It’s not about the deals you find while flipping through boxes hastily arranged under the display cases that makes visiting a record store so special. As much as I love the adventure of diving into crates of wax, the real reason I love record stores is the people. In a city blessed with six top-notch record stores, it might seem overly-dramatic to lament to the closing of Record City way out on E. Charleston in Las Vegas but there was a real sense of sadness that fell over me when I heard the news this week. For over two decades, Joey McDonald has managed the store with a kindness that is all too rare in the business.
Of the six record stores in my town, Joey’s shop is the furthest away from where I live and the twenty-mile trip usually takes forty-five minutes each way in the snarling traffic. However, as I started collecting records in 2011, his store was always the place to be. The two corporate Zia Records might have all the new vinyl, and a healthy part of my collection was found at Moondog Records where Clint has some incredible rare vinyl, but visiting Joey wasn’t really about the records. Always ready for a chat, Joey would talk about bands he thought you might like and he was rarely wrong. In fact, I know that I would have never listened to Josie Cotton or Trees had he not mentioned them while we were hanging out near the cash register.
Sometimes, I would buy random records from the bargain bin just to write about them (Tales From the Crates) and sometimes, I wouldn’t see anything I needed but Joey would give you something anyway because sharing music is his passion. For a music fan with taste that runs from the esoteric to the painfully mainstream, Joey never looked down on my excitement over a Howard Jones 12″ or asked why I was stocking up on yacht rock. In almost every way, he was the exact opposite of Jack Black in High Fidelity. You always left Record City feeling better about life and that’s more important than finding a bootleg copy of Bowie on green vinyl (though that was awesome, too). Losing my car over a year ago, not being able to see Joey has definitely left my soul a little less full even as I find buying vinyl less a part of my life.
The end of this Record City location after over thirty years came down to a greedy landlord as it so often does. As of this writing, it sounds like Joey and the inventory will be headed for the other Record City location which is much closer to my house. It won’t feel the same at first but I am confident that as long as Joey is there, it will be just as wonderful in a few months. Today, I said goodbye and picked up a disco record that will see plenty of spins at my upcoming gigs. More importantly, I saw a friend grappling with the sudden uncertainty of his entire life being uprooted with a long commute to a new store in his immediate future. Rather than talk about that though, Joey showed me two pictures drawn by young kids who had visited his store years ago. His immediate concern was not his own situation but preserving those drawings and finding them a space on the wall at the other location. They will be the first thing I look for when I visit his new digs.
