I read the news that day, oh boy.
That last item in my friend Jon’s news roundup at The Vinyl District (a music blog that’s been around for a while and is still a highly recommended read) … the little Ohio record shop we’d visited when our son was in grad school was in transition, its owner retiring.
That brought back a nice memory.
In late April 2019, those pre-pandemic glory days, Evan and I visited Main Street Vinyl in Hamilton, Ohio. It was a few doors down from a comic book store Evan enjoyed visiting.
This is what I found and what I wrote that day:
Evan and I squeezed in a wee bit of record digging this morning at this fine little shop in the next town over. This was at the front of the collectible crate. One of the two early Bob Seger records I don’t have. $75 is another thing I don’t have, at least not today. So it goes. But fun to see it in the wild after looking for it for so long.
I’m still looking for “Brand New Morning.” That’s the only time I’ve seen it in the wild. (I’m still looking for “Noah,” too, but even my friend Dave Benton, who has sold records for 40 years, has never seen it.)
There’s good news, though. I still can stop at Main Street Vinyl when we’re in Ohio this summer. The three brothers who own Unsung Salvage two doors down have bought the record store. Over the weekend, they set it up inside their building.
Wonder whether they still have the collectible crate, and whether “Brand New Morning” is in it. Oh, sure, I could call, but the fun is in the digging and in record store travel. And, yes, I could listen to the whole album on YouTube, but that takes the mystery out of it.
The record store isn’t the only thing that’s moved. That nearby comic book store — Future Great Comics — moved a few miles up the road to Oxford, Ohio, where Evan went to grad school at Miami University and where we’ll be come June.
Wonder whether it still has this battle royal.
Yeah, that was a fun day.