Tag Archives: indie record shops

Vinyl Road Rage Heads North

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It’s been an amazing journey so far–Vinyl Road Rage #4 has been a fun, mind bending journey into the heart of America’s indie record stores between Chicago and San Antonio, Texas.

Tomorrow morning (Saturday) the show goes back on the road for two punishingly long days of driving back up north towards Chicago. Most of the record stores have already been hit, only a small number remain to be visited before the journey is complete. It’s hard to believe it’s already time to write the final posts on the last few shops before heading back to Chicago and start publishing reviews of the individual stores along the way.

There are too many people to thank in this post–a whole entire other blog post will be dedicated to all the people who made this trip possible, but I especially want to thank YOU for reading and keeping up on all the Vinyl Road Rage madness.

As I’ve been promising, there will be a review for all the good record shops visited along the way, and maybe a few bad ones, too…each store deserves its own individual shout-out and they will all get their due.

It’s entirely possible that when this trip is over Vinyl Road Rage will have covered THIRTY record stores, which is a record for Turntabling.net, to be sure. Next time we do this, I think it’s time for some kind of sponsorship deal, don’t you?

Again, thanks for reading and the best is yet to come…

Joe Wallace

Vinyl Road Rage Day One

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by Joe Wallace

Vinyl Road Rage Four is well underway–the cross country indie record store vinyl blogging trip started in Chicago and I’m now camped in a Super 8 Motel just about 40 minutes from Nashville Tennessee.

The first stop was Bloomington, Indiana for another look at TD’s CDs and LPs, plus the always wonderful Landlocked Music. Both shops are definitely worth your time if you’re anywhere near Bloomington Indiana. I’ll post more details on the first day tomorrow–it’s been a very long day, but for now, feast your eyes on my grubby little v-blog on the day’s vinyl finds. (See the Youtube clip below).

As always, I’ll be blogging about the highlights of the day and saving the in-depth record store reviews for a bit later on when I’ve had time to catch my breath. Suffice it to say that today was a long, wonderful and wonderfully weird journey. Stay tuned for the details on that…here’s the vid clip.

On these videos, bear with me, it’s a work in progress and the flaws are PAINFULLY obvious.

 



Everybody’s Records, Pleasant Ridge Ohio

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by Joe Wallace

An outsider might not be able to tell the difference between Cincinnati proper and Pleasant Ridge, Ohio but one thing’s for sure–if you’re at Everybody’s Records looking for vinyl, you won’t care WHERE it’s at as long as you’re there.

Everybody’s Records has a nice collection of vinyl that looks like a typical pile of titles–at first glance. But look closer. There are plenty of the usual suspects lurking in the stacks–a dedicated crate digger will likely note the Alice Cooper new wave record “Flush The Fashion”, the occasional Gary Myrick and the Figures album, Our Daughter’s Wedding, and other fun titles. But look further still.

On my visit to this shop, I scored not one, but THREE albums by The Legendary Pink Dots. These titles are sought after by a certain rabid type of collector and are not what you’d call readily available simply lurking in the record shop stacks. But there they were, waiting just for me, it seems.

All this stuff was hiding in, if memory serves, the “Rock” section–one reason why it’s important to give those bins a closer look. “Rock” to me says AC/DC, Aerosmith, and a lot of other crap I don’t have much interest in. It’s a real stretch to call Skinny Puppy or Coil “rock”, but more often than not, they get lumped in to that category.

I can’t REALLY blame the shop for this–who wants to spend endless hours creating new categories to fit all these bands?

“Bands That Sound Like Erasure But Who Worship Satan” won’t fit on a category card unless you write REALLY SMALL, and there are only a handful of groups that would fit into “Electronic Performers Who Enjoy Semi-Consensual Buggery In Public Places But Only While Wearing Goat Horns” or “The Ghost of Brian Eno Eats Peanut Butter”.

Back to Everybody’s Records–they also have a healthy collection of oddball titles–one of my favorite sections in any record store–and some REALLY tasty finds in the soundtrack bins. I wound up dropping a nice chunk of change at this Ohio record store.  Final verdict? No trip to Ohio is complete without dropping by Everybody’s Records. Recommended.

Shake It Records, Cincinnati Ohio

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by Joe Wallace

By the time Vinyl Road Rage got to Cincinnati, I was ready for something crazy. Something big, consistently good, and a little overwhelming. I’d seen big. I’d seen good. But the cramped quarters of some of the smaller shops was starting to make me feel a little claustrophobic, and the biggest shops were heavy on the new releases. In short, I yearned for a New York City style record store in terms of size and selection (not price, to be sure).

And that is EXACTLY what I got at Shake It Records in Cincinnati, Ohio. Friendly, well-lit, and a massive collection of used vinyl that forces you to cancel your plans for the rest of the morning, slow down and take a serious look.

Don’t let appearances fool you. This picture shows nothing but compact discs and books–and what an AMAZING selection of books it is, too. This part of Shake It Records is deceptive as it doesn’t LOOK like a book store, but there are enough titles along the walls and above the CDs to qualify this as a genuine bookseller. But not at the expense of distracting you from why you really came here.

Like many of the most impressive New York City record stores, Shake It has a downstairs area stocked to the brim with well-organized, easy to browse vinyl. It is a bit overwhelming at first–where to start? My advice is to begin looking at the rarer titles along the walls. Behold:

But it doesn’t stop there. The obscurities, the weirdness, all the things I love best about vinyl shopping were all handed to me on a silver platter at Shake It.

Shake It is one of those stores you go out of your way to hit, and on top of everything else, it’s located in a GREAT part of Cincinnati with plenty of indie coffee shops and restaurants nearby. It was by far one of my favorite parts of the trip and I can tell you I will DEFINITELY come back to Shake It at my earliest opportunity. This store is clearly a work of love–every single inch of the place is a joy to shop. DO NOT MISS.