Month: April 2009

I final­ly made it to Blue Arrow Records on Sat­ur­day, and picked up two Bowie albums that I’ve been hap­haz­ard­ly hunt­ing for: David Live at the Tow­er in Philadel­phia and Aladdin Sane.

While I was in the store I deter­mined that Pete Gulyas does­n’t see his job so much as shop­keep­er but as a cura­tor. This isn’t the place to go if you like dig­ging through hun­dreds of records look­ing for one gem hid­den among them. The chaff has be pre-win­nowed at Blue Arrow, and every piece of vinyl you pick up will be a gem with its own par­tic­u­lar lus­tre.

Apart from spin­ning records, there’s a few spin­ning racks of pulp nov­els, some indie-Cleve­land cloth­ing, cool jew­el­ry and sundry oth­er items, none of which are mere­ly gar­nish. There’s a lit­tle stage with some turnta­bles spin­ning store stock and I was glad to see that I made a good turntable pur­chase when I noticed that Blue Arrow uses an Audio-Tech­ni­ca. I even got a line on some places to hunt for speak­ers local­ly, and Pete said he hopes to broad­en his stock offer­ings to include speak­ers, et cetera once Blue Arrow is a bit more estab­lished.

I for­got to ask him if he’s going to hunt for rare vinyl for peo­ple or stock stuff that might be slow to sell, like the 180g Nep­tune album I’m cur­rent­ly lis­ten­ing to, but I’m plan­ning to lay more of my hard earned cash down on Water­loo at the 2nd Annu­al Record Store Day next Sat­ur­day. The two-hun­dred yards of Water­loo that holds the Beach­land, Music Saves and Blue Arrow Records is like a giant can­dy store for music junkies.

You can read and see a bit more about Blue Arrow Records here: