Music to Your Ears
The esteemed proprietress of this column is on vacation, a fact I was unaware of until this morning when I received a phone call from an Austrian mountaintop instructing me to tell you what I know about buying records in NYC. Well, New York is a big place and I hardly ever go to most of it, so what I'm going to tell you is where to buy records in the pedestrian manageable space of about twenty blocks. I know that there are some great specialty stores farther uptown - classical and jazz specifically - and I've heard rumors about some guy in a Bronx basement that has every record pressed after 1940 and will gladly sell it to you if properly motivated; but I rarely need to go north of 23rd St. or south of Houston for my musical needs, so there you go.
For over twenty years Midnight Records on West 23rd street has been an essential stop for rock-n-roll obsessives. The store's mostly vinyl stock offers a mammoth selection of early blues and R&B, fifties rockabilly, sixties pyschedelia, punk, some real oddities like Betty Page LPs (too cool) plain old rock and roll and a whole lot more. Some of the more interesting and obscure records do not come cheap. But for those of us not willing to shell out fifty bucks for the first pressing of the first Hasil Adkins single, its still worth a look. In a lot of ways Midnight is a monument to the recorded history of rock-n-roll and all that is wild and young. The staff is very knowledgeable and can be helpful on occasion. If you happen to find a record you won't live without, but are cash poor, Midnight has an excellent mail order service. You can find them on the web at www.midnightrecords.com. Midnight is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday from noon to 6pm.
A few blocks downtown, on 18th street is one of the great musical bargains in New York. Academy Records and CDs, between 5th and 6th Avenues has an enormous, diverse selection of rare and used CDs and LPs. Avant-garde, classical, jazz, rock, pop and world music (whatever that means) are all well represented. The stock is very ordered and browsing is generally very easy. The staff is fairly helpful in most situations. One tip - I have learned from experience that if you find something you want, buy it. Academy gets a lot of traffic and the turnover is tremendous. That copy of Blonde on Blonde or Giant Steps won't be there tomorrow when you go back. Academy is open Monday-Saturday from 9:30 until 9pm and Sundays from 11 to 7.
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