Record Stores, A Birthday, And Some Nostalgia

I miss record stores. There was a time, living here in the New York area, I could sneak out of my office at lunchtime and visit a different record store every day of the week, for several weeks without repeating myself. Just in my area of Long Island and Queens, there was Titus Oaks in Hicksville and Huntington and, if I wanted to be adventurous, Brooklyn; and Radio City in Hempstead, and later another one in Hempstead; and Infinity in Wantaugh; and several Mr. Cheapos; and a guy named Kenny who had one on Union Turnpike in Fresh Meadows and another on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica; and one on Northern Boulevard in Little Neck, and several more, whose names and locations are all muddled together in my memory.

I’m thinking of these because I’m a bit nostalgic today, which would have been my dad’s 82nd birthday. I’ve talked a bit about my dad before and how he was largely responsible for getting me into jazz (Song For My Father). One of my other memories of my father is how he too would love to go to record stores. On a Saturday or Sunday in the mid-1960s, we’d all get into the family car and drive into the city, under the premise that we would walk around Greenwich Village or maybe go to the movies. But the real aim was for my father to go to his favorite record store, which was Looney Tunes on 8th Street. There was a Dayton’s outlet right across the street, but Dayton’s was too expensive — my dad would only buy the records from the bargain bins, and in the mid-1960s Looney Tunes had the best bargain bins in the city.

My father especially loved the records on the Riverside label — or perhaps those were the ones that were the cheapest, because he also loved the idea of getting a bargain. His collection was loaded with Riversides — Monk and Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans and, especially, Cannonball Adderley, who my father loved to see live and loved to hear on record. He never got much into the Blue Notes or Prestiges or some of the other collectible labels, but he did have a few, such as Horace Silver’s Song For My Father and, one of his other favorites, Donald Byrd’s A New Perspective. It’s impossible for me to look at certain records, or hear certain tracks, without thinking of my dad, and how he would sit on the sofa in our living room with a cigarette and a cocktail and snap his fingers or bop to the great records of the 1950s and 1960s played on our brand new Fisher console HiFi. So, Happy Birthday Dad, wherever you are, and wherever that is, I hope there are some great jazz records — and they’re not too expensive.