Well, no, it wasn’t quite paradise and I didn’t go near there for the last 20 years, but doing a big of googling to kill time brought me to this bit of news:

Vinylmania Records Closes Its Doors

Vinylmania was a piece of NYC music history which was also an important spot for me for about a decade. Opened on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village in the late 70s, in the 80s it was known as the shop where all the DJs shopped and at least one guy who worked in the shop, Manny Lehman, used it as a springboard to fame himself.

See, just like every other Greenwich Village record shop, it was getting by on selling promo copies and UK imports. I would stop there every Saturday to shop, bought more than I could afford each week, and got to be friends with owner Charlie Grappone and his staff.

Charlie soon opened a second store down the street selling 12 inch singles. The legendary Larry Levan of the Paradise Garage, which was just around the corner, was a big customer. Every DJ in NY shopped there and their fans followed them there. Madonna did her first in-store appearance there. By 1986 or so, they’d even started their own label.

Around 82 or 83, I ended up driving a taxi cab and not being happy about it. Charlie went partners with another guy to open a video rental shop nearby and asked me if I wanted to work there. It got me out of the taxi, so I did that for the next 2 or 3 years, until I had the idea that a record store selling only CDs might work.

So Charlie and I became partners and in 1985 we opened the Vinylmania CD Shop on Carmine Street, across from his 12 inch store. It was tough going for the first six months but then my import business started to take off, eventually doing so well that I was selling wholesale to shops outside of New York City. I had steady customers coming from as far as 90 miles away on a regular basis. I’d also introduced the notion of buying and selling used CDs. Basically anything I could do to compete with Tower, which was just a few blocks away.

But those were the days of parallel imports and the RIAA got wind of the shop – we always suspected it was via a rival shop owner who didn’t have the sources I had and so he couldn’t get the imports as quickly or sell them as cheaply. Threatened with legal action that we couldn’t afford to defend, we stopped the import trade and business fell overnight by 2/3rds. Without going into any details, the partnership fell apart soon afterwards and I helped start the CD Hotline along with two of my customers.

I wish I had known about this sooner, because the closing came about a week after my most recent NYC trip. Had I known it was coming, I would have stopped down there for a bit of nostalgia and wool gathering.

Anyway, that’s what happens when you get older, chunks of your past disappear.

Hongkie Town
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