As much as I am slavishly prone to waxing rhapsodic about the great lost record/disc shops of New York City, the place I bought my first propler LP at was actually out on the East End of Long Island.
As I discussed here, Sam’s Record Shack in Westhampton Beach was two towns over from where my family spent the summers. I cannot put an exact year on it, but probably around the summer of 1976 or so, I waddled into Sam’s Record Shack as a wide-eyed 9 year old and plunked down three or four dollars (that’s how cheap LPs were, at the time … honestly), for my own copy of Dressed to Kill by KISS. If memory serves, I had originally intended to buy a copy of KISS ALIVE, but my meager funds dictated otherwise. Regardless, I brought it home and proceeded to play the shit out of it on my crappy mono record player at every conceivable opportunity --- its many lyrically lumpen connotations and hackneyed sexual innuendos lost on my small years. I’d long appropriated certain records from my older sister, but at last, this one was ALL MINE. I still have my battered, “well loved” copy of the LP to this day.
As its name might suggest, Sam’s Record Shack was assuredly nothing fancy. A cramped, narrow little storefront with racks on each side and a cash register in the back, it was a fairly humble operation. I’d go on to procure many arguably crucial albums there, including my first copy of Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles, a cassette of Joe’s Garage Volume 1 by Frank Zappa, Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden and Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics. I actually had the temerity to order that last choice. The shop ordered two copies from their distributor. I paid for mine and took it home (much to the chagrin of my family and/or anyone within listening proximity), and the other copy was displayed in the shop window, where it sat -– unplayed and pointedly unpurchased -– until Sam’s Record Shack closed for good in about 1984, or so.
While I lamented the loss of Sam’s, in its place came a new record store a few streets away. The Westhampton branch of Long Island Sound (a pun on the name of a nearby tidal estuary) was a much more expansive operation than Sam’s. As I mentioned here, while it wasn’t exactly staffed by imperiously pedantic record geeks like my favorite places in the city, it did indeed meet my needs in terms of new releases. I swiftly became a regular customer, in due course, of both the Westhampton branch and its sibling over in Southampton.
In time, of course, CD’s became the go-to medium. I’m not quite sure when Long Island Sound (both branches) closed, but close they eventually did. After that, one’s best options out in “the Hamptons” to buy compact discs became limited to big box retail joints in places like Riverhead. But, clearly, the physical manifestation of music was becoming scarcer and scarcer out there.
Back in Westhampton, by the mid-to-late 90’s, the only way you could really buy a CD was if you found it on the racks of a local pharmaceutical chain -– which did not suggest anything too promising about the likelihood of finding anything very esoteric.
These days, the pharmaceutical chain store in question on Main Street in Westhampton Beach --- just a block or so to the west of the former site of Sam’s Record Shack, which until recently had been a footwear emporium called Shoe-Inn -– is now a Rite Aid. It was called something else prior to Rite Aid -– although stocked the same shit –- but Rite Aid bought that interest out at whatever point. But, by and large, it’s been a big pharmaceutical outlet since the late 90’s, or so.
You probably see where I’m going with this, but since it became the lone place one could fetch CD’s in the area way back when, I’ve been in the habit of always perusing what’s on offer, which is usually dire and dispiriting. Multiple Christmas albums sit uncomfortably next to dubious compilations of “hits” by bands like Great White and Survivor. You’ll find the sophomore effort by Gnarls Barkly (which failed to yield a single like the once-ubiquitous “Crazy”) shoved in tightly next to a late-80’s Doobie Brothers effort and an opus by largely forgotten white funkstress Tina Marie. There is no rhyme nor reason to the selections. They are haphazardly stocked on a shelf in the same aisle you’ll find equally anachronistic DVDs (cinematic epics like “Meet the Fockers,” “Scream II” and “Ice Age”), batteries and device-chargers. Woe unto thee whose lovingly crafted music ends up here.
That said, there is strangely still turnover. New discs still come in and old discs still go out.
Except …. for one.
Released four years after their most successful album, Psalm 69, Ministry’s Filth Pig, their sixth studio album from 1995, was a comparative let down from its sprawling predecessor from 1992. Where Psalm 69 almost single-handedly spot-welded industrial caterwaul to metallic thrash in a manner that united acolytes from both of those formerly disparate clans and even fleetingly worried the pop charts, Filth Pig found the band retaining the intensity but sacrificing much of the melodicism that made the combination palatable. Not even a dour cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” could really save it. In many respects, while still part of the overarching Ministry saga, Filth Pig marked the point where the band stopped stylistically progressing.
Anyway, if my math is right, there has been a lone copy of Filth Pig on that shelf at the Westhampton Beach Rite Aid since about 1998. Years have come and gone. Seasons have passed. Couples have met, courted, wed, procreated and reared children while Ministry’s largely maligned 1995 effort has sat silently in that aisle, waiting for a particularly forgiving variant of heavy, pugnacious rock fan to stumble upon it. Ministry themselves have gone onto release 11 -- read that number again: ELEVEN -- more studio albums since Filth Pig, yet that copy of it continues to stay on that shelf, waiting for a buyer, not unlike that second copy of Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics at Sam’s Record Shop decades earlier.
Why haven’t I bought it, you ask? While, yes, I am indeed a fan of Ministry, I was sent my own copy of Filth Pig by Warner Bros. Records upon its initial release, having been a bona fide “music journalist” at the time. I still own it. I don’t play it exceptionally often, but I do have it. And, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, unlike certain iconic albums, it’s just not a record one feels compelled to own multiple copies of.
That said, my heart still aches when I routinely spy it sitting there – unloved – in its Rite Aid limbo. In more recent years, I’ve taken to documenting its timeless sentence, vainly hoping that one day, I’ll find it gone – sold to some skateboarding twerp whose curiosity was piqued by the needlessly bloody artwork. But then I realize, skateboarding twerps don’t really buy CD’s anymore, so it’s probably contingent on another cranky middle-aged rock dork like myself finding it.
Until such time, the sad vigil continues.
This past Easter weekend:
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