Purveyor of the soundtrack to The Sushi Prophecies, Burton is here to serve. Get a mug of mushroom tea and pick a song. God Bless this Record Shop.
When I say shitty record shop, I mean it in only the best possible way. Like a great dive bar, it doesn’t advertise, and it doesn’t care. Burton’s Vinyl doesn’t sell tickets to known bands, it never stopped pushing records, it doesn’t make money, and Burton, the guy who preaches at the register, doesn’t give a shit. Burton has lived, he has loved, and he has rocked. My friend has so much soul, and is assisted by narcotics so varied, his creative mind has overdeveloped onto its own spectrum. It’s a pleasure to be in his space.
Burton may not be all there, but the vinyl certainly is…best collection in town for rarities. Ask any DJ worth his weight, and he’ll swear he’s never heard of the place, preserving the hush-hush, meanwhile sneaking around the back of the nearest restaurant to find just one more old yellow milk crate to fill.
The door opens without a single jingle, and you step into the noise. One look around the place and you know you’ve found something special, something intoxicatingly blissful, both embarrassing and gratifying in its clutter. Like your grandparents’ basement, or the shed of that disturbed single uncle, the treasures were flung far and with little regard for safe passage or classification.
Burton’s reaches all the way back to the alley giving it a rare full city block of depth. The elevated cashier bar, like many other bars in town, is horseshoe-shaped, providing a view of the entire space and a fortress of defense against lubricious teenagers and divorced men writhing in their glory days. The really good stuff is hidden behind this barricade, with who-knows how much more down the hatch back there, deep in the cellar where you know he keeps magical perishables and hypnotic foodstuffs.
There are levels to the place, figuratively and actually. In the far-left corner, an orange spiral staircase – wrapping around itself too tightly for proper skull clearance – leads up to a graveyard of jewel cases holding laser-based technology long passed. In the other far corner, a roped off ladder offers a dusty storage space and secret window-access to a rotting rooftop deck and rain-ravaged patio furniture. The view is unbelievable. The city shines for the few who have climbed that ladder.
On the right side of the store, in the electric folk section, navigating a few soggy steps of frayed green rug, stained a million stains, you might have come on a lucky day when the extraordinarily delightful Death Race arcade game is seen humming away. Burton took great pride in that machine for its rarity and banishment in the 80’s due to excessive violence. If asked, he will act aloof before slyly producing a tattoo of the cabinet’s marquee artwork – a purple-hooded Grim Reaper tearing through a vulture-ridden graveyard in a cartoonishly aggressive green Dodge Charger. The car’s front-end popped up as it rips apart crusty limbs of zombie-gremlins beneath big fat smoking rear tires. It’s subtle, but classy.
There are posters featuring local bands that had come through to perform, but only if they brought their own beer. These were often hand drawn with felt marker after the fact, sometimes weeks. Burton doesn’t believe in promotion, if you knew, you knew, and you would bring your idiot buddies.
The many, many record stacks and shelves were lacquered and tattered wood, hand-built to fit the place and maximize storage. Dangling precariously overhead in all the right spots hang large circular industrial lamps, like some army base mess tent. Plants, namely of the cacti variety, were everywhere. Burton believed that twenty-four hours of musical diversity inspired their verve.
The furniture and record players strewn about all other spare nooks were in high demand, despite their barely clinging on to any semblance of hygienic decency. Boxes upon boxes, once filled with Washington apples or Oregon whiskey were stacked where they needed to be, awaiting the day they might be transferred to the big leagues, those scuffed and oily wooden stacks in the stadium of browsing height.
Everything was just slightly askew, everything but a single beige and brown rectangle of framed knitwork hanging from a central post, stating simply, God Bless This Record Shop.
And blessed it is.
Want to see more of Burton? Get The Sushi Prophecies now at Amazon! Or get the paperback at Barnes & Noble.