by Joe Wallace

I blogged about the Springfield, Missouri record emporium Stick It In Your Ear a few days ago, but I wanted the shop to have its own entry here, so to recap:

Stick It In Your Ear is a delightful hodge-podge of vinyl, CDs and music-related ephemera. The store has its share of fun finds (Devo’s Greatest Misses and TuxedoMoon were two of mine) and it has to be said, there’s no telling what the dedicated collector could find rifling through the stacks here.

There’s a big collection of metal (not my thing at all except for the bad album covers) and a lot of soul and disco comps–never a bad thing.

Any record shop that bothers to categorize the albums in any fashion beyond genre makes me happy, and even better in this case is the breathless way those records are filed–note the exclamation points on every single band title in the photo below, as if every last one of these bands is both a rare find and the store owner’s favorite of all time. I LOVE that for some reason. Don’t ask why, I have no idea–but it’s endearing.

See what I mean? An added bonus to the Stick It In Your Ear Trip–it’s right next door to a very good sushi bar, so you can stuff your face full of raw fish to celebrate your finds. My only gripe about this shop is that all the CDs are under glass and can’t be fondled without help. Want to look at that Jarvis Cocker solo CD? You’ll have to ask.

Navigating the shop is a bit tricky as well, it’s designed in a sort of horseshoe shape with the case full of CDs forcing you into the used record shop equivalent of a UK traffic circle. But have a look at this shop–it’s in the nicest-looking part of Springfield Missouri that I’ve seen and there are plenty of cool indie bars and hangouts compared to the rest of the city which leaves much to be desired unless you are a fan of chain restaurants and convenience stores named Kum and Go, which I thought was a condom shop when I spotted the sign. “That’s a bit of an extremely narrow business model,” I thought, until I spotted the slurpee ads.