Stephen Mejias

At this moment in time, there’s honestly no way I can justify spending more money on sweet, wonderful, soul-stirring vinyl records. I just can’t do it. I have bills to pay. I have records at home that I haven’t listened to yet. I have laundry to do and groceries to buy. But, damn, am I tempted to go to the First Annual Collect-i-Bowl Record Show at Brooklyn">http://www.brooklynbowl.com/">Brooklyn Bowl this Sunday.

Back in October 1989, former publisher Larry Archibald told us to just have fun and buy cheap speakers.

Good news for jazz and vinyl lovers: The world’s greatest record store (at least in New Jersey), the">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/708awsi/index.html">the Princeton Record Exchange, just received a collection of over 2000 carefully maintained jazz titles, and they are now on sale, most priced between $1 and $4.99.

I’ve told you a bit about my favorite cassette label, Al Bjornaa’s Scotch">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/why_cassettes/">Scotch Tapes, out of Batchawana Bay, Ontario, Canada. In this">http://www.imposemagazine.com/features/scotch-tapes-label-sampler">this Impose article, Al goes into more detail, explaining how he built the label, and revealing some of his big plans for the remainder of the year, which include 60-70 new tapes, 4-5 vinyl releases, approximately 20 lathe cuts, a dozen zines, a couple of 8-tracks, and a monster summer compilation. (You can also download a Scotch sampler.)

I did not find what I was looking for at the">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/jersey_city_record_riot/">the Jersey City Record Riot, but I did find two reasonably priced Tom Waits albums (Blue Valentine and Rain Dogs) and Peter Lang’s debut, The Thing at the Nursery Room Window, on John Fahey’s Takoma label. I had forced myself to be extremely selective, and, though the many kind and interesting vendors were making it difficult for me to hold back from buying more, I did in fact hold back.

We’ve been shipping the August issue to pre-press. There, you can see it on my desk. It involves a lot of paper, coffee, oatmeal, procrastination, juggling, John Prine, Pontiak, Bushman’s Revenge, and ass-kicking. A whole lot of ass-kicking.

We were bummed out when we heard that Steve Gritzan was closing down his wonderful and dusty record shop, Iris">http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/iris_records_closes/">Iris Records, in downtown Jersey City, but heartened in knowing that he’d continue to sell albums at street fairs and at his outstanding Brooklyn Record Riot conventions.