“Where would I find REM, if you had any?”

“Did you look in the [generic good stuff] section?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they don’t have a divider, so probably just in Rock – R.”

I get it. REM is new (post-1980) and popular. I like music a lot of other people like and maybe that’s a major flaw. One I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life. Like some sort of Sonically Transmitted Disease. I’ll have to tell my doctor and wear earmuffs everytime I go to a concert. I’m sorry, I just love listening to music with other people and sometimes I don’t protect myself from popular culture.

Record stores drive me fucking bonkers.

It’s not their fault, which is part of the reason I’ve driven. It’s 100% on me. That store with no REM divider shouldn’t have one, because it’s a store for music fans of other, older stuff. If you want to get into the depths of Barclay James Harvest, you are in luck. Dude (Dudes? Are they a group or a person? I honestly have never heard of Barclay James Harvest.) has a divider and shows up in multiple sections of the store.

My challenge is finding the place that fits what I want. I live near a massive city, so I should be able to find the place that has REM and Elbow and the Beastie Boys (the Harvest location did have a Beasties divider, but the section was empty).

In that way, record stores are unlike used book stores. 

Now I’m thinking about that and thinking it’s wrong. Maybe it’s just that what’s popular with vinyl enthusiasts is the pre-80s world, in the same way western classics are popular with American readers. If I was looking for a specific version of the Tao Te Ching, I’d probably experience a similar level of frustration in bookstores.

That’s not because they don’t recognize the popularity of the Tao Te Ching, but they don’t move many of them and don’t really know how to price them. So the shelves are full of Orwell and Chabon, instead.

See, I knew this was going to be my fault. 

I guess what I’m saying is I haven’t found my place yet. I do a lot of shopping (okay, some shopping) on Discogs, which is like the AbeBooks of vinyl, but I thought it would be fun to flip through records and stumble across something neat or rare or that I’d just forgotten about.

In reality, flipping vinyl is a huge pain in my ass. Books all line up nicely, allowing the shopper to move through rows and rows without having to pull anything out. Vinyl sits in a horizontal stack, waiting for you to come along and flip each one forward. 

I’m new to all this, so I’m also constantly worried that I’m doing it wrong and that my flipping is going to fuck up a cover or something. I have visions of some irate customer selling me out to management as as bad browser. Then they’d kick me out and I’d read online later that it’s just the kind of place to buy REM and to not buy Barclay James Harvest. 

Anxiety. What a thing.

Flipping vinyl really is a pain. There are two other record stores near me. Neither of them are particularly well-curated. The bigger one looks less like a store and more like a hoarder’s basement, though they do keep a nice stash of the good stuff all in one place. 

What I want is a system. Even in good used bookstores, there’s the lack of a system fucking everything up for everyone. Oh that’s not in fiction, it’s in classics. Yeah, see, Le Carre is really more thriller than mystery and yes, we have sections for both.

In this place, it was rock as distinct from indie/new wave/alt/punk/Slash-based bands or whatever. Well where the hell would you put TMBG, if you ever accidentally purchased one of their albums? I’m sure they’ve worked with Slash before.

Did you know, by the by, that there’s a Bad Religion album called Into the Unknown? Published in 1983, it’s all synth and weird beats, and the band basically killed it after release. They’ve referenced it a handful of times, but it’s almost like it never existed. Vinyl copies run around $200. The songs are fine-ish. A few winners, more losers. You can find playlists on YouTube. Crazy.

The sum total of all this is that I need to go to more shops and figure out what the hell you’re supposed to do. Do I talk to people? Having a hobby is usually a communal thing, but that’s my least favorite part of hobbies. I don’t wanna talk about my setup or my collection or what I thought of the new Gizzard Lizard and Wizards album (real name King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band vinyl people seem inordinately attracted to).

New goal. Visit a new vinyl store each month until I find the one that suits me. Or until I die in despair.