Hot wax, cool deals during Record Store Day in Abilene

Just how do you keep yourself occupied for nearly 20 hours in a small parking lot?

“I brought a 4,000 piece Lego set,” said Kassidy Holland. “I worked on it in my car.”

The Brownwood resident was first in line when The Record Guys opened their store at 10 a.m. Saturday to begin Record Store Day. Holland had been first on the scene the day before, signing the wait list at 2:30 p.m.

Record Store Day was started in 2007, and this year it fell on Saturday. It will return on Black Friday right after Thanksgiving.

Store owner Jon Howell said the holiday was organized “to help celebrate independent stores. It's a celebration of physical media and physical stores like this.”

For months, vinyl aficionados have been eyeballing rumors of specific records slated for release on Saturday. Some, like singer Sabrina Carpenter’s seven-inch 45 featuring two versions of her song “Feather," were only limited to 2,000 pressings worldwide.

“We ended up with two of them,” Howell said. “These Sabrina Carpenters that are 15 bucks will probably be $100-$200 by tonight.”

When the doors opened at 10 a.m., at least 30 people were already outside the store, crowding against the glass to avoid the rain. Howell stepped outside to remind them of the rules and to finalize the list before allowing them inside.

“We have to pledge not to sell early, not do any holds and not do any pre-orders,” Howell said of the special releases. “There's a whole lot of steps that they want you to go through to make sure it's fair to the customers.”

He estimated he had about 1,000 special records in the displays in front of the cash registers. Not all albums were new artists. Several were old favorites reissued while others leaned into the relationship that the day’s specific cannabis-related date – 4/20 – has in popular culture.

“They've got a lot of 4/20 releases,” Howell said, pointing to one seven-inch shaped like a marijuana leaf. Nearby, Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke” soundtrack sat beside it.

“There's an Amboy Dukes, which is Ted Nugent's first band. That comes with a special set of rolling papers,” he said, holding up the record where a small package dangled inside the plastic cover.

“Zoetropes” were a big item this year as well.

“It's a disc that when you look at it through your phone, it looks like there's motion on it,” Howell said. “It has these really cool patterns. They're printing a lot of stuff on zoetrope records now.”

While they didn’t take preorders, they did solicit requests from customers to gauge what was going to be popular from what might be too obscure. Still, someone must have really wanted “Richard O’Brien’s Original Demo Tape Recordings from the Rocky Horror Picture Show” as that was in the display too.

In 2021, the Foo Fighters released for Record Store Day their versions of the Bee Gees disco-era big hits, dubbing themselves the “Dee Gees” and naming the album “Hail Satin.”

“By the afternoon of Record Store Day, it was selling for $400 on eBay,” Howell said. “It was $25 in the store.”

So what’s this year's hot wax?

“Two of the most requested were the Noah Kahan and Olivia Rodrigo seven-inch,” Howell said.

On the 45, Kahan covers Rodrigo’s “Lacy” while she sings a version of his “Stick Season.”

That’s what Holland was after but not before she picked up the Sabrina Carpenter disc too. At 24, Holland is a product of the times, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

If you grew up in the age of vinyl, you remember the skipping of the needle. Often the only fix was buying a new record, or if you were strapped for cash, weighing the needle down with your finger momentarily to cut a new groove through the damage.

But you’d also miss, and subsequently forget, that part of the song. When compact discs arrived on the scene, followed by MP3 files and digital music players like the iPod and then the iPhone, skipping became a thing of the past.

Holland’s parents had that early physical media in their home, growing up with old vinyl and feeling something was missing from her experience with music is what inspired her to return to record albums.

It transported her back to a time when popular music wasn’t simply background. It was studied as the album cover was turned over in one’s hands and the lyrics deciphered.

In the end, it gave her a deeper connection to the art, and sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to do that.

“I think part of it is being able to get off the phone,” she said. “Get off of all that and spend the time with just the music.”

This article originally appeared on Abilene Reporter-News: Hot wax, cool deals during Record Store Day in Abilene