NYC's Bleecker Bob's & Southpaw are closing down*

Discussion in 'Marketplace Discussions' started by eddiel, Jan 27, 2012.

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  1. eddiel

    eddiel Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
  2. tkl7

    tkl7 Agent Provocateur

    Location:
    Lewis Center, OH
  3. jupiter8

    jupiter8 Forum Resident

    Location:
    NJ, USA
    I remember going to Bleecker Bob's on my first trip to NYC in the mid-80s. I moved here 3 years later and never went back. If a vinyl store can't make it in NYC surrounded by NYU hipsters with money to burn that tells you plenty.
     
  4. Jerquee

    Jerquee Take this, brother, may it serve you well.

    Location:
    New York
    Bleecker Bob's is certainly a historic place but these days it's overpriced and useless as a real resource for scoring music. I wondered how they stayed in business over the past few decades.
     
  5. Hamhead

    Hamhead The Bear From Delaware

    I was there with our old rock buyer (and best friend) a couple of years ago.
    We stopped there to check it out and almost keeled over laughing.
    He had stuff on the walls where we would normally get $30-40, he had for $125-175.
    One of those was a trashed copy of Maggot Brain which he had for $125, most of the stuff was common stuff which he had for $25-50. When we walked out he were literally hugging each other from laughing so hard. More power to him.
     
  6. floweringtoilet

    floweringtoilet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Warren, RI, USA
    Don't know how it's stayed open as long as it has. I lived in NYC for seven years and never bought a single record there. And I bought a lot of records during that time. Bring on the no-foam, caramel macchiatos, I say.
     
  7. MILKEY

    MILKEY Forum Resident

    Location:
    NEW YORK
    Yes Sir ==I so happy he is closing
     
  8. MekkaGodzilla

    MekkaGodzilla Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westerville, Ohio
    Tourists and trust-funded dipsh8ts who go to NYU.
     
    Lownote30 likes this.
  9. MikeyH

    MikeyH Stamper King

    Location:
    Berkeley, CA
    (too expensive) I could say the same for many stores here, and some I used to frequent in the UK. There are ways to deal with pricing.
     
  10. floweringtoilet

    floweringtoilet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Warren, RI, USA
    Also the Times article is pretty crappy, making it sound like the demise of BB's is due to a downturn in demand for vinyl. Lots of other sellers are experiencing increasing demand. A record store owner I know told me he just had his best year ever (although that was mostly due to eBay sales). Two new record stores have opened up here in Providence over the past year or so.

    The article also says the neighborhood was fairly dangerous a couple decades ago. That's B.S., I used to live a couple blocks from that spot and it was a very safe neighborhood. Yes, there was drug dealing going on in Washington Square Park, but very little violent crime in the area. The neighborhood wasn't all pretty and gentrified and full of shops with $2,000 boots in it, but it was not dangerous.
     
  11. Satrus

    Satrus Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cork, Ireland
    Wasn't that the store featured in an episode of Seinfeld? Kramer and Newman thought they'd make a small fortune selling used vinyl but the store offered peanuts and the whole thing ended up in an in store altercation. They had this one record, was it a Don Ho LP, and the store clerk rubbished it or something saying it was worthless? I must take out my Seinfeld box set and watch that one again!

    Very funny episode.
     
  12. floweringtoilet

    floweringtoilet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Warren, RI, USA
    The only way to "deal" with the pricing at Bleeker Bob's was to shoplift. If you tried to talk him down on price he'd kick you out of the store. Anyway, I don't want to say anymore about Bleeker Bob's or its owner, but this is one of the few record stores I've visited that I will not shed a tear for.

    I missed that episode, but can imagine it was based on somebody's real experience. I had friends who brought in some of their punk singles, stuff he had on the wall for hundreds of dollars and he offered them pennies for them. Of course they weren't worth near what he was asking.
     
  13. mrgroove01

    mrgroove01 Still looking through bent-backed tulips

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    I'm a born and bread New Yorker and visited Bleeker Bob's plenty of times through the years but only for amusement. I tried buying records there but just couldn't justify it. Mostly beat up stuff with price tags reflecting mint condition book values. I had no clue why anyone would buy anything there.
     
  14. lpecucci

    lpecucci Member

    Location:
    Chicago
    It was that store and that was one of THE best episodes ever!!

    Newman's big insult was "you emit a foul and unpleasant odor!"
     
  15. Bill

    Bill Senior Member

    Location:
    Eastern Shore
    A better place for price-checks is Colony Records near Times Square. I once overheard a salesperson try to sell some tourists from Sweden a beat-up Chuck Berry reissue for over $200. Risking my life, I intervened.
     
  16. tkl7

    tkl7 Agent Provocateur

    Location:
    Lewis Center, OH
    I work a block from Colony, and yes, it is bad. Yeah, they have new vinyl at 200% mark-up. The older stuff is probably at 500% markup, at least. Avoid Colony. They also tape the open records shut, so you can't see the product.

    Of course, Bleecker Bob had a scratched up and unplayable later day repressing of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy for 100 bucks, so that's probably 20 dollars cheaper than Colony.
     
  17. BITBANGER

    BITBANGER Senior Member

    Location:
    Devon, CT.
    Overpriced? Indeed. But I remember picking up a UK M- mono Let It Bleed (no poster) and a UK vg+ mono test pressing of Beggars Banquet in 1978 for $40 each. Seemed steep at the time but I have no complaints now!
    He was also the first in town to get the new 45s from England because they had another store in London. New stuff wasn't over priced as I recall.
     
  18. eddiel

    eddiel Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    ^^^ Good for you for intervening.

    Yup Colony is rubbish. I popped in since I was in the area and was walking by. It might have been a great record store at one point in time but not now.

    I've been to Bleecker Bob's as well. I went out to NY years ago on a work trip and found it by accident. I had heard about it so went it. I agree with the comments so far; not worth another visit. I've been to NYC many times since the initial trip and I don't bother visiting.
     
  19. TommyTunes

    TommyTunes Senior Member

    All that plus he (when he was there) was a nasty **shole who was full of himself
     
  20. reverendjim

    reverendjim Forum Resident

    Location:
    new york, ny, usa
    I'm another one who has visited that store many times (usually while killing time in the neighborhood) and never bought a thing. Here's a funny anecdote from the Prindle site:

    ---

    About 7.5 years ago when I first bought a CD recorder, I gathered up all my cassette tapes of rare Ramones songs (outtakes, b-sides, etc) and made myself a couple of CD-Rs, wrote down the song titles, and entitled Ramones Smorgasbord. For no real reason. I just like the word "smorgasbord." So I made a copy for a friend of mine and just lived the good life with all my rare Ramones songs all together on two CDs like that. So then about a year later for some reason I got the idea to sell a few copies of it on ebay. I must not have been making much of a salary at the time, because I certainly wouldn't waste my time doing something like that now! So I think I sold maybe two, at most three copies of "Ramones Smorgasbord" before eBay angrily made me stop. As the years passed, all those Ramones reissue discs came out and made most of the rare tracks available to the buying public (with much greater clarity) so my discs became fairly redundant.

    FAST FORWARD TO EARLY 2006! (if you're watching this on a videotape of my life) I'm looking through the punk and hardcore CDs at Bleecker Bob's even though I never, ever, ever buy anything there because their prices are ludicrous. And what do I see but a Ramones bootleg... entitled Ramones Smorgasbord. My first thought: "What a stupid name for a bootleg! Sounds like something I'd come up with." My second thought: "Oops." So I grab the package, turn it over to examine the track listing, and yep. It's mine. But not mine as sold, you understand. One of the three people who bought it from me on eBay evidently decided to start producing his own bootleg copies of it, printed himself up some fancy artwork, duped my original CD-Rs and probably made himself a cool mint on the deal! Can you believe that!? I was floored! It was the exact same song order and everything -- I even know for a fact that the last track - "Come On Let's Go" with the Paley Brothers - cuts off halfway through! Man, I don't even think I sold a copy to anybody in New York; how on Earth did it wind up at Bleecker Bob's ****** Overpriced Record Store Of ****!? It just goes to show you - "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears/it's a world of (something), a world of (something)/(something)/It's a small world after all!"
     
  21. TommyTunes

    TommyTunes Senior Member

    I worked at Sam Goody down the block from Colony at the start of the seventies and they priced their new vinyl at full list even back then.
     
  22. happykev

    happykev Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle, WA
    FloweringToilet- The article was referring to Park Slope as a formerly dangerous neighborhood, not Greenwich Village.

    Kevin
     
  23. action pact

    action pact Music Omnivore

    Yes, the store is a joke, but I did find a few NOS/unplayed 45s from the '60s for a buck each there a few summers ago. Good stuff too, Lovin' Spoonful and Gary Lewis & the Playboys (w/pic sleeve too!).
     
  24. action pact

    action pact Music Omnivore

    I know why Colony's prices are so high...

    Think about it: a TV director or radio producer or whatever needs a copy of a recording for a project, and doesn't want to waste time going downtown to J&R or whatever, so what do they do? They send someone across the street to Colony to buy the $20 CD, and then expense it.
     
  25. floweringtoilet

    floweringtoilet Forum Resident

    Location:
    Warren, RI, USA
    Ah, yeah, parts of Park Slope could be dangerous indeed. It's pretty gentrified now.
     
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