Doug Wygal of Rocket Number Nine. (Photo: Phyllis McCabe)
Rhino and Rocket Number Nine both sell records, but each has its own flavor and personality. At Rhino, LPs are sorted under into categories like “discount tourism” (for world music) and “rustic” for the broad spectrum of country, folk and honky-tonk music known as Americana. There’s a bin of $1 classical recordings, a bin for Lange’s favorite classic avant garde record label, 4AD, and “Café Rendevouz” a bin full of offbeat lounge music from the ‘50s and ‘60s. “Basically music to have sex to,” said Lange, whose own tastes tilt towards jazz, classical and post-punk. “Bachelor pad music.”
Rhino also does a brisk business in new and used CDs and hosts an eclectic book selection (a shelf in the store is dedicated to pulp paperback editions of Beat Generation classics like Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie).
Down at Rocket Number Nine, Wygal said he tries to keep his selections eclectic. There’s the obligatory punk, jazz and blues sections. But he also makes space on the shelves for ’80s R&B, comedy albums and other recordings that might not pass the cool-kids test.
“I’m not just looking to sell Velvet Underground albums,” said Wygal. “I like the fact that people come in and say, ‘Where’s the Henry Mancini records?’ In some record stores that wouldn’t be cool.”
Both shop owners are also collectors. A hobby, they say, that’s helped immensely by having a location where new items literally walk in the door each day. A few weeks after Wygal intercepts the load of LPs headed up the street, an elderly man pulls up outside Rhino and produces a notepad. He wants the store’s phone number to pass on to a friend in Albany who has a collection of Elvis records “from day one.”
The shop owners also make the rounds of estate sales and record shows and do online bargain-hunting. For Wygal, at times the biggest conflict is between the collectors’ instinct and the shopkeepers’.
“Sometimes I think what I really want to do is curate a record museum because it’s hard to let stuff go,” he said. “I sold a copy of the first Stooges record to a guy from Brooklyn the other day. I said I was going to miss it. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to a good home.”
One upside to the democratization of technology is that the cost of a good-to-better set of speakers and an amp good enough to drive them doesn’t have to break the bank – and that is, indeed, the way to listen to vinyl. I’ve been a music collector/appreciator since the late ’50s and am still discovering new thing, both by new and old artists, and while mp3s and other digital formats have increased the ease of collecting, nothing beats clean vinyl on a good system. In addition to a couple of thousand CDs and a few thousand more mp3s, I also have about 23,000 records – LPs, 45s and even 78s – and turntables on which to play and enjoy them. Thank you for the article and for help keep people who care about music excited. (And now to go visit the record shops!)
ILIKE this article I like phone numbers to these stores. Have record collection of my own would like to sale.
23,000 vinyl records. I may have to rethink my stance against Psychiatry….
Great article! I’m happy to learn that there are two record shops in uptown Kingston, NY. I have a question for Rick Lange or Doug Wygal. Is there any way to trace records that were donated to Goodwill? My other half gave away my record collection a number of years ago, which was very disappointing to me. One of them was an album of “Ingo and the Continentals,” if anyone is familiar with them.