California Crate Dig

San Francisco, Mission District street art

I'm just back from my latest family jaunt Stateside - this time to San Francisco and various points south - armed once again with the indispensable VinylDistrict iPhone app. Not wanting to take any chances with getting my purchases home safe and sound, I got kitted out with a sturdy flight case before heading out. It's built like a brick shithouse and at £30.00 didn't break the bank.

I'm no stranger to the Golden State and its record stores, so was fully expecting rich pickings. Before leaving home I had compiled a US vinyl wish-list; not a comprehensive list of every record that I hoped to add to my collection, but a best case scenario, cream of the crop, fingers crossed kind of a vinyl roll call. Of the 75 LPs I brought home, eight of them were from my hundred-strong wish-list. I'm yet to decide whether that's a result or not.

The holiday began in San Francisco, one of my favourite cities and home to more nut-jobs and dead-eyed junkies than you could shake a shitty stick at. Walking through the Tenderloin, even in daylight, is like stumbling onto the set of Michael Jackson's Thriller video. The people there really have been left to rot. Those drug casualties who haven't completely given up on interacting with anyone other than their crack dealer haul their arses up to the Haight to hang out and provide a bit of authentic counter-culture colour for the tourists. It's all a million miles from the manicured perfection of Russian Hill and the commercial artifice of Fisherman's Wharf. Except, it's not - it's just a manageable walk away. But anyway... record stores. There are plenty of them.

Recycled Records, Haight Street, San Francisco

Last time I was here I got into an altercation with the guy at the checkout because he didn't think I needed a bag for my purchases. That was a decade ago. The staff are still on the glacial side of frosty, but at least the stock is interesting and the place is a manageable size. I was chuffed to find a copy of Wichita Fall's Life Is But A Dream and a Locomotiv GT album. A good start to the trip!

Amoeba Records, Haight Street, San Francisco

It looks like it's going to be vinyl nirvana when you survey the acres of racks that greet you as you cross the threshold, but the truth is that since my last visit the amount of space given over to vinyl appears to have shrunk, and much of what there is consists of new, sealed LPs - which I can pick up on Amazon any time - mixed in with the used stock. That's not to say that I came away empty-handed, but the pickings were slimmer than I had anticipated. Of the eight LPs I purchased, perhaps the most interesting was a self-titled album by Shotgun Ltd, which is an impressive and largely unheralded slab of hard rock and comes highly recommended. Incidentally, the staff member who sneered "we're not a toy store" when my wife and Kiss-obsessed kids asked if Amoeba sold Kiss action figures, might want to think whether a customer service job is really right for him. Prick!

Originals Vinyl, 3150 18th St #105, San Francisco 

This is more like it: a welcoming record store run by a friendly, enthusiastic, helpful guy who allowed me to listen to anything and everything before committing to buy. It seems that the smaller the store, the better the quality of the music on offer, and the better the service. I can't recommend this store highly enough. It's a bit off the beaten track, nestled in a tiny unit in what appears to be a small industrial estate, but Originals Vinyl is an essential stop-off if you're looking for vinyl, particularly 60s / 70s psych and hard rock. There's a pretty healthy jazz section too which provided me with a couple of gems. The cheaper stuff is at floor-level, but the low prices in no way reflect the fantastic selection of goodies on offer. Highlights of my haul included Ramatam's In April Came the Dawning of the Red Suns, The Yellow Payges' Volume 1, White Water's Out Of The Darkness and Larry Coryell's Offering, each for a measly five dollars. A fantastic little shop!

Logos Books & Records, Santa Cruz

Logos is definitely more of a bookstore than a record shop, but there is still a reasonable, if limited, selection of used vinyl to dig through. I came away after 15 minutes, having checked out all the vinyl there was to see, clutching Savoy Brown's Blue Matter ($3.00) and Spooky Tooth's You Broke My Heart So I Busted Your Jaw ($6.50), so it was certainly worth a look.

Streetlight Records, Santa Cruz

Streetlight is a nice store - if slightly confusingly laid out - and the staff are friendly. It's unfair to judge a used record store on its stock after just one visit, but despite full racks, I struggled to find much of interest. Prices are reasonable, but the stock when I visited was just a tad uninspiring. Richer pickings another time maybe?

Metavinyl, Cedar Street, Santa Cruz

The clean, simple logo that announces the store to the street presages the smart, minimalist interior. Clutter is kept to a minimum and the racks are arranged around the edges of the room to give an airy, spacious feel. The used and new vinyl is racked separately (halleluiah!) and clearly labelled. Prices of used vinyl are very reasonable, starting at a dollar.

It's always a test of my patience and parenting skills when my bored kids are rolling around at my feet, play-fighting and shouting at each other while I'm digging through racks of records. I think the store owner coped with their 'colourful' behaviour better than I did and, for that, I'm grateful, as I found a bunch of quality titles within Metavinyl's racks. I've been looking for a minty copy of Dylan's Blood On The Tracks for some time, and I found one here for a grab-it-and-run $8, along with Traffic's John Barleycorn for $5, Harvey Mandel's The Snake for $7 and The Resurrection Band's Awaiting Your Reply for $5, which, if you can ignore the god-squad lyrics, is a kick-arse, must-hear, heavy rock LP! Not that it was audible over the racket my kids were making, but ELO's Out Of The Blue was playing over the shop's system for the duration of my visit: that earns Metavinyl extra points in my book. The kids were given stickers when we left (presumably on the understanding that they never return.) My favourite of Santa Cruz's record shops.

Recycled Records, Lighthouse Ave, Monterey

With my family happily ensconced on the beach, I made the eight mile drive into Monterey and took full advantage of my freedom. Recycled Records has masses of well-ordered stock, some hard-to-find titles and bargain bins that contain the occasional gem if you're prepared to root through some pretty mundane stuff. I bought eight LPs including a couple of Keef Hartley albums, two by The Flock and Badfinger's Magic Christian Music, prices for which ranged from $5.50 to $11.50.

Sean, the co-owner of Recycled Records, is friendly once you've lured him from his little wooden booth and engaged him in conversation (I never did find out the purpose of the mysterious booth), and he was kind enough to steer me in the direction of my next digging spot a couple of miles up the road in Pacific Grove.

Vinyl Revolution, Forest Avenue, Pacific Grove

Pacific Grove is a well-heeled and attractive stop-off five minutes' drive down the coast from Monterey. Vinyl Revolution declares its presence with a sign executed in Master Of Reality-hued purple, a window box display of half buried LPs and the sound of a band in thrall to Black Sabbath bludgeoning its way from the store's sound system. Bob, the proprietor, looks like the Big Lebowski's biker brother and is affable and interesting company. Anyone who understands the brilliance of Captain Beyond's debut and Judas Priest's Sad Wings Of Destiny is alright in my book. A hand-made, wooden Scorpions logo adorns one wall of Vinyl Revolution - a remnant of a shop display from the time of Taken By Force. It really ties the room together.

Vinyl Revolution's stock is priced to sell. The records that I dug out from the bargain bins have clearly been well-used, but none of them is trashed: The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, Blues Project's Projections and Richie Havens' Alarm Clock for $0.25c each! My most expensive item was Triumvirat's Pompeii LP; a steal at a shade under four dollars. My only regret is that I didn't pick up a copy of a single by Bob's own band, The Tomb Weavers: an authentic-sounding, 60s-style garage band recorded in the store's back room. Top bloke, nice store!

Granny Had One, Main Street, Cambria

Cambria's real draw is the beautiful, wild beaches, but the town has much to recommend it too, with its large choice of restaurants and antique shops, many of which have the odd rack of vinyl lurking, waiting to be discovered. Prices are often on the optimistic side of realistic, but there's always something worth a punt. In the case of Granny Had One, I left with Grand Funk Railroad's All The Girls In The World Beware ($7.50) and Sea Train's hard to find debut ($8.50) under my arm.

Country Collectibles, Main Street, Cambria

The beauty of shopping for vinyl in places like this is that there's plenty of books, jewellery, antiques and vintage toys to keep Mrs Shelf-Stacker and the kids entertained while I flick through the surprisingly sizeable vinyl selection, amongst which I found a nice clean US pressing of Badfinger's No Dice on the Apple label for $20 - a fraction of the cost of buying a UK original back home. I realise now that my taste in music belongs in an antique shop after the sweet old lady behind the counter looked at my T-shirt and commented: "Black Sabbath! It doesn't get any better than that!"

Boo Boo Records, San Luis Obispo

For a fairly large store, I struggled to find much of interest here, in part because much of what's on offer is new vinyl. Having said that, I did pick up The Association's self-titled album ($3.00), Redwing's eponymous debut ($1.00) and Trouble's Live In L.A. ($10.00), so I can't complain. Prices seem very reasonable. The staff at Boo Boo Records are friendly, welcoming and kept the kids happy with stickers and badges promoting the recent, expanded reissue of Led Zeppelin's Coda. This is another store where it's probably unfair to judge it on the back of one visit because on a different day I'm sure there would be more interesting used records in stock to supplement the wide range of music-themed peripherals such as T-shirts, playing cards, mugs and key fobs.

Cheap Thrills, San Luis Obispo

When I first climbed the stairs to the vinyl section of Cheap Thrills, I thought I was in heaven. The place is huge. Not Amoeba huge, but pretty impressive nevertheless. Once I had got my bearings and had a tentative poke around, I realised that it was more manageable than I had at first thought, as great swathes of the racks house genres that are of no interest to me. The next thing I noticed - something that initially made me want to walk out empty handed - was that all the LPs are sealed in plastic sleeves making it impossible to check the condition of the vinyl. The urge to leave subsided once I'd spotted the signs explaining that records are visually graded and can be inspected at the till prior to purchase. Not something I'd encountered in a record store before, but fair enough. I needn't have worried as all the records I picked up had been very conservatively graded and, what's more, every LP comes with a free, brand new, protective outer sleeve upon request.

I had to pay two visits to Cheap Thrills to satisfy myself that I'd not missed anything. I came away with ten LPs ranging in price from $1.98 to $9.98, including a pair of Barefoot Jerry albums, James Gang Live, Sugarloaf's Spaceship Earth, Dreams' self-titled album and Zephyr's debut featuring Tommy Bolin.

Downstairs at Cheap Thrills is a labyrinth of CDs, comics, action figures, computer games, cables and connectors and anything and everything vaguely related to music and home entertainment. My kids filled their pockets with complimentary fridge magnets and stickers, and charmed the guy at the checkout sufficiently for him to give them each a Hotwheels toy. A superb store that I would live in if I was a local. And there's a customer car park.

One thing I noticed throughout California is that many record stores are racking new vinyl in amongst the used stock. I hate that. To me they are different things that have their own separate appeal and should be shelved separately. You wouldn't expect vintage apparel to be hung on the same rail as new clothes, or for used cars to sit alongside new vehicles on a garage forecourt, or for dog-eared paperbacks to be shelved next to the crisp, new books in Waterstones; same principle applies to vinyl. My over all impressions of my modest sample of California's record stores are that the prices are higher than on the east coast (although there may have been a nationwide price hike in the two years since my last visit to the States) and that, with the odd exception, small is beautiful when it comes to vinyl shopping: as with any retail experience, a smile and a spot of friendly banter goes a long way.

Memories of a Long-Defunct Record Shop

Most people of a certain age have fond memories of a record shop from their youth. The fondness of these memories is not always in proportion to the reality of the retail experience, but nostalgia has a way of smoothing off the rough edges and presenting the past in flattering soft focus: that old 'the war-years-were-the-happiest-days-of-my-life' syndrome. In common with all teenagers I believed my home town to be the dullest place on the planet and, as commuter-belt towns went in the 1980s, Berkhamsted must have been a serious contender for that title. Woolworths and W.H. Smith both had record departments, but they were staffed by people who wore uniforms and looked like my parents. One day these people would be selling LPs, the next they might be on the pick 'n' mix - music was just another commodity to them. Thank God then for J & J Records.

The site of J & J Records today

If I close my eyes I can still taste the carcinogenic, metallic tang given off by all those sweating PVC sleeves in that tiny space. And it was a tiny space. The shop-front itself gave the illusion of a normal-sized store, but some architectural brain-fart had resulted in a premises that was not much more than a corridor; a tapering, almost triangular one at that. When you opened the door to the shop you could pretty much start rifling through the record racks on the opposite wall without crossing the threshold. The widest point housed the counter where two surly staff members took it in turns to be unwelcoming in the small space by the till. Tetchy, condescending and unhelpful: yes, they satisfied all of the traditional record shop personnel character traits! I remember returning a copy of Rose Tattoo's Rock 'N' Roll Outlaws twice because of a pressing fault and being accused of only returning it because I didn't like the music. I did eventually prise a third and playable copy from them which I still have some 35 years later. How I persuaded the patronising git behind the counter to exchange the LP again, I don't know. Perhaps I threatened to get my dad onto him.

To the left of the counter, along the back wall stood a rack of largely ancient 7" singles, mixed in with a handful of new releases. I remember a Canned Heat single that seemed to be a permanent resident. Periodically, I would pick it up, study it and wonder what strange sounds it contained. It never occurred to me to buy it and find out, but then those were the days when my pocket money limited me to just a couple of vinyl purchases per month: I couldn't afford to make mistakes. The staff could sometimes be persuaded, albeit reluctantly, to dig out a notepad and a sheet of carbon paper if you wanted to order something they didn't have in stock. This is how I got hold of my cherished copy of Blitzkrieg's Buried Alive 7"; a record that left me reeling when I heard it on Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show. Sadly, I missed a trick, as it was Lars Ulrich not me who, inspired by the flip-side, Blitzkrieg, formed Metallica using that track as a sonic blueprint. Above the singles hung a black velvet-covered pin board filled with badges, many of them miniature, lapel-sized versions of those mirrors you could buy in the Seventies and Eighties with a band's photo and logo printed on the glass. I'm pretty sure I bought one of these with the ELO spaceship printed on it in red and black.

For a small shop, J &J certainly managed to cram a lot in. There were racks of LPs against the window between the counter and the door, beyond the 7" singles along the back wall, and inhabiting the shop's narrowest point at the end opposite the counter. I don't recall the stock being split up according to genre, but it must have been alphabetical at least. The staff didn't seem to differentiate between new and used records as they were all racked together. It was only years later that I was studying my copy of Kate Bush's Never Forever which I had bought thinking it was a brand new UK release, only to discover that it is, in fact, a Greek pressing.

No doubt there were albums in the racks that, if I had a time machine, I would snap up in a heartbeat given the opportunity. Surreptitiously, I always had my eye on a copy of Electric Ladyland which to this day I remember had a £4.99 price tag on it, but I was never brave enough to pick it up, let alone take it to the counter as I couldn't face the inevitable humiliation that would come from being accused of only wanting it for the sleeve which, being a UK pressing, happened to be plastered with a gatefold's-worth of naked women. My thirteen year-old self often thought that this album, with all those worldly-wise, confident, intimidating women staring out from the cover, not Hendrix's debut, should have been the one called Are You Experienced?. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering if I was shamed out of buying an original Track label pressing.

Despite the ritual humiliation, I loved that shop. Neither the misanthropic staff nor my pubescent awkwardness could diminish the joy of being surrounded by the vinyl treasures that I was starting to discover. Every record sleeve had a story to tell, some nugget of information waiting to be unearthed. Names, faces, studios, instruments, producers: I absorbed them all, and the more I learnt, the more I wanted to know. I spent many a school lunch hour at J&J, topping up my education. I was in heaven.

By the time I was sixteen, the VCR was king, and J&J wanted in on some of that video rental action. Somehow they managed to squeeze what seemed like a huge selection of titles into that tiny corridor. No doubt much of the vinyl was edged out to make way for Back To The Future, Weird Science, Porky's and Risky Business, but I can't say that I noticed as, by that time, a gang of us were making regular trips to Virgin, HMV and the Record & Tape Exchange stores in Camden Town, Notting Hill Gate and the Goldhawk Road, our horizons having expanded beyond our mundane little town. J&J was still an important part of our lives though. Where else were a bunch of sixteen year-olds going to get their hands on the soft porn and splatter movies that made up the bulk of our viewing when our parents were out of town? Of course, the writing was on the wall for J&J Records once it ditched the vinyl, lured by the easy money promised by the video rental boom. Funnily enough, even as a video outlet J&J managed to further my musical education. During an evening of teenaged drunkenness accompanied by a screening of yet another Electric Blue movie, I found myself transfixed, not by the soft focus, soft porn on screen, but by the pulsing musical accompaniment to a ridiculous fantasy sequence involving a naked woman, a bike and a long drop from a cliff. What's this music? Does anyone know who this is? Anyone? My friends all drew blanks. Realising that I couldn't hire the tape every time I wanted to hear it, I had to find out who was responsible for this amazing music. Fortunately, a few clues in the lyrics eventually led me to Steve Miller's Gangster Of Love: one minute and twenty-four seconds of stoned, throbbing, funky, head-nodding, west coast weirdness.

I have vague recollections of another J&J Records bricks and mortar shop on the edge of Hemel Hempstead market. I'm pretty sure that's where my copy of Prism's See Forever Eyes came from - a steal at 99p. From the little I remember, the Hemel store was little more than a broom cupboard, but sometimes there was a stall on the market selling vinyl which may have been a spill-over from the shop. J&J Records was best known locally though for its stall on Watford's Charter Place market. It was manned by the two Js (Janet and John Lang) who gave this modest business empire its name. As market stalls go, it was huge; certainly much larger than the two shops combined. I began my music collection in earnest here, picking up second hand cassette tapes for small change: Thin Lizzy's Live & Dangerous and Deep Purple's In Rock. Clearly first loves make a deep impression as I still rate those as two of my all-time favourite albums. Once I came to realise that tapes are a bit crap, I graduated to vinyl, digging through the market stall's many records for gems such as my original UK pressing of UFO's Obsession (complete with poster).

There was something almost other-worldly about buying records from a stall in a covered market, the air thick and funky with the smells of ripe fruit, dog biscuits, fish food and bacon butties, but despite that and the surly service in the Berkhamsted shop, my fondest memories are of that cramped, inhospitable space.

Click here for a local newspaper report on the demise of J&J Records and here for a website that archives information on Britain's record shops.