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Julio Garcia makes a note on a paper ledger before pressing a key on a cash register that appears older than the young clerk himself. Garcia makes change from $6, and with that, Stanley Clark’s debut album “Children of Forever” becomes the first sale of a Monday morning at The Record Man in Redwood City.
Not to worry fans of 50-year-old fusion. The Record Man still has another copy of “Children of Forever” waiting just for you. In fact, the dusty, one-of-a-kind museum of music on El Camino seems to have multiple copies of every long-playing vinyl record ever made.
The Record Man has been part of a dying breed of used record stores since 1988. It survived on life support through the dark jewel-cased days of the compact disc and barely registered a pulse for a while when Spotify and iTunes were ascending. But these days, vinyl is making a comeback among audiophiles and others who hear music as much more than so much data.
On Saturday, a national marketing effort called Record Store Day –this year on April 20 –shines a light on mom-and-pop businesses like The Record Man. Many independent record stores offer deals and special releases on the big day.
But for Gary Saxon, The Record Man himself, every day is Record Store Day. Fans of his 10-room, two-story edifice to recorded sound kept coming through the lean years, after a devastating fire in 2022 and continue to stream in rather than streaming music on their cellphones.
For casual music fans, that might be surprising. The vinyl record has been on life support since the advent of the CD 40 years ago, around the time Saxon opened his record store. Some would say that is with good reason. The long-playing record warps in the sun, scratches easily and can lose its vibrancy with repeated plays. Each side contains only about 20 minutes of music, and these days, one could subscribe to a music streaming service for several months for the price of a single coveted used album.
And yet, for a subset of sometimes curmudgeonly music lovers, there is nothing like the experience of music delivered on a black vinyl disc. Some of that appeal is no doubt nostalgic. Record lovers recall the hiss of a particular album they loved in high school, perhaps. The cardboard album cover is also a draw for anyone concerned with graphics of a certain era; it is infinitely easier to see and enjoy than the plastic CD cases destined to clog some landfill forever more. And forget trying to read liner notes that come inside a CD case that is a 4.72-inch square.
Some argue vinyl offers a warmer sound than digital music, too. Saxon would.
“Vinyl is analog,” he said. “It provides a richer, fuller sound. I talk about the art and zen of records.
“First, there is the artwork on the cover,” he said. “You read the liner notes and learn a little bit about what you are hearing. Then you put the needle on the record and the room fills with music.”
You don’t have to own a record store to sing the praises of the old technology. Music fans, including longtime Peninsula resident Neil Young, have long waxed poetic about the joys of wax tracks. The music press is filled with odes to the vinyl record.
“I have gone from LPs to cassettes to CDs in my music-buying lifetime,” Scott-Ryan Abt wrote last year in The Riff, an online music magazine. “I could tell you what albums constituted my first purchase of each. I can’t do the same for the first song I downloaded (from streaming services).
“I just want to slow down and reacquaint myself with something we’ve been told we no longer need,” he wrote.
One of the charms of The Record Man is that browsers are encouraged to play albums from floor-to-ceiling stacks on old audio components set up in some of the storage rooms. It’s a way to tell whether a particular record is free of scratches and worth the investment. It also creates a unique ambiance in a building that is also liable to be freshened by the smell of incense. Records seem to spill from the two buildings and the storage containers housed in the parking lot. The collection has bred a loyal following.
“People come from all over the world,” Saxon said. “We have people who come from Japan and South Korea, from Germany, England…”
What they find will take the breath from any record collector. Record shelves fill each room, from the dusty panel-wood floors to the 10-foot ceilings. If two record collectors meet in any given room, the space can be so tight that they have to dance sideways to pass one another. Ladders allow the brave to climb sometimes to the eighth row of records waiting near the ceiling. And that is not all. There are books related to music, some sheet music and an array of preowned audio equipment should shoppers need a “new” turntable. Hidden on one shelf is an autographed photo of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
Record lovers might find it hard to imagine that one day soon, this could all be gone. The land beneath all of those records — and adjacent Happy Donuts and Cycle Gear — is owned by Premier Properties, which plans to construct housing on the site in the next couple of years, Saxon said.
“It’s overwhelming,” he said. “I would like to be able to relocate somewhere on the El Camino but I don’t have $10,000 to $20,000 a month. I’m more of a $5,000 to $6,000 guy.”
Saxon is holding out hope that another, younger record lover will come out from behind the bins to purchase the business before it’s lost entirely. “If I could find someone to buy us out and relocate that would be amazing,” he said.
If not, there will be a lot of records to move. Just how many?
“I used to boast there were a million records, but I don’t know any more,” Saxon said.
