RSD 2012: Staff Experiences
One necessary part of getting what you're looking for on Record Store Day is understanding your local record store and its customers. For the Mad Platter in downtown West Chester, PA, the clientele can be quite sneaky. Any other day of the year, the store is a cosy, low-key shop with an impressive collection, but on Record Store Day, the accumulation of all their customers from the previous 364 days (and then some) arrive with their RSD shopping lists. I arrived with two friends about fifteen minutes before what was supposed to be "opening," only to see that the line was already out the door for the RSD releases. We reached the registers nearly a half-hour later, when most of the singles we had anticipated getting, from the Arctic Monkeys R U Mine? or Arcade Fire's Sprawl II were already sold out. I managed to leave instead with the reissue of Lou Reed's Transformer and a remastered Small Faces Itchycoo Park single. One friend snagged the new Regina Spektor single and a nice remastered (not RSD-affiliated) copy of The Postal Service's Give Up. The other friend opted for the used record bin (perhaps a wise choice), and left with a comedy LP, a Glen Miller album, and Bad Company's self-titled album (his taste is an eclectic one).
Overall, I was disappointed that I didn't go home with an R U Mine? purple 7" disc, but then I realized that I just purchased one of my favorite albums of all time on vinyl. So what then did I learn on Record Store Day 2012?
Hell with The Arctic Monkeys. Viva Lou Reed! David Hogg
A busy day including a 60-mile round trip to view the world’s smallest and dingiest house (isn’t moving fun?) meant that any RSD-related activities seemed unlikely. However, I found myself with a spare quarter of an hour and eagerly dived into Guildford’s People Records. It’s a tiny shop with less floor space than the average living room, but an impressive proportion of the shelves are dedicated to vinyl. By the time I arrived, it was getting close to 3pm, so it was difficult to know what had been there this morning that was no longer available. However, there were still plenty of 180g special editions, split singles and – count ‘em – three copies of the RSD edition of the latest Tindersticks release.
I came away with a split 7” between Francois & The Atlas Mountains and Slow Club and, from the conversation I had with the owner at the till, it had been a great day for the shop. Fingers crossed some of this momentum can carry over into the remainder of the year. In the numerous times I’ve been in there before, I’ve never seen more than three customers at a time, and running an independent record shop in 2012 must often appear a foolhardy endeavour. Joe Rivers
I queued for three and a half hours.
I feel like a total dick for saying this, and I wouldn’t have gotten up at half 7 if I weren’t excited about Record Store Day, but I think by 12.30 when I was in the shop and the people in front of me were home and were presumably already typing up their eBay product descriptions, I was simply fed up and angry. Nottingham’s Music Exchange is a lovely place, run by the Framework Homeless Charity, but in spite of their efforts, Record Store Day was literally the worst day of the year to visit it. It confirmed my earlier skepticism that pricey exclusive vinyl releases are a totally counterproductive means of coercing outsiders into the world of physical shop releases – perhaps if it was focused on universal, cheaper releases in bigger runs, we wouldn’t have had to queue up starting at 4am (seriously!). And perhaps it would have enticed people who don’t already romanticise the physical release: the problem is, Record Store Day is preaching to the converted – everyone else thinks we’re mad to queue up for so long in the cold for some ultimately pointless and overpriced discs of plastic.
Opening the Shabazz Palaces live EP on marble purple vinyl and Refused’s second album (they’d run out of The Shape of Punk to Come), as well as a bunch of discounted personal favourites, was exciting, but I do rather wish I’d been in time for the St. Vincent single and the orange Mclusky Do Dallas reissue, among others. However, I bought a copy of an LP for the Framework charity, featuring some genuinely superb local artists on white vinyl which strikes me as exactly the sort of thing Record Store Day should be doing. They also put on a free gig in the evening which I’d have attended had I not already lost nearly four hours of valuable dissertation-writing time. As much as it’s cool to own these limited releases, it’s a much better idea in theory than in practice. Stephen Wragg
I went to Record Store Day today! I got out of bed at 9:00 to do it, which is a feat on a Saturday morning. There are two record stores in Bellingham’s downtown area, and they’re right across the street from each other. Everyday Music, the larger of the two, was offering 20% off everything used and 10% off everything new. Avalon Music, the smaller but friendlier (Everyday has a lot of very typical record store employees) was offering $2 off, goody bags with free used records, stickers, a CD from a local band, and whatever else they threw in. I got a burned CD called “Jimi Hendrix Early Studio Shit.” I got that because I bought the 180 gram reissues of Spiritualized’s stoner masterpiece, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space, a fitting purchase for April 21st. I’m playing it now and it sounds great. Most of the special releases were either sold out or too expensive for a split single. I found a used copy of The Beatles Second Album, and came close to overspending on that too. It would have looked pretty on my shelf, but wouldn’t have been played all that often.
Avalon had a two piece blues rock band out front, the same band they have every year. It’s always fun. It’s nice to see the stores so crowded on one day, and to see all the employees actually having to work. Avalon makes most of their money off drug paraphernalia (I think), and this seems to be the one day of the year where everyone comes in and buys records. RSD seems to have gained quite a bit of steam around here, and I can’t wait to move to Seattle next year and see how it is there.
My friend, Justin, wasn’t (and probably still isn’t) awake yet, so I’ll go back down later. My very hungover girlfriend went with me instead, and I would like to publicly thank her for putting up with that for as long as she did. Andrew Baer
It’s difficult not to feel a little cynical about something like Record Store Day.
In the few years it’s existed, RSD has raised awareness regarding the difficulties of the independent record store and has acted as a reminder to those of us who live and breathe music and still want to obtain the physical product to come out, visit and support the stores. And while this is good, the exclusive releases excite the philistines who throw their acquisitions online for three times what they paid after wrestling through a moshpit of music fans. Last year, after standing in line and finally getting into the store (A.K.A. Music, Philadelphia, PA), I didn’t want to have to climb over people to snatch up the day’s enticements. I wanted to shop for records. And, I couldn’t help but feel, as the mob stayed up front and I, along with maybe ten other people, shopped around the store, that the RSD exclusives were devaluing the day’s worth.
I went to Long In The Tooth yesterday with my brother, another indie record store in Center City, Philadelphia, just for a change of pace. The store had been opened twenty minutes before we arrived, a sign hanging on the door that said “NO PHISH — We will open today @ 10:30.”
No line. No pandemonium. Weird.
We walked inside and the crowd was significant, but calm. The exclusives were stationed behind the owner, so shoppers would ask what he had, he would inform, they would buy. There was no chaos or Christmas shoppers’ lust going on, and people were scattered throughout the store, seeing what it had to offer.
For a friend, I asked about the Glen Miller 10,” but to no avail. The Mastodon/Flaming Lips split 7” was sold out as well. I did, however, manage to procure the Lee Perry Blackboard Jungle Dub 10” box set (last one they had) and the Mike Watt and the Missing Men/Chuck Dukowski Sextet split 7.” I completely forgot to ask about the new Public Image Ltd. One Drop EP, but I didn’t see any available. I also contemplated the Iggy & The Stooges Raw Power double LP featuring both the David Bowie and Pop mixes, but I already own the album twice on CD. Tomahawk’s Eponymous to Anonymous also caught my eye, but it was a tad pricey, as was the STAX box set that was going for $75, which would’ve wiped me out completely.
Otherwise, I picked up Open Your Heart by The Men on vinyl, a live four-song 7” from OFF! titled Live at Generation Records and a used copy of God is the House by Art Tatum.
Overall, it was a really good time. I was in there for a little less than an hour and a half, unrushed or flanked by tongue-wagging, salivating eBay-mongers. Cynicism is reduced and I got my Blackboard Jungle Dub. Sean Caldwell
Record Store Day is the new Christmas isn't it? Loud, crazy, prone to brawls in queues (I'm guessing - I've never actually witnessed any) and way too commercial. That being said I had a very good one this year - I think because I wasn't actually planning on going; I didn't even realise that there was a participating store near me until the week before (after ten years of lacking a proper independent record shop, Portsmouth finally has one again). After last year's panic attack-inducing trip to Resident in Brighton (still one of the most wonderfully friendly places to buy records imaginable, but way too small to deal with the crowd that it attracts) I was still on the fence, but decided at the last minute (or rather about 7:30 on Saturday morning) to make the trek in to see what was going on.
Inevitable train complications ensured that I didn't get to the store until about twenty minutes after it opened and on top of that there was another 20-30 minute queue to actually get to the back of the shop to root through the stuff on offer. But there was a pleasant atmosphere, with a fairly diverse bunch in the shop (not really racially, and still mostly guys, but there was a nice age range, with a surprising amount of young kids queueing up to buy 7"s/discuss the Smashing Pumpkins gig poster on the wall, despite not actually having been born back when the band were worth a damn). Which is probably for the best when everybody had to cram in elbow-to-elbow in order to pore over the cases of records on offer.
They didn't have the Feistodon 7" which was the only thing I really wanted, so I compensated for that minor disappointment by blowing cash on some random things - not much because some of the prices were insane (I love Arcade Fire, but two fairly ordinary remixes for £17, really?) - namely the Domino records Flexidisc zine (which is to be honest a nice idea but a bit patchy; I'm not sure whether I should confess on here that the only track on it I really like so far is John Maus' as I expect that'll really annoy one writer in particular) and the, fairly incomprehensible, Animal Collective 12" (I accidentally discovered when fiddling about with the MP3 downloads that it actually works much better if both sides are played at the same time; it might be the Dark Side Of The Moon/Wizard Of Oz sync-up, or at least Flaming Lips' Zaireeka equivalent of our generation). And a mushroom pie (pies being this record store's USP), and then hung around in the shop doorway for about an hour in order to chat to one of the owners and watch a local folk-leaning band (banjos were played, mass-singalongs were attempted but didn't really go anywhere... despite all that they were quite good though).
I'm not opposed to the idea of Record Store Day; in fact there's a lot I like about it. For one, I'm generally a pretty bad record shopper, mulling over potential purchases for way too long before deciding against them as I can't really justify the expense, or whatever (that's not necessarily a bad thing - I ended up getting Feistodon too thanks to my brother braving the Brighton crowds, and am now worrying about spending more than I budgeted for) - so having the threat of time limits/limited editions does at least force me to buy stuff. I do think though that, in future, RSD needs to expand laterally, releasing stuff and putting on bands and special events over a more spread out period (The 12 Days Of Record Stores?) otherwise it'll just tarnish the shops with that elitist, miserable reputation that did many of them in in the first place. While waiting in the queue I noticed that there were a few regular releases marked as "indie stores only" and perhaps this is the way to go - ensuring a steady stream of customers all year round without all the hassle (and more pies wouldn't hurt either). Mark Davison
After an entirely awesome and expensive Record Store Day in 2011 that saw purchases of, among others, Big Star’s Third Test Pressing Edition and a few copies of R.E.M.’s Three to get signed by Peter Buck at Seattle’s brilliant Easy Street Records, I decided to take it easy in 2012. As such, I wasn’t really paying attention to any sort of “what to get” list and decided to just take what I saw, with only St. Vincent and The White Stripes, both with a 7”, on my “must-get” list. I figured this would be a good way to save my money and that my ignorance would stop me from being disappointed about not grabbing this or that.
While the latter proved true, the former did not. I woke up quite late, but ran down to Other Music in Greenwich Village (not just the closest record store, but also the best) for my shopping, where a couple of friends had me a spot in line. It was a late opening to begin with—doors at 11 AM—but the store was small and so they only let in so many people at a time. By the time we got in a bit past noon, there was still plenty of selection, and employees still offered coffee to everyone in line (not that they needed to—it was a sunny 70 degrees Farhenheit).
When I got inside, the store was a bit more crowded than I expected, but I still had room to maneuver and flip through one stack after another in a calm, controlled way. There was a DJ set going on (with a new DJ every hour, Four Tet and The Men being the highlights for the whole day) After a frantic “every man for himself” at the gigantic Easy Street last year, it was a nice change of pace, and being able to ask someone to “please pass that St. Vincent record this way” while I grabbed the last two White Stripes singles for me and a stranger requesting one was a friendly and rewarding experience. I picked up the Arctic Monkeys single on the strength of R U Mine? without having heard the B-side Electricity. I could not pass up on Springsteen’s Rocky Ground b/w The Promise either; I saw him four times this month, will see him three more in September, and am just generally in love with his music (and those songs). I didn’t realize until I was exiting the store that the weird red sleeve sandwiched in all the Bruce Springsteen singles was the last Neil Young single, so I messed up a bit.
So while I thought I was doing pretty well in terms of money, I didn’t realize I hadn’t gotten to the expensive stuff. I passed up every Uncle Tupelo record, a new Dark Side of the Moon with a poster (and probably some other stuff) in it, and deluxe editions of both Goo and Dirty in favor of the more affordable El Camino and Horses, the former partially for my mother (but also because it’s a great collection of a very good record) and the latter because it’s a repressing of one of my favorite records and a great thing to get signed when Patti Smith comes around for something (generally not a long wait in New York City). My final pick-up was David Bowie’s Starman b/w Suffragette City, which comes with a lot of photos or something? I’m not entirely sure, but I love Bowie, Starman is one of my favorites, and it seemed pretty cool.
On my way to check out, Iggy’s Raw Power caught my eye because it had both the Iggy and Bowie mix together, but I’ve always wanted something in-between, and the clerk told me a re-mastering wouldn’t do that, so he rung up what I had, and although I spent more than I wanted, I didn’t do too bad and certainly spent less than I did last year. I got what I wanted the most, and while I wish I could have had the Neil Young and Animal Collective (which was sold out before I even got in) for myself or The Byrds for my dad (also gone before I had a chance), I also could have done much worse. It was a great experience again, now I just need to wait until I get back to Seattle where I have a record player waiting for me. Forrest Cardamenis
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