As 2014 draws to a close it is natural to reflect, to look back over the year or even back many years. This past year saw a continuation of a long-running trend—the demise of record stores. Among the casualties this year were two big-city mainstays: J & R Record World in New York City and Sound Of Market Street, also known as Jazz Sound in Philadelphia. I have been a patron of both for many years though I must confess less frequently these days as I am not often in Lower Manhattan before 7PM nor in Center City Philadelphia in daylight hours. Still, whenever I was in those areas during the day I made it a point to stop by these establishments. I’d been patronizing both for more than three decades and loved both for different reasons.
J & R Music World was a music/tech emporium of—at its height—three stores. Their selection of music was unrivaled—no matter what genre—and they made it a point to hire people who loved and knew music (and I knew some of these folks personally). If you asked somebody where to find something they quickly led you to it. If you asked them for a recommendation or opinion, you most often got one. And their summer free concert series—featuring major R & B and jazz artists—was a boon to any music lover who found themselves in Manhattan during the summer. They may have been the largest independent music store in the country for most of their existence though in recent years I suppose Amoeba on the West Coast, with their large stock of used items, may have surpassed them. But whether it was classical, jazz, hip-hop, dance music, metal or any other genre, J & R ‘s selection of domestic and imported CD’s was deep. I could easily spend a couple hours their browsing and taking in the tastefully selected music on the in-store sound system. Considering that Tower and Virgin have both been long gone, J & R was the last full-catalog music outlet in Manhattan—a rather stunning state of affairs. I hear that they may re-open at another location. I hope so.
Sound of Market Street opened in the 1970’s, one of several “Sound Of” stores that opened in the city (others being Sound Of Germantown and Sound Of Upper Darby) but always the best one. Not as large as J & R, Sound Of Market Street still had a tremendously broad selection of many genres, including a great selection of 12” vinyl. The store catered to dee jays, especially in its early days, and in that sense meant even more to the Philadelphia music community that J & R did to the New York music community. It was a place where people would just stop in, not only to check out what was new but to talk to manager Darryl King and others on the staff. You often could find items there that you would find nowhere else, whether releases by local artists or indie artists from other areas, bootlegs, and idiosyncratic releases that were not on mainstream radar. For instance, one day I stopped in to browse the bins and I found a Bettye LaVette bootleg from Holland containing most of her best material from the Sixties and Seventies. Since most of the material had never been on available on CD, I bought it and when I listened I had an epiphany: that Bettye LaVette was the greatest unrecognized R & B singer of the past 40 years! That discovery started a chain of events that led to me not only coming to know her but helping her to her first U.S. recording deal in a long time. Another time, having just been blown away by hearing a Kim Burrell CD for the first time, I was browsing in the Sound Of Marketplace bins and found a copy of Kim’s first recording. Doing a little research I realized that this album had never been widely distributed. I contacted Kim’s manager and made a deal to release it nationally; since then we have released two more Kim Burrell albums, helped her score her first Top Ten gospel hit, and will release a fourth album by her next year. All due to Sound of Market St.! The sad thing is that Sound Of Market Street didn’t close because of economics; the owner of the building decided to convert it to condos and so they had to vacate.
Thinking of these great record stores causes me to reminisce. The first record store I ever encountered was called Prein’s and I first entered it when I was only 11 years old, growing up in the San Fransisco Bay Area. I had just started to listen to the radio intensively and was really excited to hear so much great music on the local Top 40 stations, KEWB-AM and KYA-AM. But in those days if you really loved a song you had to buy the record if you wanted to be certain of hearing it predictably in the future. I think it may have been my parents who took me to Prein’s; my father may have stopped in to buy a record. Prein’s wasn’t really a music-store per se; it was an appliance stores that also sold records and sheet music. This was a remnant of the early days of the music industry when appliance stores and dry goods stores were the outlets for records. And another throwback: Prein’s had listening booths. You could take any record into the booth and listen to it! What better place for a soon-to-be-twelve-year-old without much money to get a musical education! And I did get an education, thanks to their great selection of rock ‘n’ roll, r ‘n’ b, blues, pop and country 45’s (they had a limited selection of albums on the wall but LP’s were not the main market in those days—though I specifically remember looking longingly at albums I couldn’t afford by The Flamingos and Moonglows on those walls!) and those afore-mentioned record booths plus, most crucially, a guy who worked there named Mark. Mark looked old to me but he was probably in his 20’s; he was an R & B fan and was probably the reason for the great stock of R & B in a store with a 99% suburban white clientele. Mark was always willing to talk, even to a 12 year old who was haunting his store and very rarely buying anything. I remember asking him one day if the new single by Ronnie & The Daytonas (of “Little G.T.O.” fame) was any good. I still remember what he said: “it doesn’t turn me on. Here why don’t you listen to this.” And he gave a compilation LP of R & B artists to listen to. I knew “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia but had never heard anything else on the album. That was like a door opening. So Mark was a music missionary, particularly for R & B; and that was the beginning of my own love affair with R & B. I can still remember coming in to Prein’s; if it was a day I had some money saved, I might have a dollar or sometimes two dollars, to spend. 45’s cost 99 cents (sound familiar?) so that meant I could only buy one or two. I would then spend an hour combing through the bins of 45’s, which contained both new releases and “oldies”, agonizing over what to buy. I remember puzzling over B.B. King’s section; I knew Ben E. King; I didn’t know B.B. King and yet their were more releases in B.B. King’s section than Ben E. Kings. Off to the listening booth I went. When I heard Ike & Tina Turner’s “Can’t Believe What You Say” on the radio, I made my way to Prein’s to buy it ….and discovered a whole bunch of releases in the Ike & Tina Turner section; I had only known “A Fool In Love” previously. I still have that “Cant’ Believe What You Say” single today. So it was a real loss for me when my family moved to the East Coast and I no longer had Prein’s as a resource. By then I was also frequenting a discount store that carried records that opened up in town. The great thing about that store is that it carried cut-outs or older singles, packaged in polyurethane 3 for a dollar. It was tricky because you were at the mercy of whoever packaged them; and they deliberately put what they considered “dead stock” with a recent hit. I would twist and turn the polyurethane so that I could read the titles of all three 45’s and often enough found combinations worth buying.
In the Philadelphia area, out in the suburbs at least, there was one decent indie record stores but it carried mainly current singles and had no one like Mark to turn me on to great music. And then there was E.J. Korvette’s department store in a nearby shopping center that had a pretty good selection of albums at cheap prices; my memory says $2.99 for monaural LP’s….and I only had a mono record player anyway. I remember buying Live At The Apollo by James Brown, because it has all his hits on it, not realizing it was a live album; boy was I in for a surprise! By then I had a little more money—I was 16 and doing odd jobs for spending money—so I could indulge my music addition a bit more. The Philadelphia music culture was completely different than that of the West Coast. Going to dances I’d hear records like “Bila” by The Versatones and “Wine Wine Wine” by The Nightcaps, along with Motown stuff. Philadelphia had had strong vocal group scene and that music was being kept alive by a local dee jay named Jerry Blavat who often played great vocal group records that had never even been hits, along with current fare. He hosted huge dances in Philly and was a local celebrity. One day a friend and I rode the train into Philadelphia and went by a record store at 10th and Chestnut called The Record Museum. Stapled to the walls, with impressively high prices scribbled on them, were dozens of rare of 45’s, many of the records that Jerry Blavat played. I heard sounds in there that I had never heard before and that shop opened up a whole new world to me also.
During this time the premier record store in the country was Sam Goody’s flagship store in Manhattan. Every week Sam Goody would take full-page ads in not only New York papers but also Philadelphia newspapers—touting an all-label sale for, say, Columbia Records. Everything on Columbia would be at a low sale price for a week. The next week it would be a different label and every so often independent labels would be on sale. When I got a little older I would make pilgrimages to Manhattan (the Philly Sam Goody stores were ok but nothing like the main Manhattan stores) and once again their vast selection of LP’s opened a whole new world to me—worlds of jazz, folk music and music from around the world. It was at that store that I first saw—and bought—a Sun Ra record and the first place I saw an Om Khaltoum LP (I didn’t know who she was at that time). Come to think of it I bought a Pennywhistlers record there…a Nonesuch released which introduced me to the extraordinary beauty of Eastern European vocal music.
In the early Seventies I was living in upstate New York and driving daily to my counseling job in Irvington; on my way down I would pass through Ossining which happened to have a little hole in-the-wall record shop catering to an African-American clientele. I was listening to WBLS-FM—during the first golden era of Frankie Crocker—and hearing tons of great music. Every week I would stop in this little shop and ask “what’s new? What’s hot?” they would play me the latest and greatest and more often than not I walked out with three or four new singles. Also during that era I stumbled upon a small record shop in the small mall attached to the White Plains train station; it was run by a Jamaican and there was a treasure trove of JA singles in a bin. I was getting into reggae seriously at the time and felt like I had found buried treasure when I came upon “Kaya” by Bob Marley & The Wailers on Lee Perry’s Black Heart label, among other gems. In that pre-internet era such finds were exhilarating. Much of the Seventies found me in Nigeria, where little record shacks off the street had a wonderfully diverse selection of African and American music. Again, whoever was running the shop was happy to play me whatever I wanted and I was able to get into a wide range of highlife, Congo music, Afrobeat, Afro-rock, juju, apala, fuji and myriad traditional musics, not to mention some cool reggae releases that came from the UK.
On my return to the States, I settled in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and found another hole-in-the-wall record stores similar to the Ossining shop noted above, at Germantown and Chelten Aves. Most every Saturday I stopped by to hear what was hot and new in the R & B world and can still remember the thrill of hearing first solo releases by Stephanie Mills, Teena Marie and others. I also became aware of a great record store downtown—Third Street Jazz, located on Third Street just off of Market Street. As the name suggested they had a magnificent and deep selection of jazz, which I was starting to get into more deeply, aided in no small measure by the playlists of shows on WRTI-FM which, though a college station, was staffed mostly by jazz heads from the community. If I heard something I liked, chances are I could find it Third Street Jazz. Most of the people working at Third Street Jazz were jazz heads themselves and they served up stimulating dialogue and opinions about the music along with the wares on offer. I became friendly with the owner, Jerry Gordon, among others and so going there was like going to see friends. The store was unique in that it had a large stock of many privately pressed, often with hand-made jackets, LP’s by Sun Ra & The Arkestra, as Jerry had come to be trusted by Sun Ra. I wish I had bought more of them because many are now valuable collector’s items. Third Street Jazz was more than a store; it was a crucial part of the jazz musician community.
When Tower Records began opening stores on the East Coast it was like the gates of heaven open for music lovers. For many years the flagship store was the 4th & Broadway store in New York City. By 1981 I had begun working for Shanachie Records and was often in Manhattan so I was often in the 4th & Broadway store with its three floors of music. They stocked virtually everything and hired buyers based on their knowledge of the genre they were supposed to buy (what a concept!). It wasn’t necessarily the best business model—they buyers often bought what they thought was great and much of what was stocked did not sell—but it was paradise for music lovers.
Countless other great record stores with passionate, music-loving personnel and interesting stock not determined solo by the charts greatly expanded both my love for music and my knowledge of it. There are precious few of them left. I still enjoy dropping into “Other Music” on 4th St. in Manhattan, across from the former Tower location. I haven’t yet been to the new Rough Trade store in Williamsburg which opened just last year, swimming against the tide of record store closures. The internet is a fabulous tool—I’ve discovered much great music in YouTube and through social media—and probably 90% of everything ever recorded in the Western World and much of the rest of the world is available somewhere on the internet. But for me nothing was sweeter than a passionate music fan in a little record store handing me a record and saying “you have to check this out!”