in the Bronx or a family-run store in the Midwest, but the record department was basically the same. And which part of the store you gravitated to could say a lot about where you went later in life. There was a time, for instance, when I wouldn’t go near an early Frank Zappa album, Weasels Ripped My Flesh because it had the grisliest cover art I’d ever seen: a grinning guy using a bloodthirsty rodent for a shaving razor. Meanwhile, in another part of New York, a preteenage Thurston Moore was buying that album for the very same reason.

“Records like that always drew me in,” says Moore. “I‘here were records in the store that I always gravitated toward. I’d see something like Weasels Ripped My Flesh and think, ‘Well, this is really something that you don’t see everywhere. What is this? What’s going on here?’ It was a wild hippie, youth-culture kind of thing, and I wasn’t of the age where it was my culture, it was something older. I had an older brother who influenced me in record collecting, he’d stack his records on top of his dresser, vertically. Even though he wasn’t real hardcore, he started buying records before me and got me interested. He had maybe twenty of them, things like Beggars Banquet and Abbey Road, some Jefferson Airplane. It was so cool to see them stacked up like that—I was thinking, ‘Man, in about a year those are going to be stacked up to the ceiling.’ I was already collecting comic books, so I had collector fever before records. I liked the organizational aspect of it. I have that quirk where everything has to be filed and organized.”

His band, Sonic Youth, went on to produce its share of beautifully scary album covers, to say nothing of the music inside—and that die was likely cast when Moore brought his first records home. “I could only afford them every now and then. The first was In-a-Gadda-da-Vida (by Iron Butterfly), maybe in 1971. Now, that isn’t a great record, but it is a weird, dark record in its way. Records were three dollars in the local Woolworth’s, and I could tell by looking that it was going to be a heavy record. It almost didn’t matter what the music was, you could go home and study the vinyl and the grooves.” As anyone who bought the thing will attest, the side-long title track of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida had a long stretch of alternating loud/soft sections with a lengthy drum solo, which meant that the vinyl had a range of dense gray and sleek black shades: a perfect disc for extended groove-gazing.

A record with a three-dimensional cover was even better, and the Rolling Stones provided one. Moore wasn’t the first to buy Their Satanic Majesties Request on the basis of the sleeve alone. “I wasn’t even sure whose record it was. My mom said, ‘Who’s it by?’ and I didn’t know. I thought it might have been the Rolling Stones but the script on the cover was so weird, and I didn’t want to be wrong. That’s another frightening record musically. Unlike In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, I thought it was really fascinating. But I’m pretty sure I got it for the cover, the fact that it looked so arcane in the face of all those other records. It was one of those little bastions of unknown information, and I was super-intrigued by it.”

 

 

My own first record store wasn’t even a record store. It was a small corner of a Montgomery Ward department store, out on an industrial park near an IBM plant. It occupied the furthest corner of the store; to get there you had to pass through the long stretches of kitchenware and garden hoses. When it got close to Christmas they’d set up an expanded toy section just next to the records—the bright colors from the holiday spreads blending nicely with the psychedelic album jackets next door—and in my preteen years I’d have no qualms about hanging there for hours at a time.

The back cavern of a big store was an appropriate place to tuck a department that held so many secrets. The atmosphere of the place would change every couple of weeks, when they’d put a new half-dozen albums into the front display. It was a dull week when they’d make a gesture for the parents and put some Robert Goulet records up there. If there were more people than usual, it would probably mean that the Beatles had decided to release something. But I’d already become partial to a few lesser-known bands that I’d either seen on TV or read about in teen magazines (in the era when 16 or Tiger Beat might have the Doors and the Monkees on the same page, with Jim Morrison and Micky Dolenz striking some variation of the same soulful pose), so you’d find me in the corners thumbing through the neglected treasures: Paul Revere & the Raiders, who were mean as the Stones but nearly as catchy as the Beatles, and had far better costumes than either, were my cult heroes of choice. I was partial to an album called Revolution!, which showed the five Raiders in their preferred costumes—Revolutionary War by way of Carnaby Street—pouring tea on the porch of a house that looked like one of the many old-world houses in the quiet, dull patch of upstate New York where I lived. Of course, it was anyone’s guess what that tea was spiked with, and it looked like the Raiders were on a mission to liven up my sleepy rural existence.

I wasn’t allowed to buy more than an album a month, but the covers were nearly as good. Who needed to hear the music when you could gawk at the first Mamas & the Papas album, with the four group members crouched in a bathtub, barely suggesting sexual issues that we twelve-year-olds had yet to figure out? For that matter, I can thank Blind Faith for the first naked female body I ever saw depicted. The record racks had their good guys and bad guys—there were the odd Frank Zappa discs, the scary faces that scowled at you from the cover of We’re Only In It For the Money, to fuel your budding cynicism. But most of all, there were those splashy, flowery-colored album covers. It could be a legit classic like the Beach Boys’s Wild Honey, or something trivial like the Sunshine Company, but there would be those trippy colors, twelve square inches of Day-Glo radiating peace and love. Seems silly now, but at the time they at least promised that there would be more to life than kitchenware and garden hoses.

If you were ten when the ’60s counterculture peaked, you were 20 when punk rock hit and set off a new wave of collecting. This time it wasn’t your older brother or sister’s culture, it was your own. And you didn’t find the records in the department stores your parents frequented, but at a funkier spot in your own neighborhood. Punk rock was fuelled by a certain us-vs.-them mentality. You couldn’t hear the new music on the big radio stations or buy it at Caldor’s, so you’d discover a college station and an independent store.

For me it was Main Street Records in Northampton, which occupied part of the second floor of a hippie-esque mini-mall. There was a place that sold organic perfumes on the first floor, another had natural Chinese food. Main Street was a glorified clubhouse where every local student with a music jones would meet up on Saturday afternoons. On anniversary weekends they’d break out free champagne, which caused many an impromptu shopping spree. But they had the records you really wanted; nobody from the mall chains was going to send an order to England for the new Gang of Four single. One day before Christmas 1979, the first import copies of the Clash’s London Calling showed up at Main Street before any of my gang knew it was coming (the American one wouldn’t come out for another two months). It was perfect fodder for your bohemian lifestyle, or at least for your college radio show. One tasteless punk single I picked up, “Sit On My Face, Stevie Nicks” by the Rotters, was enough to keep the phone calls coming for weeks. To paraphrase an old Tom Lehrer album: Of all the songs I ever played on college radio, this was the one I got the most requests not to.

 

 

At that point living in Connecticut, Thurston Moore went to New York to find one of those stores, in the heart of Greenwich Village. “What happened with punk was that certain stores were devoted specifically to it. Bleecker Bob’s on Macdougal Street was the church of buying punk-rock records. I remember being there when ‘New Rose’ [by the Damned] came out, and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on a seven-inch. The owner would fly over to England and bring records back personally, and you would just buy everything regardless of who the artist was. It wasn’t until 1977 that I felt I was buying things that were involved with who I was directly—The Ramones, Patti Smith and Television were all older than me, but I knew it was closer to me personally. Even though I wasn’t hanging out on the Bowery, there was a certain vibe going on that I could catch; the bands were playing and I could actually see them. It wasn’t like trying to listen to the Allman Brothers, or ELP, who were way beyond my age and experience.”

Punk rock was full of ironies, not the least of which was that this anti-capitalist movement brought record collecting back with a vengeance. The landmark English punk single, the Sex Pistols’s “Anarchy in the UK,” was also an instant collectible, since it was banned and withdrawn by the time most Americans heard about it. Later came the Stiff label—home of Elvis Costello, the Damned, and Ian Dury—which fueled collectors’ fever by screwing with label design, scratching secret messages into the run-out grooves, and immediately deleting the odd single to create a rarity. And if you cared about such things, the music was also really good.

As Moore notes, ’50s and ’60s collectibles were created by accident. Some rare performance or unique label design would get issued without much thought and the item would get discovered later. But by the time new wave happened, people had had enough “historical resonance” with records that they self-consciously created collectibles. “Punk rock gave you the idea of buying things of a series. You could see that labels like Stiff came from a certain design sensibility. New wave was about making collectibles, but a lot of it had to do with your financial stability. I always had to pinch money from my mother’s purse before I drove off to New York. I’d take twenty dollars so I’d have enough money for a Damned album and maybe a sandwich. During the ’80s I wound up with so many punk rock singles, ones that would command a couple hundred bucks now. They’re the ones that show up on the CD compilations now, and there’s nothing like having an original copy, but at the time I had to sell them on St. Mark’s Place for cigarette money.”

Tours with Sonic Youth have been a more dependable source of fuel for the collection. “It’s funny, but a lot of the jazz records I’m looking for are found in Japan. That’s the one place on earth that has more highly collectible records than anywhere; it’s a collector’s dream and nightmare in one dose. You can find whatever you’re looking for over there—there are maps, three-hundred-page booklets that list all the record stores in Japan, but you have to decode and decipher them. In Tokyo alone there are one hundred different vinyl stores. Last time I went there I remember looking down from the plane and thinking, ‘This is a little island. How can it be such an intensified bastion of record stores?’ What I’d do is fill up every corner of my suitcase and my guitar bag; I’d completely line my amp case with records. Then I’d ship a bunch of boxes and get the record label to pay for shipping. I’d say, ‘We’ve got a bunch of Sonic Youth source material here.’”

Perhaps out of sympathy, he hasn’t pulled the Stiff trick of making instant collectibles out of his own records. “I don’t like to make collectibles, but we’ve done certain things that are maybe spurred on by the label for business reasons, like ‘Europe wants a ten-inch of this single.’ And I’ve done a couple of things on my own label that came out with five hundred copies and disappeared within a year. But I only do that because I don’t want to wind up with ten thousand copies in my basement.”

 

 

Twenty years before punk, ten years before the Beatles, New York and its record stores had a different rhythm. This time the music wasn’t coming from England, it was coming from down the street. If you happened to live in New York during the late ’50s, and you were hip enough to be into doo-wop and other early stirrings of rock ’n’ roll, you didn’t have to go to a Montgomery Ward to get the music. You could go to Times Square and buy it from the source.

One of the city’s legendary outlets, The Times Square Record Shop, occupied an underground corner of Canal Street and Broadway from 1959–62. You’d go there on a Sunday afternoon, when the middle-aged, bespectacled owner, the late Irving “Slim” Rose, wasn’t busy with his other gig running a jewelry store. The place became a hangout for record producers and DJs, so it also attracted groups and record promoters looking for the big break. There might be a few doo-woppers harmonizing in the corner, and there’d definitely be a few leather-jacketed punks crowding the stairs. And there’d be Slim cranking the music he loved—usually the kind of emotive streetcorner soul with a high tenor wailing on top. The store wound up spinning off its own Times Square label, by some accounts, the first label devoted solely to doo-wop. It ran from 1960 to 1962, and there are now a few bootleg compilations devoted to its output.

The scene at Times Square changed a few lives, and Peter Wolf is living proof. Before he came to Boston and wound up touring the world with the J. Geils Band, Wolf was a New York hipster who put in long hours at Times Square as a preteen. “Records became a part of my existence,” he recalls. He was barely into adolescence when he heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” coming from a neighbor’s house in the Bronx. “From the window I heard this sound that totally captivated me—‘Don’t make me so lonely I could die.’ My dad was a musician, so records were a part of my world, but at that point it just hit. I walked to the local record store, and the guy told me, ‘You’re the 20th person that’s come in asking for that,’ I had to wait until the end of the week before he got it back in.”

Weekly trips to Times Square fed his passion. “You’d get off the subway and you’d see all the doo-woppers hanging out there, trading records. You’d see Paul Simon, Dion, all those cats down there. It was Birdland for record collectors, a cultural center, people saying ‘I’ll give you two of those for one of that.’ Something about those labels has a transfixing power for me … Gone, End, Chess, Specialty. It was magic. I wound up spending $2.50 for a record, and you just didn’t do that. It was one I still have, ‘My Heart’s Desire’ by the Wheels.”

Wolfs shadowy figure has become a familiar sight to anyone who frequents nightspots in Boston: he still looks impressively bohemian in his black garb and ever-present shades. He was an all-night disc jockey on Boston’s WBCN before he was a rock star, and still draws from the spirit of radio when it was great. On the dedication to his latest album, .Sleepless, Wolf imagines that broadcast waves are still swirling in space, beaming the voices of Elvis, Hank Williams, and Sam Cooke into the cosmos, creating “an eternal legacy of voices and songs … on a sleepless journey.” On an afternoon drive through Boston, recently, it seemed his own car radio played nothing but sweet, vintage soul from a few decades earlier. Okay, so it was actually a cassette that a DJ friend had made, but you could be excused for thinking that he’d tapped into those enchanted airwaves.

His Boston apartment looks like a shrine to music fandom. As you walk through the door you find his book collection in the front alcove, and sitting right at eye level is a row of five books sharing one word in the title: “Elvis.” However, his most impressive souvenirs are ones that most collectors will never get to see. He shows a postcard that he knows will grab my attention. It was mailed to him in 1968, signed by one Mongo Morrison. He’s been hanging out in a “rustic, groovy” part of New York, and wants you to come see him in town next month. A photo of the two together confirms the sender’s identity. One-time Boston resident Van Morrison, at that point working on the songs that would become the landmark album Astral Weeks. Hell, he may have scribbled the first lyrics to “Madame George” within minutes of writing this postcard. I handle with great care.

His records cover the walls of his main room; nicely organized with the fancy CD boxed sets on an exposed shelf. His huge middle room doesn’t have a lot of reclining space, but every corner has something to play music on: a vintage jukebox propped up near the window, a new CD player at the other end, a turntable sitting right on the middle table. Shut away in cabinets just above the floor are the vintage singles, including a few boxes’ worth that he’s carried around for most of his life. He played them on his radio show (and still does, when he does one of his annual guest broadcasts) and worked up some of the songs with the J. Geils Band, who introduced them to another generation of budding R&B fans. And yes, some of those are the same well-traveled singles he bought on Times Square four decades ago. Wolf’s archives are home to some undisputed rock/soul masterpieces. But the disc he’s about to play is definitely not one of them.

“Sometimes you find a little oddball record,” he notes as he cranks up the turntable, his face showing the hint of a grin. He shows me the 45’s sleeve, which lists no artist and gives no info beyond the title: “Stickball—A Bit of Nostalgia.” It starts with a heavenly choir, and turns into one of those urban-funk grooves that were all over the radio during the Shaft and Superfly era. The narrator’s got one of those deep-soul voices, doing one of those monologues about how groovy it was to grow up with friends in the projects, “sharing popcorn and grooving with your ice cream.” Definitely got some camp value, but so far I have no idea why anyone with a world-class soul collection would be playing me this. “Love between two people is outta sight,” notes the narrator. “But love between FIVE people—that’s a groove! Especially if I’m one of those five!” The record takes a fast train south from there, as the narrator makes absolutely no bones about what he wants his four partners to do to which parts of him, where and how hard. “The preceding program was brought to you by the makers of Shit,” announces the nameless guy over the fadeout, getting in one more offense for the road. Now Wolf is really grinning.

The hell with Woodstock, here’s why the late ’60s were great. You could hear this thing on a commercial radio station, providing you tuned in during the wee hours. Try a stunt like that nowadays, and your station’s corporate office would ride you out of town on a rail. Even Wolf doesn’t know who was behind this, which adds to its charm (for the record, you can still find it on a CD compilation called Naughty Rock ’n’ Roll, where the artist is listed as P-Vert). Wolf says it came out in response to the Beatles’s “All You Need is Love,” which makes some kind of twisted sense. “The great thing was playing this on the radio. Who’d be listening at 4:30 A.M. except the real congregation?”

That single now resides in one of his stashed-away boxes, along with the other discs that have the longest tenure in his collection. And carrying them around wasn’t as easy in the days before CDs. Just imagine a band crowded into a tour bus trying to work a record player. “I used to travel with a phonograph during the days of the J. Geils Band, and a few album boxes. It got a lot easier with the advent of cassettes.” Rather than bragging about hits he had with the J. Geils Band, he’ll note that he turned other folks on to the R&B that he loves. “That was one of the greatest things about being in the Geils Band. For instance, when I see a Dyke & the Blazers CD reissue and it’s called ‘So Sharp’ [after a song that the Geils Band covered], I know we helped popularize that group.”

Wolfs 45s are clearly records that have been lived with: The discs themselves are in playable shape, but the covers are shot to hell. And the song titles read like messages from another time—like this single by Chuck Higgins, with the song titles printed in bold capitals: On one side, “I NEED YOUR LOVE,” on the other, “OH YEAH.” “You’ve gotta know this song,” he says handing me a copy of “Love-Itis” by Harvey Scales and the 7 Sounds. In fact, I know it because Wolfs own version was a favorite of mine during high school. His remake is still pretty cool, but it didn’t have the brilliant label design of Scales’s single: it’s on Magic Touch Records, and the label shows a grinning rabbit waving a wand.

There’s a visual flair in most of these singles that sets you up for the music; they’re already blasting before you start playing them. The original Mercury single of “Tryin’ to Get to You” by the Eagles (no, not those Eagles) has a screaming, Day-Glo pink label. For a meaningful, patriotic touch, he pulls out “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” by Elton Britt & the Dominoes—an RCA single with a patriotic red-and-white label. Wolf can hear something in this, but I sure can’t: it’s a country-ish stinker with a kitschy, dramatic delivery. Then again, it would probably be mistaken for a major statement nowadays. My own idea of a real statement is something like the next single turn up: “That’s Where It’s At,” by an artist listed as “Lots a Poppa—420 Pounds of TNT.” It’s on the Tribe label, whose logo is a dimesture-type, politically incorrect Indian in headdress. You don’t really have to ask whether the record’s any good or not.

Wolf hands over a record with some personal value, explaining that “My first true love found this for me. She rescued it from a barbeque joint that burned down in the Bronx.” She couldn’t have found a more perfect record: with its deep-blue label and the titles on proud display, this disc already speaks volumes about the pains of young love. It’s Little Willie John on the Chess label, with “Do You Love Me”/“Heartbreak (It’s Hurtin’ Me).”

“Unless they get broken, you never let these things go,” he says. For him, the old singles are the quickest route back to the buzz he got in Times Square. He could have found most of these songs on CD reissues, or burned a CD compilation of his own, but it wouldn’t be the same. “I get something out of just holding these records,” he says. “When I take ’em out, I’m not into putting them back right away. I get into a listening jag with certain things, especially when you get into the bottle and people come by. I love CDs because they preserve the music, but there’s a richness and uniqueness that those original records had. So this”—he holds up a select single from the pile—“is the Holy Grail.”

It’s “Honkin’ at Midnight” by Frank Motley & His Motley Crew (no, not that Mötley Crüe), which he pronounces “just a great rock ’n’ roll record.” What blasts out is a really rude gutteral sax, a rhythm section that’s gonna fall over any minute, and a singer barking out a bunch of exhortations: “Come in brother and blow you horn! I wanna honk some mo’!” I can’t say whether the thirty-plus years of wear on the grooves has added to the overall effect, but it sure doesn’t hurt. “Whoo!” Wolf lets out one of his trademark yelps, getting into the music as if he’s onstage. They’re supposed to get the pulse racing and the blood level jumping. In this impromptu house party, they’ve just worked once again.