I spent a little bit of time in Las Vegas earlier in the week and, rather than wander around Sin City drunk, spending my children's college fund on the slot machines or doing something else that should probably stay in Vegas, I instead took a little trip to the very north of the strip and spent nearly $100 on my own very personal vice.
Mind out of the gutter, peoples. I went record shopping. Yes, I go to Las Vegas and rather than get all de Sade or De Niro or something, I go record shopping. I prepared ahead of time, Googling for the awesome local used record store. I knew there'd be one because pretty much every good-sized town has one. Some, like Amoeba Records in San Francisco, Screaming Skull in Los Angeles, Easy Street in Seattle, Waterloo in Austin, Phonolux in Nashville, etc. are legendary. Las Vegas has The Record Stop, and while it is not indeed legendary, it was still well worth the trip.
It was located two blocks off the Las Vegas Strip in a little strip full of run-down businesses. It looked like it might have been a car stereo store at one point. Or maybe a Hardees or something. It was the proverbial hole in the wall. Sketchy as heck on the outside, but when you stepped down into the store it was Heaven. Wall-to-wall records, used CDs, movies, collectible music memorabilia, the classic record store vibe with picture discs and the really super-rare unaffordable stuff up on the shelves above the record bins.
This was my Caesar's Palace, my Treasure Island, my Venetian.
Like most record stores the world over, the dude who runs the place is incredibly cool. Collected albums for 40 years and decided he'd listened to them enough and turned his private collection into the basis for his store. And it just kept growing. He's a collector at heart but not a purist and certainly not precious about his prices. He keeps it going by keeping prices low, moving a lot of volume locally and selling the really rare and pricey stuff through eBay. He depends on people like me who travel through town and look specifically for the local record store.
It's Vegas, right? So you'd think that the store would be packed with Sinatra, Martin, space age bachelor pad music. Yeah, not so much. This guy is so cool that he refuses to carry any of that stuff and turns it away.
It was awesome to fall into a record store like that since we really don't have something like that here. Austin and Houston do, and I'm sure Dallas probably does somewhere, but I miss having the real record store experience right here in Bryan-College Station.
I do realize that we probably couldn't sustain such a business here, since the brick-and-mortar record experience is largely disappearing in smaller towns. But it was nice to feed my vice. After all, what I did in Vegas I get to bring home and relive everytime I drop the tone arm on one of those two dozen albums I brought back.
* Kelly Minnis plays in a bunch of bands, DJ's, co-owns a local record label and still somehow finds time with his wife and kids. E-mail him at kellyminnis@gmail.com.
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