Lost in the Record Store

I’m not sure when it opened, but I definitely spent a lot of time there around 1977 and 1978 – Peaches Records and Tapes. This was a huge record store in an abandoned supermarket and it was huge. Did I mention how big this store was? Well to a novice 8th grade record buyer it felt like an entire universe. With pocketful of allowance money earned from cutting the grass, I would spend hours just going through row after row of records. Of course I even bought my own Peaches Crate, which I still have and it still has the label on it. I remember hearing a rumor that Peaches was a front for the “Moonies” – A cult lead by Reverend Sun-Young Moon, but who knows? I couldn’t pin down when exactly Peaches opened, but I remember it being a big deal. The store was maybe 2 miles from my house, an easy bike ride on my Ross 10-speed. The store didn’t last forever, and I read somewhere that they were betting on 8-tracks being the next big thing, instead of cassettes, which led to their demise. I’ll always have a little place in my heart for the store where I bought my first albums, and wasted a lot of my time.

In my life there were a few record stores I was partial to. The first was Peaches. After they closed, I migrated over to Wall to Wall Sound, over on Rte 130 just north of the Pennsauken Mart. Later, I would spend a lot of time in the record store in the Berlin’s Farmer’s Market looking for 45’s. Tower Records, both on South Street in Philly and later in Cherry Hill got a lot of my money. There was also 3rd Street Jazz in old City in Philly, which had a great punk/indie/new wave section in the basement. If you wanted to find locally produced music, this was the place to go! In the late 80’s and early 90’s I would spend a lot of my lunch hours from work at Final Vinyl on Haddon Ave in Westmont. I think I almost met Ben Vaughan there, once!



The other day, the family took a day trip up to Princeton and I stopped in the Princeton Record Exchange. What a great store! Vinyl Lps! Cheap CDs! DVDs Indie/Hardcore just about anything you want. It was definitely a throwback store, but it was pretty cool to be able to show a store like that to my teen-age sons. They’re already both so used to buying songs online and watching videos on YouTube that I doubt they will ever actually buy a physical CD in a store in their lives.



The First Records I Ever Bought



Of course I remember the first albums I ever bought with my own money. Just like your first date, or a first kiss or your first car, for my generation, buying your first album was something you knew you were going to remember, so it had to be done right. I bought them at Peaches and they marked the start of a record collection that would grow to include hundreds of albums, singles and CDs. They weren’t the first albums I owned, though. I had Wing’s Band on the Run, as I mentioned earlier. I also had an Elvis’ greatest hits album, with about 20 songs on it and a Tom Jones greatest hits album. (Why Why Why Delilah??) The Elvis and Tom Jones albums I won from selling magazine subscriptions for my grade school’s fundraiser. I really wanted to win the 10 pound bar of Hershey’s chocolate, but I was never that aggressive of a magazine peddler. The best thing about the magazine fundraiser was the carbon forms they used to give you to record the orders. They had this weird smell that I think I was addicted to, because I would spend the first day of the fundraiser sneaking whiffs of the forms out of my book bag.

But where was I? Ah yes, my first albums. The first one may not be a surprise to anyone from that time. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors was released in February of 1977 and went on to rule the charts for the better part of that year. Don’t Stop was the first single of that album, but I was partial to the rocking Go Your Own Way. This album redefined pop songwriting for the next few years, while at the same time reflecting songwriting that wouldn’t have been out of place coming form the songbooks of Carole King or her Brill Building contemporaries. The album would turn Stevie Nicks into a pop culture icon for a generation of teenage girls, and us guys thought the photo of her on the album was pretty nice, too. The album has truly stood the test of time, with nearly all of album’s original 11 tracks still in rotation on oldies and classic rock stations.

The other album I bought at the same time was from what would be one of my favorite bands. In October, 1977 ELO released Out of the Blue, an epic double album that would be their commercial and critical peak and would mark their place in rock and roll history. The album cover featured a great picture of a spaceship, featuring the script ELO logo. Released in the same year between Star Wars and Close Encounters, I think ELO knew what they were doing with the Sci-Fi themed cover. The album packaging also featured a cut-out of the large and small space ships that you could put together, but mine are long since gone. I liked ELO since Roll Over Beethoven and Evil Woman. The year before they released A New World record, this featured Telephone Line and Do Ya, but I bought this album on the strength of the singles Turn to Stone and Sweet Talking Woman. Both were pretty good songs and still make the rounds on the radio, but this album had a lot of great surprises including the eternally spotless and sunny Mr. Blue Sky. I plan on dedicating a blog post to ELO down the road, but for now, I’ll just say that this is still one of my favorite albums. It was one of the first albums that I upgraded to CD when it was available. I remember later realizing that the design for the space ship was actually a variation of an old art deco Wurlitzer jukebox, which I thought was pretty cool, bridging the history of rock and roll to its future.

Columbia House

I don’t know if you were part of this, but it was hard not to notice the full page ads on the back of Parade Magazine. I think I had to ask my folks a couple of times before they caved in and let me join. Of course, they ended up footing the bill for most of my purchases, but I was able to start adding to my record collection and start filling up my Peaches Crate. I was starting to realize that there was lot of music I had to catch up on! You probably remember the ads: get 11 records for 1 cent. Just buy 10 more over the next two years at our ridiculously inflated prices to satisfy your commitment. A friend of mine thought that Columbia House sold cut-rate versions of the records and that you were better off buying them in the stores. I never noticed any problem with the quality of the records I bought. The first batch of records I bought included a great number of Barry Manilow records, I’m sorry to admit, but it was true. Also in there was the double album Star Wars Soundtrack, Steve Miller’s Book of Dreams, and I think this was when I finally picked up Boston’s debut album.

Over the years, I bought a lot of records and a lot of posters from Columbia House, but I was still partial to the records stores, especially when I got into the local music scene, which was mostly independent. There really was nothing like going through aisle after aisle of LPs, looking for a new release or just checking out the cover art. It’s something I miss from my youth and I’m sad that my kids won’t have the same experience. Maybe they get some kind of rush looking through the new video games at the GameStop or Best Buy, but it’s not really the same. Call me a curmudgeon if you want to, but I think eventually it will be hard to find stores that sell CDs or even video games as the internet becomes more powerful and wireless delivery of merchandise creeps takes over more formats.

Next: 1977 - 1978 Growing Up