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”!

Old New York: Colony Records Packs Up the Beatles and Elvis

By Mitch Broder

The “Yellow Submarine” lunchbox will cost $650 till the end.

The Colony never changed anything, so it’s not about to change that.

The Colony is Colony Records, a Theater District treasure-hunt of sheet music, recorded music, and musical relics. It’s been around since 1948, but now it appears to be closing, possibly in just two weeks, though at the Colony you never know.

Michael Grossbardt, the CEO, told me that on September 15^th he will shut down the store that his father, “Nappy” Grossbardt, opened sixty-four years ago. He also assured me that he will conduct no going-out-of-business sale, which is appropriate for a store whose legend has rarely involved bargains.

Years ago, I experienced Colony as a frustrating place, because it had things that nearly took my breath away at prices that finished the job. But the problem was me. As soon as I started thinking of the place as a museum, I could go in knowing that the things I wanted were there only to look at.

Colony will end its storied life as a museum indeed, a shop that gave in to CDs in the nineties but to nothing much since then. It’s worth a last visit, since the lack of a sale is keeping the place intact, and since you will never, at least in this city, see its likes again.

Stroll past the tourist trinkets, and find new CDs and DVDs selling for $25 and up. Then find old LPs selling for $35, $40, $75, $125 and up. Then find some LPs selling for $15. They are the same ones you have in your closet that you couldn’t pay your local record store to take.

Much of the rest of the space displays sheet music and songbooks, recalling the days when songs were born in the Brill Building, which has long housed the store. But look deeper and find the display cases hoarding remnants of music history that you won’t find in real museums because they can’t handle the Colony’s markup.

Top prizes include that Beatles lunchbox at $650, and an Elvis-in-uniform prototype doll, at $1,800. Among other treasures are a Fabian pillow ($150), a Dick Clark “American Bandstand” Secret Diary ($200), and a Supremes Special Formula White Bread wrapper, priced no doubt for its irony, at $600.

As fascinating as the artifacts are the display cases themselves. They are not, to be gentle, meticulously maintained. The case labeled “Elvis” holds the Beatles stuff. The case labeled “Beatles” holds no Beatles stuff. The case that holds Elvis stuff has no label and, besides the Elvis stuff, holds the Michael Jackson Cordless Electric Microphone.

The “Streisand” case has a Streisand bag, but it also has TV Guides with cover photos of Chad Everett and Louise Lasser. But the “Frank Sinatra” label is accurate. Its case offers unused Sinatra tickets and unused Sinatra eight-tracks, which are about equally useful.

If Chad Everett and Louise Lasser don’t ring a bell, just know that they are hot stars compared with some others for sale. On high glass shelves, which incidentally display the dust of the decades, are the Burns & Allen Coffee Server and a poster for the Popsicle “Parade of Stars,” whose stars included Dick Haymes, Arthur Godfrey, and Fanny Brice.

Keep looking up and see 8-by-10s of the likes of Leonard Nimoy, Daryl Hannah, Phil Donahue, Demi Moore, and Paul Hogan. They run around $100, though Demi is $200. They may all have been autographed once, but the evidence has often faded.

The Colony, of course, wasn’t always like this. It was a rockin’ place, as most places that sold records once were. It opened at Broadway and 52nd Street and soon became a musical landmark. It had a famous DJ named Symphony Sid spinning platters in the window.

The music that played in the store also played out on the street. Getting heard on the street speakers could make a record a hit. The store continued to rock even after it moved in the seventies. Sinatra and Lennon shopped at the Colony on their way to becoming display cases.

With the seismic changes in the music business, the Colony courted tourists. But apparently, what got it in the end was rent. The owners, Michael said, could once have bought their building for $250,000. It was last sold five years ago for about $150 million.

Michael told me that what doesn’t sell in the store will just get boxed up and eventually put back on sale online.

So go now to look or to buy — but not to save. And if you’re really well off, and you really like this blog, keep in mind that I really want the Dick Clark Secret Diary.

Take a last spin at Colony Records, 1619 Broadway, at 49^th Street, in New York City.