Record Hunting Blues

A Long Time Ago...

...in what seems like a galaxy away - which is to say, the Sydney of the 1980s - I used to go record hunting with my high school buddies. Our hunting grounds were placed in the stretch of Pitt St between Bathurst St and Goulburn Street. There used to be a row of secondhand vinyl shops, as the CD was only beginning to come out. All the vinyl people were casting off ended up in the sales bins and this was where we started collecting albums.

Today, it is the CD that is going out of style, but not without a fight it seems.

"The whole price market has changed: record companies now do deals with big major stores, like the JB Hi-Fis and Big Ws, Kmarts, Harvey Norman, so they go out at prices sometimes below what they sell to other people," Lehne says.

As for Dirt Cheap CDs' model of importing cheap CDs, margins were thin but the weak dollar has made it worse.

Specialising seems to be the secret to surviving as an independent. That has been the case for niche stores such as Ashwood's Music and Books, on York Street, and Red Eye, the 26-year-old record store that sells new and second-hand music in three shops in the Sydney CBD.

"Jazz and classical are still strong, vinyl is selling," says Ian Vellins, the manager of Ashwood's. "It's just that the contemporary pop CDs aren't selling because everyone downloads them. The only thing that's not selling is everything that would get an ARIA award."
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THE CITY CD SEARCH
Ashwood's Music and Books Specialises in rare and collectable vinyl, books, sheet music and memorabilia, as well as CDs. 129 York Street, city, 9267 7745.

Lawson's Record Centre Stocks rarer styles such as jazz, blues and world, latest release CDs, DVDs and more. 380 Pitt Street, city, 9267 3434.

JB Hi-Fi Australia's sixth-largest retail chain has good deals. In city in Strand Arcade and Galeries Victoria, 500 George Street, 9267 8444, plus many suburban locations.

Red Eye Records Shop 1 (new and imports) and shop 2 (metal-industrial-punk-horror and cult DVDs) are both at 66 King Street, city, while the second-hand shop is at 370 Pitt Street, 9262 9755.

Mojo Music The self-proclaimed kings of the back catalogue stock blues, jazz, country reissues and more. 32 York Street, city, 9262 4999.

Egg Records New and used LPs, CDs, film and related memorabilia. 3 Wilson Street, Newtown, 9550 6056.

The Recordstore Specialists in new and second-hand vinyl, particularly beats and hip-hop styles. 255b Crown Street, Darlinghurst, 9380 8223.

Revolve Records Relics Bargains amid the new-release vinyl. Shop 3, 65 Erskineville Road, Erskineville, 9519 9978.

Birdland Records Long a specialist in jazz and related forms of music. 231 Pitt Street, city, 9267 6881.

For more CD and record stores around Sydney, see sydneymusicweb.com/

Aah, Ashwoods and Lawsons! Those were the days!
My particular favourite haunt was a place on 310 Pitt street which is now a flashy comic book shop, but it used to be a small, dingy, dark, hole-in-the-wall place run by a fellow called Greg - Greg was a bearded relic of the 1970s (complete with blue denim jacket) who knew so much about Prog Rock acts from around the world. As such, if you put a word in with Greg, he'd keep an eye out for obscure records for you. How obscure? Try these titles I bought from him:

• Robert Fripp: 'Let the Power Fall'
• Keith Emerson: Sound track to 'Nighthawks' (starring Sylvester Stallone)
• Chris Squire: 'Fish Out Of Water' (as well as Patrick Moraz's 'Story of i').
• Gordon Haskell: 'It Is And It Isn't'
• John Wetton: 'Caught In The Crossfire'

Most lot of these albums are not on CD even to this day, and if they are, you have to order them in from some obscure little re-release label in the boondocks of America. As you can see, the principal arcana in which Greg specialised, was tracking down solo albums by prog rock alumni from Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer and Genesis. I've bought 'Exposure' by Robert Fripp 3 times in my life, but the first vinyl pressing was from Greg's shop. It was 'mint condition', in its own little plastic sleeve.

I bought it and listened to it ONCE when I taped that ONE occasion on to a TDK Gold cassette, and then proceeded to thrash that cassette to death. So my original vinyl copy of 'Exposure' is still what you would call 'mint condition'. Such was LP lore.

Greg also made some extraordinarily astute recommendations for things like Camel albums and other assorted '70s rock music with neck-twisting time-changes and bizarre instrumentation. This stuff was gold when the mainstream Music Industry was busy trying to sell us Culture Club, Wham, and Madonna; And you have to understand that in the day before the internet, Amazon, and indie distribution, it was nigh impossible to find 'just-that-thing' put out by the second guy to play drums for the 3rd incarnation of the Prog Rock act Such-and-Such. Greg knew all this arcane, difficult, obscure, subtle, delicate, and yet TOTALLY meaningless stuff like some Gandalf of Prog.

He wasn't the only guy. There was a guy at Lawsons who also knew all about Led Zep bootlegs - not that I bought any, and a guy at Red Eye who knew all about different pressings from different countries. Secondhand LPs came with an entire system of Lore that was passed on from people who just loved recorded sound on to the next. Thus, many an hour was spent wandering up and down Pitt Street in search of an immaculate copy of 'Tales From Topographic Oceans' or 'Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'. It was hard work, because you were counting on people to be clever enough to buy this stuff, but dumb enough to let them go without having played them too often. When that venture proved impossible, we ordered special German and Japanese pressings of these materials.

It was enough to turn any kid into a total music snob of the worst kind - but I liked it (And still do, thank you very much). Just as an aside, when people rang me up to tell me they'd seen my life on the screen when they saw 'High Fidelity', I knew exactly what they were talking about. I lived inside of those shops for a significant part of my youth, and yes it's true: In life it's not what you're like that is important, but what you like. We all liked vinyl recordings.

Then came CDs, and the rest of life where you scored jobs and re-bought the LP collection. How could we not? Foolishly, I never let my vinyl collection go. I still have all those obscure albums plus the LP catalogue of the major Prog Rock acts. It fills me with a funny sense of nostalgia when I think about the passion be-spent upon these things that sit on my shelf silently. Even my CDs are getting to be played less and less as I spend my listening time working on my own music and letting the iTunes-iPod complex handle my playback of these acts. One of these days I might own a Data cube that houses 100Terabytes, with all these songs loaded up, uncompressed - and I'd still never let go of my LPs or CDs.