In Brooklyn, I once dated a guy who actually loved digging through dusty bins of used records even more than I do. He was an old hand at finding stores where you could ferret out records on the cheap, like the junk store in Greenpoint so crammed with old records that you could barely stand up without brushing up against vinyl.
On wonderfully aimless weekends in the summer, we would get brunch at Eat Records, a vegetarian cafe that also sold used records and turntables, and then drift over to McCarren Park to watch some rock shows from the gigantic abandoned swimming pool there.
When I think of a record player, I think of the baby Numark turntable we picked up one afternoon at Academy Records on North 6th Street. He insisted that I needed a record player, and the suitcase Numark was tiny, but well-sized for New York City apartments. He biked all the way back to my apartment with the box under one arm.
When I moved from Brooklyn to the Bay Area, I sold the Numark along with many of my records and the extremely breakable collection of shellac 78s I had started to collect. And every time I passed a San Francisco record store, I would make myself walk past the stacks because there was, after all, no reason to stop in. Could I still be a record collector if I didn’t have a record player anymore?
That question became irrelevant when my boyfriend surprised me with a brown Crosley suitcase record player for my birthday this year. The night I got it, I opened up the canvas bag of records I had saved from Brooklyn and listened to all of the records I own back to back, from IDA to The Breeders. I looked forward to having a reason to linger at thrift stores and sidewalk sales, at brick-and-mortar record stores otherwise rendered obsolete by the digital revolution.
This weekend I made my way to the KUSF Rock n’ Swap, where a $3 admission fee bought hours of time with hundreds of bins full of used vinyl. The event was a fifth of the size of the record convention I had attended in New York, but my canvas bag was full of new music when I left the event, and my hands were covered in dust from the digging.
The spoils (total cost $30, 2/3 of which was the cost of the Sonic Youth record):
- Blues Classics By Memphis Minnie – Recordings From 1929 to 1946 (Blues Classics/Arhoolie Records)
- The Great Benny Goodman (Columbia Records)
- Nina Simone at the Village Gate (Colpix Records)
- Sonic Youth – Master Dik / Tuna Brix (Youth Riot Records – Rare ’87 Demo)
- Fats Domino “When I See You/What Will I Tell My Heart” 7′Inch (Imperial Records)
- Michelle Shocked – Campfire Tapes (Kerrville Cassette Demo)
Here is one of Memphis Minnie’s more well-known blues cuts:
Moaning The Blues
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