Record Stores R.I.P.

As an appendix to our regular features, here’s a discussion of some of the Cleveland-area (and beyond!) record shops that are no longer with us .

1. Records– The king of them all, Records, and Larry it’s proprietor, are sadly missed by anyone who ever shopped there. There will never be anything like it again. Originally housed in a crumbling store front in a seedy part of the West Side, he later expanded to include an even larger spot around the corner. For a while, both were open at the same time. Blasting country & western from speakers both inside and outside the shop, it was hard to miss if you strolled by. Inside, thousands of crumbling albums were stacked floor to ceiling. It was difficult to walk through, and there was absolutely no organizational system of any kind. Trips to Records would sometime involve bag lunches- you’d be there for hours. You’d never know what you might find, if it would be playable, or if the record inside the jacket was even the correct one. Larry sat in the back smoking cigars, and when you hauled your stack of finds over to him, he’d abstractly flip through them- carefully removing any country records (which he’d tell you weren’t for sale)- and come up with some arbitrary price, usually 15 or 20 bucks for a stack of thirty or forty records. When he died his family had a house sale where they sold off all the country albums he’d kept for himself.

2. Chris’s Warped Records (West)–  A lot of great albums came from this place over the years, and it’s not uncommon to still come across a used LP with the familiar large round orange or yellow (depending on era) price sticker on the upper right. Originally this location was two connected storefronts, one side sold comic books, and the other had music. Eventually the comic side closed, and became a separate store that sold punk, metal, and bondage clothes. Over the course of many years the music side slowly devolved to mostly selling shitty punk and metal. Then one day it closed entirely. In its prime it was one of the best in town for used records of any genre.

3. Chris’s Warped Records (East)– I didn’t go to the East Side Chris’s too many times, which as I recall mostly sold t-shirts, posters, and other ephemera. I remember getting some weird Shimmy-Disc cassettes or something of that ilk there once.

4. Wax Stacks– This was a pretty cool spot on the East Side that always had a good selection. When they closed they sold off all their stock at super discount rates. I still have a bunch of great albums I got during that sale. I remember I got a copy of “Soldier Talk” by The Red Krayola during that, and that they probably had at least 10 sealed copies of it. I wish I had had the foresight to buy ’em all!

5. Platter Puss– This place stocked all kinds of psych and weird Euro imports. The guy who ran it was a real character, too. He would get you high, sell you impossibly rare yet water-damaged old LPs on the cheap, then disappear to the Taco Bell across the street for an hour and tell you to watch the store. This is exactly the kind of thing the internet has ruined, folks. Jesse James Record Stores.

6. Mindwave– If I was in Back to the Future II, I would not hesitate to go back to Mindwave with 5 grand and buy Jack’s entire collection. Here was this drunken cat (‘ex junkie’), sitting in his chair, watching black-and-white “I Love Lucy” reruns on an 8″ TV in a big-ass warehouse fulla weird vinyl. The place was part of a ground floor of an abandoned theater. There was no internet back then, this was the 1990s. I got a lot of great stuff from him, but Jesus, the things I left behind… He had the TG Suitcase! That really exists! He later moved the store to a small storefront down the street that had like seven goth/industrial CDs in it. He died of a heart-attack behind the counter of the store at some point a few years back. One time, in like 1996, I remember going into his original shop and him showing me the burn scars he had on his arm from falling into a fire pit at a Crash Worship show a few weeks prior.

7. Repeat The Beat– This place is only notable because they hired some legit OG hipsters to stock their titles and book some shows. Other than that, they pretty much only sold CDs (wack), were located in a shopping center in a particularly offensive Northeast Ohio Suburb, and were operational for like a year. Why did this exist exactly?

8. Mark’s CDs– Way back a long time ago, The Euclid Arcade (or the Old Arcade, or the Citibank Arcade, or whatever it’s called now) had not only a GIANT comic book shop in it, but also this kick-ass weird CD store, where I bought a bunch of Jad Fair and Zoviet France titles, cuz nobody else back then even knew about such shit. Around the corner from there was “Downtown Sounds,” a good spot for mixtapes and discount Rap 12″s.

9. Random Jazz Store That Was Across The Street From The Old Bent Crayon For Like A Year Sometime In The 90s– Yeah, somebody ran a used jazz vinyl place for a minute on W. 116th & Detroit (where the psychic reader place is now), in the mid 90s. Why didn’t I buy the Gato Barbieri ESP-Disc’?