Being first in line at the Main Street Vinyl Fair this past weekend is nothing new for Gerald Yoshida. He’s first in line any time Vancouver has a record fair.
But record fairs aren’t shoe sales and it was an hour of hunting through plastic sleeved records jammed into boxes before he found Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. It cost 70 bucks, which isn’t even close to the amount Yoshida’s parents had to fork out to Columbia House Records in 1971 when Yoshida, then 11 years old, bought albums which included the Beatles’ Revolver and the Partridge Family for the company’s deceptive intro price of a penny.
“And that’s when I started buying records and I’ve never stopped,” said Yoshida, who is better known in local music circles by nickname “Rattlehead,” a pseudonym left over from his years of hosting CiTR’s metal show Powerchord.
Robert Privett hasn’t been a record collector for all that long. Vinyl piqued his interest when he also had his own radio show, called Sore Throats, Clapping Hands, at the student-run station at the University of British Columbia.
Desperate for income, he started working as a janitor at Planet Bingo and thought the space would work well for a record fair. Four years and eight fairs later, the Main Street Vinyl Fair has hopped along Main to VIVO Media Arts Centre, to the Biltmore, and now to its current home twice a year at the Cambrian Hall.
Privett doubled his own collection in September when he drove across Canada to pick up his uncle’s records. There were so many there was barely any clearance between the car’s back tires and the wheel wells.
“For me, I’m on a computer all day so listening to records while I work gives me half-hour segments,” said Privett, who now runs BadBird Media. “Every half hour the record’s over and that’s my time to stretch. I recommend it for anybody who works in tech.”
The vinyl fair was packed with vendor tables which included both local record shops as well as independent sellers such as Tony Frei who promised his wife, Silvia, he’d get rid of a couple thousand to make room in their home.
There were different vendors each day. Mark Szabo shopped the fair Saturday but was selling Sunday. And in his 30 years of collecting, he has seen music fads come and go.
“There’s something about a record, as an artifact… It’s a piece of art where a CD is a piece of product,” he said. “I have never downloaded a song in my life… It’s too easy and it doesn’t count. A record counts and a CD doesn’t count. A download doesn’t count. It’s not the thing the musician wanted to make, the thing that it was intended to be which is made out of cardboard and dinosaurs.”
And because the record isn’t considered to be junk, most owners these days are careful to ensure unwanted collections go to a good home. Part of Privett’s vinyl world is taking in orphan records (the recently-closed Zoo Zhop donated its stock of three thousand) and taking money from those sales to give to Girls Rock Camp Vancouver, CiTR and to the Safe Amplification
Society.
Standing outside the hall Saturday morning, he spotted somebody leaving with The Police’s Synchronicity tucked under their arm.
“Ah, that’s good,” he said. “I know they bought that one from the donations.”
