OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN.....With apologies to Britney Spears. In preparation of my move to Iceland, I made the conscious decision to once again sell half of my record collection, which had grown back to its former glory of 4,000 LPs in acquisition binges from 2012 to 2025. Fuelled partially by my creation of Making Vinyl in 2017 and the 2022 publication of my book, Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century, I realized by how much I missed listening to the physical stuff, and the act of collecting, the hunt for a particular record by all means necessary, spending hours in record stores for a music discovery. Although I admit to using e-commerce platforms like Discogs and eBay, as well as Amazon Prime for immediate gratification when the urge itched, I have always preferred brick-and-mortar mom & pop record stores. I simply needed the money to help pay for the move to the island in the North Atlantic. At least 500 of the used records came from my friend Tim instead of getting paid for covering his record store from 2013 to 2019. I was able to replace, for example, my beloved Elvis Costello favorites. 

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The second time I divested my record collection I consciously made the decision to raise money for my move to Iceland. Separating the keepers from those that seemed disposable turned out to be surprisingly easy. I asked myself, Would I ever really listen to this records again? I tried not to think about the large number of purchases on RSD, many bought on whim. From 2013 Black Friday until 2025 RSD, I typically bought as many as eight LPs that set me back about $400 each time. 

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(The following is excerpted from the Epilogue of Record Store Day: The Most Improbable Comeback of the 21st Century.)

FATE INTERVENED.....when I moved back to Manhattan in June 2020. In 1977, French economist Jacques Attali (author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music) predicted Record Store Day’s ability to get people to line up the night before with wish lists of limited editions in their pockets, thirty years early: “People buy more records than they can listen to. They stockpile what they want to find the time to hear.”

The pandemic raged for over a year in 2020, taking the lives of more than half a million Americans by the spring of 2021 and demonstrating how precious our time is on planet Earth. Covid-19 claimed the life of one regular Record Store Day shopper named Tom Burgess, whom I never met but consider a kindred spirit for being a music lover and an adjunct professor. I learned of Tom’s death because of his record collection of a hundred thousand LPs, representing a who’s who of rock, jazz, classical, and world music, being on sale for the first six months of 2021, a block-and-a-half away from where I live in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. There were also twice as many books of all genres. Among my RSD finds, originally purchased by
Burgess, included a sealed copy of a holy grail, the 2014 release of Donny Hathaway’s Live at the Bitter End 1971. I knew of the album but never saw it before. It felt almost sacrilegious to obtain it this way.

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The biggest scores were two non-RSD gems: Garbage's debut album on OG sealed vinyl, as well as The Beatles' Anthology. 
I also bought that day the 2013 RSD release The Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal, which I once saw elsewhere years ago but kicked myself for not adding it to my collection. I picked up Tom’s unopened copy of the RSD reissue of The Dresden Dolls, although I decided to leave for another crate-digger Flaming Lips’ 2013 RSD Zaireeka boxed set. I didn’t want to come off as too greedy.

As it turns out, Tom and I taught at the same college, CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in downtown
Manhattan, although I was there for only the fall semester for English 101, whereas he was there for two decades, teaching anthropology and sociology. BMCC is a few blocks away from the large J&R Music World store that closed in 2014.
Before Sam Phillips’s 2002 DORS conference speech, the Sun Records founder marveled about his J&R visit earlier in the day. “It totally had the feeling as though you were going to the warmest place on this earth…You could tell that it was run by individuals that love what they are doing and fighting their ass off to make it a place of enjoyment for people to come and spend their money.”

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Based on all of the J&R bags (containing  I found at the pop-up store Tom spent a lot of money there. I find it most heartbreaking that Tom didn’t get a chance to listen to so much of his collection—lots of sealed records remained in unopened J&R bags. Literally dozens of RSD vinyl titles—mostly unopened—dating back to its earliest days showed how Tom embraced the annual holiday year after year. I purchased from his impressive collection about two hundred LPs, a hundred 45s, several dozen CDs, and about half dozen CD boxed sets.

 

“The first trip I took [to Tom’s crammed one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan’s neighborhood of Inwood], I found a
whole shelf of Record Store Day stuff, LPs and singles,” remembers Will Glass, who ran the pop-up sale with his wife, Veronica Lieu, the founder of Word Up, a neighborhood nonprofit bookstore, where Tom often volunteered.

 

The proceeds from the sale of his records and books went to Word Up. Will live in a Washington Heights building that their landlord graciously allowed them to use the vacant space for the first months of 2021 to sell off the massive collection before donating the records and books in a pop-up store known as “Recirculation,” named after Burgess’s philosophy of donating ob-
jects based on the idea that capitalism had already produced enough to go around.

“[Tom] had a thing for collecting stuff that had good value, and some day the ARChive [for Contemporary Music, where Tom also volunteered and donated stuff] could sell it for more,” explains Glass, who works at the Jazz Foundation, so he’s the perfect individual to preside over such a music endeavor. “I could tell he just enjoyed Record Store Day for the exciting collector side of it,” he adds.

Tom and I had a mutual adjunct friend, Rebecca Smart, who teaches psychology. I once met her at a union meeting. She
told me that Tom had been suffering from lung cancer for about four years, surmising his condition to BMCC’s close proximity to
the World Trade Center on 9/11. In early February 2020, Rebecca was surprised to see Tom on campus after he missed a few semesters. She figured his health must have rebounded. Weeks later, the pandemic lockdown occurred, so they never crossed paths again. She still feels guilty about a CD he loaned her, and fondly remembers running into him at a City Winery gig of Dave Davies of The Kinks. “I figured I’d run into you here,” she told him. I mentioned to Rebecca that I’m also a massive
Kinks fan and was also at that show. It’s too bad I didn’t know either of them at that point.
 
Live performance and record stores serve as an oasis for human interaction as much as a dive bar if they ever open again. Friendships and romances can be formed as discerning music fans bond over what they already cherish, or discover as revelation, based on what’s wafting from the speakers or PA and spinning from the turntable.

 

Any crate-digger who looks forward to the coming Record Store Day asks the seeming philosophical question about why buy on vinyl certain titles that you already own on CD or cassette or both. Is being a format completist necessary?

 

Rebecca Smart wasn’t surprised to hear that her friend Tom Burgess amassed an RSD stash. “I think adjuncts need to do what
makes them happy.” That observation, in a nutshell, is why we collect—and hopefully spin what we purchase on Record Store Day. It makes us happy. Our astral plane awaits.

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