Record stores in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island & Connecticut!!

Yeah, Speaking Volumes has some great stuff. But for their prices they can keep them forever. I don't understand how they can stay in business. Last time I was that way a few years ago they had a handful of sweet Dead bootlegs I would have happily dropped $50-75 each for. Which would have been high end eBay/Discogs prices at the time. But they had $150 and up on each one. Who the hell is going to pay that much?

And, indeed, Pure Pop had maybe 20 used records last time I was there. Not worth a stop unless something has dramatically changed in the past few years.

I had some decent finds at Burlington Records. Best thing I pulled there was Screaming Abdabs - Brain Damage

 

I spent my Patriot's Day going to Mystery Train in Gloucester. I traded in some vinyl & a couple of music DVDs and got about 6 CDs and I only had to pay about $4 out of pocket.

Also, I noticed that there's a new record store in downtown Salem located at the Witch City Mall. There's 3 record stores now in Salem, MA, although the other 2 will have to work a bit to reach the standard of the Record Exchange.

 

How is Mystery Train doing for used stock? I heard last year they were having some trouble finding collections to buy and were selling a lot of new vinyl.

It's been there for a little while. The owner of the Beverly Coin knows him and sold him a good chunk of his initial startup stock. Said he's a nice kid. I've never gotten over there, though.

 

To be honest, I'm a CD guy, but I have seen more new vinyl in Mystery Train the past few times I've been there. Even the Record Exchange is selling more new vinyl.

Are you talking about the new Salem record store in the second paragraph? The location is half decent, especially w/the tourists coming into Salem these days. I think that there should be more stock & posters put on the walls since it does feel a bit empty. In comparison, you can start another record store in the back rooms of the Record Exchange.

How is Beverly Coin, by the way? I drive by there a lot, but haven't gone in. Have you been to Soundtracks in Cabot Street?

 

Too bad about Mystery Train. I've gotten some great stuff there over the years and their prices have always been very fair. They used to always have piles laying around that they hadn't even priced yet. I'd always find something in there for them to price on the spot. Rarely if ever saw new vinyl there.

I'm assuming that is the new Salem one from what I know. Beverly Coin is great. He used to be in Danvers. The owner, Spleen, is a buddy of mine. Really nice guy. The coins are his main source of income and the records get people in the door and pay the rent on the shop. He said he's been getting a lot of good stock and is always putting new stuff out. It's always worth a stop if you're driving by his place.

Hm. No didn't even know about it. I am getting an MRI for a damn hip injury tomorrow. I may try to get over there after. Edit - dagnabbnit. I just looked and they're not open Tuesday. But I'll have to head back over there to see the ortho again, maybe get lucky and it's a day they're open.

 

Boston news: drummer Chris Anzalone (Juliana Hatfield, Roomful of Blues) has bought Stereo Jack's. Jack Woker is retiring, as he's been wanting to do for some time, and the store in its current location is closing on August 15. Chris is moving it from Mass Ave to Ball Square in Somerville in the fall, which I suspect will be a good location for a store.

This feels like a win-win to me. I don't know Chris well, but we have some mutual friends, and he seems like a good guy. The stock will get freshened up as well, and a new location will give it some new energy. And with the green line extension opening in Ball Square soon, that neighborhood is about to get a lot more accessible.

 

Sounds like a good thing. Not only cause ball sq is convenient to me, but that Stereo Jacks seemed pretty stale the last few times I’d been there.

 

While all true, it is the end of an era. Jack Woker is a walking encyclopedia of Jazz, particularly Jazz on vinyl. I will truly miss being able to hold up any record in that store and get a few snippets of info about it from Jack. I have bought many records from Stereo Jack's that I wouldn't even have considered if not for Jack's personal recommendation.

I'm sure I'll visit the new Stereo Jack's in the new location but I'm also sure that it won't be the same without Jack sitting behind the front counter.

 

I have spoken about this with Jack at length. The vinyl resurgence has been killing the store's ability to buy used records. Hardly anyone is selling. Almost everyone is buying, buying, buying. He also said that the vinyl market has upped the competition when trying to buy large collections. I can't even remember the last time Jack got in a large collection... maybe 8 or 9 years back?

I imagine that one thing Chris can do to improve Stereo Jack's is to start stocking new vinyl, particularly high end vinyl reissues like Blue Note's Tone Poet Series. Jack hasn't really carried much new vinyl for a long time now. Chris can fix that right away. He'll just have to front the money to get that stock on the shelves and hope he picks the right titles.

 

As I've said in this thread, Stereo Jack's is as much a social stop for my wife and I as anything else. A nice Saturday afternoon for us will start at Blue Bag Records, then a stroll down Mass Ave to Porter Square Books, lunch at Cafe Mami (if we didn't start at Greek Corner before we hit Blue Bag), a coffee at Simon's or an ice cream at Honeycomb, then stop in at Stereo Jack's to see if one of our friends is on the register, flick through the new arrivals, and have a chat with Jack. He always likes to see my wife because he remembers her parents from the Cambridge coffeehouse scene and they like to gossip about old folkies they have known. I will certainly miss that, but I have both the memories and the records.

 

Planning a trip to Southern Vermont this fall and came across an antique store that has a selection of used vinyl in Bennington.

Browse the Little Shop of Vinyl at The Owl's Nest Upholstery & Antiques

 

Maybe it’s just my taste, but I always find new stuff I want to buy at blue bag, deep thoughts, and Armageddon.

 

I get a lot of my new vinyl at Bull Moose. That was not my point. I think that if Stereo Jack's carried new vinyl, particularly new audiophile vinyl, they might have brought in more customers and their shelves certainly wouldn't look so bare at times. When Jack carried new CDs, I special ordered a whole bunch over the years. I tried doing the same thing with Tone Poets but Jack said he wasn't doing that with new vinyl.

When I patronize a store like Stereo Jack's, a store I really like, I go out of my way to support them financially. It's why I'm buying Tone Poets from Bull Moose for almost $40, even though I can get them from Amazon a lot cheaper. If I don't support my favorite locals, they won't be around for me to visit.

 

Given that Blue Bag doesn't really carry new vinyl, I think that poster may have been talking about churn in the used stock, there always being new things to find in the bins.

 

Im

Im not talking about “new” vinyl. I mean new used arrivals. Sorry for confusion.

 

I just went into Jacks 2-3 weeks ago for the first time in a good 10 years. It did seem pretty threadbare. I certainly don't begrudge him his retirement but it is sad in that it marks the end of an era. I think he's the last of the old Cheapo records crew of the 1970's; most of them left Cheapo and opened their own stores.

He didn't remember me but he did remember my dad (the story of my life) who used to go in there all the time. Yet another store that I've had to break the news of his passing to. It was funny to hear him say "I remember him coming into Cheapo in the 70's with his son" which was me.

The store was pretty threadbare when I was in there. I picked up a few funk records as that was the only section that had anything at all, hi-lights were a copy of the extended 12" of Parliament's Flash Light & a sealed Buddy Miles LP.

Regarding his inability to acquire new stock, a good part of that might be self inflicted. Many other stores aren't having the same difficulty. The resurgence has really driven up prices, if he's still trying to price like he was 10 years ago he's never going to get anything other than salvation army records. I mean I'd love to get clean blues OG records for $20 but that's not happening in 2022.

 

lol'd -- that's a Yogi Berra-level comment

 

BTW - the reason Stereo Jack's has to move is because the landlord is kicking Jack out. Jack says that the landlord is renting it to a cannabis store.

 

The landlord has been trying to tear down and redevelop that entire block for at least a decade. I’m surprised they’ve lasted as long as they have, honestly.

 

Yeah, about 8 or 9 years ago, the landlord wanted to convert Jack's storefront into a pizza place and the city shot him down. We should probably consider ourselves lucky for these past few years of Stereo Jack's.

 

In Your Ear's Comm Ave location will be closing

It’s been groovy: In Your Ear, a longtime destination for treasure-hunting record buyers, is leaving Boston - The Boston Globe

It’s been groovy: In Your Ear, a longtime destination for treasure-hunting record buyers, is leaving Boston
By Noah Schaffer Globe correspondent,Updated June 27, 2022, 3:16 p.m.

The customer at In Your Ear asked co-owner Reed Lappin about the Cramps. Soon the aisles of LPs, 45s, cassettes, and CDs were filled with the sound of rockabilly as Lappin played a late ‘90s CD by Boston’s Crank-Tones (which can’t be streamed) and talked about the band’s beloved guitarist, Frankie Blandino. “And have you heard Hasil Adkins?” asked Lappin, recalling how the Cramps had covered the West Virginia wild man.

That kind of personalized music recommendation — plus a wide-ranging inventory that Lappin numbers around 100,000 recordings — has made In Your Ear a destination for Boston record buyers for the past 40 years. But soon they’ll have to travel south if they want to dig through In Your Ear’s crates. Although the store at 957 Commonwealth Ave. is closing, In Your Ear’s two locations in Warren, R.I., will remain open. A final day for the Boston store hasn’t been set, but a hand-scrawled sign on the door says that the store will be shuttered in the next three to four months. Another sign advises that vast collections of eight-tracks, press kits, and live reel-to-reel recordings are available for four-figure sums.

Lappin says that he and his business partners Mark Henderson and Chris Zingg decided to pull the plug on their Commonwealth Avenue location after the landlord asked for a long-term lease and “the heftiest rent increase we’d ever faced.” Retirement held no appeal for the 68-year-old. “I think I’m still pretty useful, and can do this on a high level. It gives my life some purpose,” Lappin says.

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In Your Ear’s owners started out peddling records at flea markets and colleges. As campuses became less welcoming to vendors, “we decided we needed our own store,” recalls Lappin. There were two prior locations elsewhere on Commonwealth Avenue before they settled into their current basement in Allston-Brighton, where the store has been for 30 years.

“Here no one really bothered us or tried to poach the location,” says Lappin, noting the ongoing saga of Stereo Jack’s, a Cambridge record institution located in a spot that a cannabis dispensary has been seeking. This month it was announced that drummer and Stereo Jack’s employee Chris Anzalone is buying the store from Jack Woker and moving it to Somerville in the fall. (In Your Ear’s Cambridge location lasted about 30 years before closing in 2019.)

“If you got into a time machine and went to the store 25 years ago, it really would look just like it looks now,” says “Boston” Bob Gibson, who worked at In Your Ear in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, discovering so many rare funk records he started making breakbeat compilations that became favorites of hip-hop DJs. “And before the Internet, if you wanted to hear something, you’d have to play it on a turntable in the store. Reed was never interested in just making money off of records. He always wanted to promote many kinds of music.”

“The people who worked at In Your Ear would always remember you, and point you in the right direction if they got a feel for what you wanted,” says Sean Quinn, who as Claude Money has spun countless records he found at In Your Ear for dancers at Soulelujah, his long-running soul DJ night, which recently returned to its weekly Saturday night slot at the Sinclair. “And they would be super fair and cut you a deal. It’s a whole way of retail life that you just don’t find anymore.”

Quinn says he would routinely pack a lunch before heading to In Your Ear for hours of searching through the stacks. But those with more modest collections have always been welcome too. On a recent afternoon, Nicholas O’Brien, 21, was delighted to finally score a copy of the soundtrack to his favorite film, “A Clockwork Orange,” which he’d looked for during prior visits to In Your Ear. Why not just buy it online? “The prices here are a little bit better, and they always have other things you can find. And I love looking through the movie posters,” says O’Brien.

Former employee John Butler, who has been helping with the move to Rhode Island, picked up a record by Bob Kuban and the In-Men, and talked about how band lead singer Walter Scott’s 1983 murder has been the subject of an episode of “Forensic Files.” “I told my wife I won’t have any social outlet now,” he laughed. “I’ve always found interesting records I had never heard before.”

In Your Ear is leaving Boston just as a number of new, smaller stores have entered the market, including Soundtracks in Beverly, Want List in Newton, and Good Taste in the North End. Quinn says he now often goes to Vinyl Index in Somerville. “It’s heavily curated — a completely different experience,” he says.

One of Quinn’s favorite In Your Ear finds came when he brought DJ Prestige, who writes the Flea Market Funk blog, to the store. “He started talking about this Jackie Gleason record that Salvador Dalí had done the cover art for. They had two copies, so we each walked out with one.”

 

Bummer about In Your Ear but, truth be told, as a Jazz fan, I haven't had much luck there in decades. Great rock selection though.

It seems like the Boston area's rents are going to price out used record stores. I just hope they start moving North.

 

Thank you, Cdash!

 

I don't know that place specifically, but antique stores are often the worst places to buy used vinyl, in my experience. Typically very overpriced because they're in a market where they're used to having stock (i.e. furniture and accessories) sit around for months before it sells.

 

It's not going to be open when I'm there anyway.