For the first time in many years, I went to a record show. Every few months, these things pop up in a conference room of a local hotel and dealers from all over the tri-state area show up with their goods to trade. Record nerds come out of the woodwork in search of their own personal lost arcs to bring back to their own private museums. These are my people.
The nature of the Record Collectors' Convention has changed quite a bit from when I first started attending these things in the early nineties. Back then I was a teenager and part of a see of adolescents washing into an ocean of older career collectors. The halls that the shows were in were large and often spilled into other banquet halls. It would literally take hours to give the place a good once over. Trade tables would be completely covered with boxes of cds packed tight and on end. Giant bins of loose discs filled the space beneath the tables. Crates upon crates of records ate up as much space as the discs. Each table was managed by some sort of peddler that knew their product and loved working with it. Most of them were there more on quests of their own than to make a buck selling their own product. Then there was the random collectable shit: life size cut outs of Elvis, signed promo shots of everyone from Aerosmith to The Zombies, KISS lunchboxes, etc. I would have to wedge my way in between people to get a glimpse of what was there for the taking. And the people. There was a pretty even mix of young and old. Punks, Gen-Xers, Deadheads, Dads, Grandpas, and a whole lot of guys that were suspiciously similar to the comic book guy from the Simpsons. Proper hygene was not essential at these events. In fact, I came to accept it as a strategy. These weren't people that didn't care for themselves. These were people who understood the game. The confines are tight and it is every man for himself. A little BO or bad breathe may keep an adversary far enough at bay so that they do not claim what you have come in search of. The Sunday morning of a record show never started with a shower or toothbrushing.
Back then cds were still the hot new medium for music and most of the dealers were enthusiastic to embrace it. My quest was always for two things, the bootlegs and the promos. Most of my time and money went after Cure and Nine Inch Nails products. The bootlegs were the big draw. At the time there were a few European companies that would get their hands on recording of concerts and put together elaborate packaging to go along with them. The end product wound up being really expensive due to the fact that, since they were illegal, they had to not only be imported, but smuggled into the country. As for promos, it was a time when the record labels were cd crazy. Often times when an artist had an album coming out, the labels would print up all sorts of related promotional stuff that they gave away to stores, radio stations and djs. Most of these items had b-sides, remixes, and other unreleased tracks. If you caught them early on, dealers would practically give them away, and then as numbers dwindled the prices went up. It was also a good time to search for used cds. The format was still relatively new, so there hadn't been time for collections to build up large quantities of totally undesirable cds that never sold.
Fifteen years later, it is a different scene. I was surprised at how many of the faces behind the tables I recognized from years ago. I was, but then again I wasn't. I'm still here, so why shouldn't they be as well. The room that it was held in was much smaller, but just as packed. There was no longer an admission fee either. As I first took in the space to plot my path, a few other changes became very obvious to me. For one, most of the product is now very old vinyl. This is no longer the endless landscape of new or once used products. Most things here had been bought and sold and bought and sold many times before finding their way here. Given their age, I began to wonder how many of them had been loved by someone, but just outlived their owners. Had they then moved to a basement of a relative for years only to be dumped at a consignment shop and picked up by a knowledgable dealer? I then also realized that the number of record dealers hadn't outgrown the cd dealers. The cd dealers are simply fading away. The smaller room is due to the lack of cds. As I inspected the few cd tables that there were I confirmed a few things that I had suspected. One, the cd bootlegs are gone. This I actually knew. There was a pretty big crack down on the major distributers by the FBI in the late nineties. That was the first hit, the second was the internet. Live shows are free and plentiful in cyberspace and often times they are available within hours of the event. Two, promos? What promos? Record labels are getting stingy with the free stuff and are finding other ways to promote their products. Three, the used cds aren't even worth looking through anymore. Now that cds have been around for 20 years, there is a lot of crap that nobody bought that has been building up and filling more and more of the space in the used boxes. This is not to say that I didn't find anything interesting. There were plenty of things that I looked at in depth and thought about buying, but then decided I didn't want to spend the money on.
There was one thing that hadn't changed that deeply saddened me. Just like when I was a teenager discovering this whole subculture, I found that today I was still one of the youngest people there. The younger generations have gone digital and there is no real place for it in this forum. You can't sell downloads at a table. It's sad, because younger music enthusiasts won't get to take part in this sort of sonic swap meet. I guess convenience is a nice tradeoff. I certainly am enjoying the ability to track down almost any music I want from my living room. The interconnectedness of the internet is very disconnecting on a personal level though.
For instance, today I got to meet a guy that had a thing for concert t-shirts. He was buying ten or so from a dealer as he was telling me stories of his shirt collection and his ability to go months without wearing the same one twice. One of the shirts that he was purchasing today completed his collection of shirts that were available from the Rush 19whatever tour. T-shirts and Rush aren't my thing, but his passion I understood. And his breath kept me at an arms length distance so I couldn't dig through the same pile of shirts until he was done. At least not without holding my breath. Yet another thing that hasn't changed.
Everyone here has their own thing that they are after, but they all share the same passion. That connects us and adds to the coolness of the experience. At these shows, there is no judgement. The leather clad punk with the foot high mohawk, the Jerry Garcia looking deadhead, and I are all connected and interact freely and openly in this environment. You can't really get that from a computer or in another setting.
In the end, I walked out with a four dollar CBGB's T-shirt. I've always wanted one, and now that they are out of business, it was a good find. It certainly wasn't what I went there looking for, but it is the kind of random find that will keep me and all the other music nuts coming back.
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