Bleecker Bobs is closing.

i got a really cool richard kostelanetz record on Folkways at mercer. tape music, cut up recordings of liturgical speech/chanting/singing in a variety of languages. real cool. sealed copy, cheap, i guess Kostelanetz lived nearby and would stop by with copies occasionally. also got sun city girls 'jacks creek' on mercer street when i was working over there.

Colony went under last summer. See also this brief thread: 48th Street = Desolation Row. Bye-Bye Brick and Mortar Music Stores

Didn't one of the Mercer Street Books guys open the much-missed Heights Books on Montague Street in Brooklyn?

"Generation Records is the other one. On Thompson."

can't remember if we talked about this place when i saw you in nyc. do you ever go there? i was impressed.

― scott seward, Tuesday, March 12, 2013 1:02 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was the store I was talking about. When I was at NYU it was pretty much the only place I'd go to. I'm glad it's still there. :)

Haven't found anything for me in awhile at generation, but enjoyed nabbing some 7"s that must have been waiting for me for years when I first showed up.

I never knew about Heights Books. It's possible! I can count the times I've been to Brooklyn Heights on one hand, despite it being just a short bike or bus ride away.

i've mentioned it before, but colony used to scare me when i was a little kid. my dad would go in for jazz records and it always seemed really chaotic and frenzied on a friday or saturday night in the 70's. like fulton fish market only records. kept thinking i'd get trampled by the record freaks and the people who worked there.

generation was total skot-bait. unplayed 70's promos and cool early 80's stuff. and cheap.

kevin, from rocks in yer head, is one of my best buddies
I ran into one guy I knew in front of the store back in the day and he loved Kevin. I think he had him helping him in his office, running some errands, maybe even babysitting his kid.

yeah i only went a few times, but rock in your head was an ideal record store. i don't suppose subterranean is around anymore, either is it?

can't remember if we talked about this place when i saw you in nyc. do you ever go there?

I think you were holding a bag from there as we were talking! Yeah I go there sometimes. I should be more adventurous when I go record shopping. Usually I get stuff I know I want, not stuff I think I might want to check out. I am envious of your m.o.

subterranean is indeed gone.

I think Good Records is still running right? Haven't been there maybe close to a year? Hmm, unsure. They have a neat blues/country section usually.

http://www.spin.com/articles/bleecker-bobs-golden-oldies-new-york-record-store-final-days/

Bought on vinyl at rocks in your head in the mid 90s:
-crooked rain
-vee-vee (archers of loaf)
-whip smart
-blowout comb
-better can't make your life better
-stereopathetic soul manure (CD)

I didn't get to bleecker bob's til much later, when i got ripped off on some Steely Dan vinyl (cover indicated japanese pressing but disc was stock MCA)

What a great, if crushingly sad, article - thanks for linking it, Ned.

"I think every record store these days is in jeopardy of being priced out of its neighborhood," says Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music, an indie-centric East Village record store. "To me, one of the biggest things about that store is maybe they were focused on music that wasn't as popular now as when it started. That was a great punk store, and in the punk era, it was the only place to get a lot of stuff. It would be disingenuous to say I'm going to miss Bleecker Bob's. I literally probably haven't been there since I was in high school. But I hate to see what was a very cool store disappear."

are people supposed to stay in business forever? i get the real estate part of it though. nyc = expensive. got that.

maybe if they had worked the coffee mug/t-shirt angle harder...just as a brand you'd think you could stay in business. online store for bleeker bobs fashion. that sorta thing.

which was the lower manhattan store that specialized in doo-wop that closed in the lats few years?

And because Bob was open-minded enough to embrace emerging musical trends, rather than focusing solely on oldies, the store found itself at the forefront of the punk-rock explosion.

"And because Bob was open-minded enough to embrace emerging musical trends, rather than focusing solely on oldies, the store found itself at the forefront of [focusing for most of the past 30 years on oldies]."

This really highlights the paradox of rock magazines. Some point in the past looks continuously like the present to them. This makes them incapable of seeing oldies as oldies, or letting go of the past (ironically, exactly what the punk explosion they venerate represented: a violent letting-go of the past), which appears to them to be the present. They really believe they've found a way to freeze that yoghurt for good.

Not sure which doo-wop place you mean.

Just realized that Village Oldies is not the same as House of Oldies, which apparently is still there:

http://peterbengtson.smugmug.com/The-Village-We-Lived-In/Village-Oldies-Record-Store/11431644_3nxP8S#!i=1551111033&k=BxGHSHV

maybe if they had worked the coffee mug/t-shirt angle harder...just as a brand you'd think you could stay in business. online store for bleeker bobs fashion. that sorta thing.
― scott seward, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 5:44 PM

So no yogurt place after all?

Nor yoghurt. Nor record store.