Record Shops in Madison WI (continued)
I finally found it on Sunday afternoon, Strictly Discs, one of the nicest places to buy records I’ve ever been in. It’s located along a pleasant historical row of low rise stores on Monroe Street surrounded by what appears to be the hilly neighborhood where the tenured professors live. This store is bright and clean on the first floor with a good selection of new records (including a designated audiophile-oriented section) but the revelation was down a flight. The basement has probably the best collection of used records for sale I’ve ever seen from a single vendor. In a large clean well lit space of probably 2,000 sq. ft. there are many tens of thousands of VG+ and NM records, by category (for example, blues section was best and largest anywhere outside of Memphis) all in nice outer sleeves, tagged, data base indexed, and at low prices. In other words I pretty much nailed my hat to the wall and asked them to shoot me now cause I’d descended right into heaven.
This place is so cool they leave the rare stuff right in the bins. Very clean records - no mildew smell in the store at all. Grey’s Anatomy dropped in for awhile and even remarked about how clean it was (the smell of used record stores being her principal objection to them). I bought her an England Dan and John Ford Coley album (magnanimous of me huh?).
Had a second really pleasant conversation with the owner over a long checkout ( he had initially done some inventory searches for me off the want list I carry with me). Learned they have quite an appealing routine: Every Friday they release 900 new used records to their inventory, putting them out in their basement and online. They don’t do a newsletter but nearly all of their records are listed on Discogs. Thought you folks would want to know. This place is worth a trip. How it should be done now I think.
