I’ve invoked Second Coming Records on Sullivan Street, here, several times. Simply put, alongside similarly inclined concerns like Bleecker Bob’s, It’s Only Rock N’ Roll, Venus Records, Record Runner, Subterranean Records, Rebel Rebel and Rocks In Your Head, it was just a completely crucial destination for music nerds of a certain stripe, and that stripe was mine. As such, I come back to it often, here, pretty much any time I spot a fleeting invocation of it. Evidence of its comparatively brief existence is scant and infrequent, so when I do see a bit of it, I leap on it. This is one of those times.
Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, on this rainy Sunday morning, I opened up Google and typed “Second Coming Records” into the search field. Amid the entries that first came up — most of them from this blog — I spotted a couple of new items. The first was yet another account, this time from a self-proclaimed “anti-piracy services” blog, about the infamous 1996 raid on Second Coming, prompted by their admittedly brazen sideline in selling bootleg recordings (something that gradually superseded all their other business), that ultimately spelled the demise of their business. As if anyone needed another reason to hate this band's fucking guts, it was evidently Hootie & the Blowfish (or, more accurately, their manager and their attorney) that were instrumental in the pursuit of Second Coming Records. Dicks.
Let’s just get something out the way — while it’s true Second Coming were technically selling copyright-controlled material, no one was buying these recordings instead of sanctioned commercial releases. I bought fucking dozens of bootleg cassettes from Second Coming — usually by The Clash, The Cure, The Cult, The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, The Stranglers, Devo, XTC, U2 and — wait for it — Killing Joke, and they were almost exclusively shoddy live recordings marketed directly to bug-eyed, completist fanboys (like myself) who wanted to hear rare live versions of canonical songs, however dubiously wobbly of quality they invariably were. They were practically novelty items designed to satiate the feverish curiosity of only the most die-hard acolytes, and you’d have to be an irretrievably stupid individual to mistake these items for legitimate releases. No one was buying these tapes who wasn’t already committed to dutifully lapping up every bit of official product from the artists in question, fuckin’ Hootie or otherwise.
There’s a bit of irony in that, only a few short years later, the advent of file-sharing on the internet and the dawn of Napster would make the music industry’s campaign to stamp out the sale of bootleg live recordings seem like incalculably small potatoes.
Anyway, Second Coming closed up shop towards the end of the `90s, largely as the result of this episode.
The other new item about Second Coming I saw, however, was — crazily enough — a t-shirt (albeit already sold out) with the image from the top of this post on it.
I clicked on through and found it in the shop section of a Danish concern, appended with this explainer….
Street view of the legendary record store Second Coming, New York - captured by DJ JSPR in 1996. Second Coming was one of the most frequented record stores in New York for cratediggers during the 90s. Several scenes from the Beat Diggin' documentary by JSPR were shot in the shop
The plot thickened….
As it turns out, DJ JSPR is … beyond being a DJ … a film director named Jasper Jensen who, in 1997, made a documentary about the practice of “beat digging,” in other words, intrepid Hip-Hop producers scouring through dusty record shops in search of the perfect instrumental breaks to sample, scratch and repurpose for Hip-Hop records. It’s striking to think of those guys mining Second Coming for that sort of stuff, being that, by and large, Second Coming stocked predominantly punk, post-punk, metal, goth, hardcore and just basic, straight-ahead rock, but I guess that’s a testament to the resourceful innovation of Hip-Hop.
In any case, JSPR was so enamored of the place (albeit for entirely different reasons than I) that he not only featured it in his film (which I’d now love to see in its entirety) but slapped the image on a now out-of-print shirt.
Here’s the trailer...
Today, the original space of Second Coming Records — after spells as both a Mexican food joint and a tattoo parlor — is a Thai restaurant called Top Thai.
I’ve never eaten there.
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