Field NOTES #004: Pretentious Records

Though still in our nascent stages, GRAILS has developed a reputation for having rare, or “interesting,” records.

I’ve cautiously accepted the compliment, if and when that’s the presumed intent, though I’m not entirely sure Interesting Records is the dba I’d hoped for.

Along with curious glances over the bins and across the counter come the occasional exchanges:

Peruser (carping): “Is everything new?”

Me: “No. Roughly half the records are used. I am, however, rather particular about what ‘used’ is allowed to look like.”

Often followed by:

Peruser: “Do you have any… classic stuff?”

Me: “We do. Quite a lot of it, actually.”

The evidence to the contrary, admittedly, can be difficult to ignore. On any given afternoon, the shop might reveal pressings of Clics Modernos, Wahdon, Lô Borges, Neuromantic, Miss Perfumado, Open & Close, Est... Folle, Alles Ist Gut, and any number of records capable of stopping someone mid-flip.

Peruser: “What is this?”

Me: “Ah.”

How I elect to answer depends entirely on who’s asking, which usually requires a few questions of my own.

“This” could be something they’ve spent years searching for, something they’ve only ever streamed and are seeing in the wild for the first time, or something entirely unfamiliar that arrested their thumb halfway through one of the peculiarly labeled bins they’re still trying to make sense of. All three happen with surprising regularity.

It could also simply be an album with intriguing cover art.

It’s the “entirely unfamiliar” peruser that tends to deem GRAILS a home for the unusual.

Spend enough time in American record stores and certain albums begin to feel like municipal requirements. Kind of Blue. The Dark Side of the Moon. Led Zeppelin IV. Ziggy Stardust. Thriller. Nevermind. Abbey Road. Songs in the Key of Life. Hotel California. (Just as common is spotting a disheveled copy of Whipped Cream & Other Delights at a local Goodwill.) None of these requires an explanation. Nobody pulls Rumours from a bin and wonders what sort of record store would carry such a thing.

Nor should they.

These are extraordinary records. GRAILS carries them. Over the years, I’ve owned countless variants, many of which have followed me through apartments, cities, and relationships.

The trouble begins when familiarity becomes the boundary rather than the foundation, because there is no neutral version of a record store.

Every independent shop reflects somebody’s taste. Sometimes that taste announces itself from the walls. Sometimes you have to dig for twenty minutes before the autobiography reveals itself. Either way, somebody chose what to buy. What to pass on. What belonged on the wall and what belonged nowhere near the building.

GRAILS is no different. My musical map simply covers a lot of “unusual” ground.

A love for Rosinha de Valença led me deeper into Brazil long before Clube da Esquina became requisite listening. Close familial ties to Bahia ensured I didn’t stop there. Early discovery of El Flaco ensures that Argentina is impossible to relegate to a mere footnote. A long-ago ex opened Japan well beyond the borders city pop would later make algorithmically fashionable. Travel throughout Africa made the absurdity of reducing fifty-plus countries and thousands of musical traditions to a single “World” bin difficult to ignore. Close friends brought Fairuz into my life without the need for a Western analogue to explain her canonical significance.

None of this strikes me as particularly adventurous. Music has been traveling for as long as people have. Sometimes willingly. Sometimes under circumstances considerably less benign.

People move and take music with them. The music changes along the way. Sounds, rhythms, languages, and traditions that once seemed geographically distant find themselves sharing the same room, and something new emerges.

Eventually someone presses the result onto a record. Then that record travels, too.

This is how supposedly distant musical traditions keep turning up in one another’s family trees. A record made in Lagos finds an audience in London. Jamaican sound-system culture absorbs influences from New York and, later, helps reshape music there in return. Brazilian records alter the ears of musicians thousands of miles away. Japanese players absorb American jazz, R&B, and fusion before returning something sufficiently distinct that American collectors spend decades hunting it down.

The bins merely follow the evidence, which tends to make GRAILS look eclectic. A term that, in certain homogeneous circles, can sound less like a compliment than intended.

A visitor accustomed to record stores organized around a largely American and British rock canon may reasonably wonder why a Cape Verdean record they’ve never encountered occupies wall space beside an album they’ve known since childhood. Another may be delighted to find Francis M without having to search beneath a category broad enough to contain most of the planet. Someone else just wants a clean, original pressing of Rumours.

All of them should be able to shop here.

Obscurity, however, has its own peculiar cachet among record collectors. Knowing the record nobody else knows can become a personality remarkably quickly. So can owning the pressing nobody else can afford. Add enough catalog numbers, matrix variations, private pressings, and confidently mispronounced surnames and record collecting can become competitive trivia with furniture.

I’m not especially interested in that.

A rare record isn’t necessarily a good one; in some cases, that may explain why it’s so hard to find. Scarcity can tell you how many copies survived. It cannot tell you whether anyone should care.

The records that interest me tend to have another quality: They meant something to me.

That’s the funny thing about calling music “obscure.” Often what we really mean is obscure to us.

A record can sell hundreds of thousands of copies in another country, soundtrack an entire generation’s adolescence, influence musicians for decades, and still arrive in an American record store carrying the faint aura of an archaeological discovery.

It wasn’t hiding; we simply weren’t looking where it lived.

That realization has shaped GRAILS more than rarity ever could.

There are records in the shop because they are canonical. Others because they should be heard again. Some because their influence is easier to find than the music that produced it. Some because migration carried them from one community to another until nobody could say with much confidence where one genre ended and another began.

Most are here because I love them. The rest because I respect them.

That may be the least pretentious explanation of all.

What happens once they’re in the bins is largely out of my hands.

Maybe customers exit with exactly what they came for, a record they’ve been hunting for eons. Maybe they leave with something whose title they couldn’t pronounce when they entered (and can pronounce only a tad better than before).

Or maybe they put it back and storm out in a huff.

That’s allowed, too.

The inventory isn’t a prescribed reading list.

Which brings us back to the accusation embedded, however gently, in that question:

“Do you have any… classic stuff?”

Of course.

The disagreement, if there is one, concerns who decides what gets called classic.