Old New York: Catch the Cool Cats at Bleecker Street Records

By Mitch Broder

Creeper and Scuzzball apparently will be moving to a new store, but that shouldn’t stop you from paying a call on them while they’re at the old store. At the old store, after all, you always know where you can find them. In the new store, at least at the start, they might actually get up.

Creeper and Scuzzball are the languid cats of Bleecker Street Records, one of the few consequential record stores left in New York. It’s been said to be closing, due to the typical rent challenges of city stores. But credible sources tell me it’s moving, probably in the fall.

It’s moving, they say, to the former site of another record store — 186 West Fourth Street, once the home of Disc-O-Rama. Disc-O-Rama, which has had several stores, is now just at 44 West Eighth Street. It, too, carries CDs and LPs — but not with the festiveness of Bleecker Street.

At Bleecker Street Records, the main attractions are the walls. There aren’t any. At least not that you can see. If they are there, they are concealed by hundreds of beguiling albums, which recall the joys that were once a part of a hunt for musical treasure.

They include rarities by the likes of the Beatles and Buddy Holly, and oddities by the likes of Carroll O’Connor and Zero Mostel. This may the only place in the world that displays an LP by the Detergents, who answered the bizarre Shangri-Las hit “Leader of the Pack” with their bizarrer hit, “Leader of the Laundromat.”

The albums provide education along with entertainment. They are festooned with labels that tell you things you never thought you could know. A formidable example is found on the label for the Japanese pressing of an album intriguingly titled “The Best of Cheryl Ladd”:

“Did you know this former ‘Charlie’s Angel’ was also the singing voice behind the animated cartoon ‘Josie & the Pussycats,’ and she was very popular in Japan where she enjoyed a successful career and released many Japanese Market only releases!!! Well, it’s all true!!!”

And as if that isn’t enough, the label makes sure to add: “Japanese pressing/Best Quality! ... Immaculate Condition!!!! This Gatefold LP comes with a huge color poster of Cheryl … Va Va Voom!!!!”

Below the displays, the place is packed with recorded music, much of which you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. It spans not just rock and pop, but everything from country to Broadway, with a dash of Noël Coward, Jimmy Durante, Chad Everett, and Rosey Grier.

Topping it off — almost literally — are Creeper and Scuzzball, two big gray furry meat loaves who doze on boxes by the stairs to the basement. They hardly move and they rarely respond. Evidently, this gives them mystique. One of the store’s best-selling items is the Creeper and Scuzzball T-shirt.

Inevitably, there’s some whining online about the record prices. They can be high. But so can prices on any other antiques. Besides, the bins in the basement are full of surprising bargains. And if you’re looking for “The Best of Cheryl Ladd,” how many options do you have?

The store, more or less as it is, dates to 1972. It was called The Golden Disc, with “disc” referring to vinyl. It changed hands in the mid-nineties and was redubbed Bleecker Street. The new store settled in just in time to enjoy the golden age of compact discs.

Today it counts on record hounds willing to pay the price, says Rob Lecuyer, one of the store managers. “People come to New York to spend money, and this is a real tourist street,” he says. “Some people complain about prices. Other people drop thousands in one sitting.”

West Fourth is also a tourist street, so it seems like a good bet. And that’s good for New Yorkers — at least the ones who still like to hunt.

“Anything and everything will sell,” Rob says. “What you think is crap, somebody else is like: ‘I’ve been looking for this my whole life.’”

Take a spin at Bleecker Street Records, 239 Bleecker Street, between Carmine and Leroy streets, New York City.

FOR MORE RARE RECORDS, VISIT HOUSE OF OLDIES, ON CARMINE STREET, JUST AROUND THE CORNER FROM BLEECKER STREET RECORDS. AND READ ABOUT HOUSE OF OLDIES — AND DOZENS OF OTHER CLASSIC SPOTS — IN THE AMAZON BEST SELLER “DISCOVERING VINTAGE NEW YORK”!

House of Oldies: Selling Last Century's Hits For Half a Century

That's Bob.

By Mitch Broder

The House of Oldies stocks around 700,000 records, yet the only thing that’s likely to do any skipping is the store.

It has skipped cassettes. It has skipped CDs. It has skipped downloads. It has skipped catalogs. It has skipped — musically speaking — the past couple of decades. Nevertheless, in at least one way it’s more relevant than almost all the record stores that have come along in the fifty years since it opened:

It’s still in business.

It has outlived Tower and Virgin and HMV and Sam Goody, and (in Manhattan) FYE, the chain that ate chains like Sam Goody. It has outlived mostly forgotten names like Record Hunter and King Karol, and scores of other record shops, record chains, and record departments.

It has just outlived Strider Records, the store that most resembled it, probably because it was run by a man who once worked at the House of Oldies. When I heard that Strider, a couple of blocks over, had closed after 32 years, I got worried and went to check on the House.

I had nothing to worry about.

Still wedged into the 700,000 records was Bob Abramson, who has owned the store since 1968. He still runs it alone. He still sells only records. He still sells the records he sold in 1968. And he still plans to keep selling them. “I love being here,” he said. “It’s either a sickness or a passion. I think it’s a passion.”

He likes customers with a passion — meaning customers who know what they want. His is not a store for hours of browsing, since its one aisle gets blocked by one browser. This is paradoxical, since the store has dozens of tempting bins and a wall of tempting album covers and 45-rpm picture sleeves.

But you can spend a little time admiring wall occupants like the Everly Brothers, Bobby Darin, Little Richard, Dion, Ruth Brown, and the Eldorados. And that may help you to know what you want — which may lead you to sticker shock. But Bob says that his prices shock only the people who don’t understand what he sells.

He pulls out a copy of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” It’s marked $90. He slips the disk from its sleeve. It’s shiny and flawless. “Show me where you’re gonna find a first pressing of ‘Let It Be’ that looks like that, from 35 years ago. It’s a first edition. You’re gonna pay for it.” (And actually, it was 41 years ago.)

Nevertheless, he has bargain bins, with LPs for $10. These are generally albums that are in more abundance or less demand. But like the ninety-dollar “Let It Be,” they are guaranteed not to skip. If you prefer the Motels to the Beatles, you go home an all-around winner.

The Motels notwithstanding, prime time here is the fifties and sixties, and most albums cost between $25 and $40. Those prices, too, can elicit comments like “Forty bucks for this? Are you serious?” Bob’s stock reply: “Let me bring that to the attention of my buyer. It probably is too high.”

The House of Oldies’ record run started in 1962, when Richard Clothier opened it around the corner, on Bleecker Street. Bob became a customer. Then he became an employee. And at 24, he became the owner. Richard didn’t have the passion.

Bob moved the store in 1980, when his landlord said that the fish store next door was taking over the space, which in fact it never did. If not for that, he probably would never have moved, just as he hasn’t moved since. “I don’t need to be the richest guy in the cemetery,” he says.

As cassettes and CDs eclipsed vinyl, Bob put his famous sign in the window: “NO CD’s/ NO  TAPES/ JUST RECORDS.” Back then, I saw it as defiance. Decades later, I’ve been corrected. “It was not to be elite,” Bob said, “not to say ‘F-U with your CDs and tapes.’ I did it ’cause the store was small, and I didn’t want 9,000 people coming in here for CDs and tapes.”

The fidelity to high fidelity cost some fidelity in the nineties. The masses abandoned records for the alleged miracle discs. People commonly bought CDs of records they already had. Bob waited for them to come back and buy records of CDs they already had.

Now, with CDs dead and tapes deader, business is good. The customers span generations; Bob calls his teen clientele “huge.” “They’ll come in and say, ‘Got any Zeppelin on wax?’ They love the sound of vinyl on a decent system. It doesn’t have to be a $10,000 system. It can be a $500 system.”

As for his own system, Bob plays the classics — Dylan, Baez, Presley, the Stones. “The greats are the greats because they’re great,” he says. “Everybody thinks I have, like, secret albums that no one ever heard of. I don’t. I don’t have one album that you never heard of.”

But he sells just about every album you ever heard of, especially if it’s midcentury rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop, rhythm & blues, blues, soul, or pop.

And if he keeps on outliving record stores, that copy of “Let It Be” for $90 may just end up being the biggest bargain in New York.

Take a spin at House of Oldies, 35 Carmine Street, New York City.