Saint Petersburg, FL | Your guide to the 3 top spots in Saint Petersburg’s Ponce De Leon neighborhood: Visiting Ponce De Leon, or just looking to better appreciate what it has to offer? Get to know this Saint Petersburg neighborhood by browsing its most popular local businesses, from a vinyl record shop to a store for golf enthusiasts. Hoodline crunched the numbers to find the top places to visit in Ponce De Leon, using both Yelp data and our own secret sauce to produce a ranked list of neighborhood businesses. …Topping the list is Banana’s Music, a spot to score music and dvds and vinyl records. Located at 2887 22nd Ave. North, it’s the highest-rated business in the neighborhood, boasting 4.5 stars out of 39 reviews on Yelp. With 3.5 million records in stock, you’ll end up finding that Depeche Mode or rare jazz album you’ve always wanted.
Springfield, MO | Business Spotlight: Hitting the Right Notes: Stick It In Your Ear’s new owner looks to build on store’s recent run-up. More than halfway through his first year of ownership at downtown Springfield stalwart Stick It In Your Ear LLC, Erik Milan says he envisions the music store as the last job he’ll ever want. “I love it. I love the downtown area and the customers are great,” he says. “It’s something new every single day. It’s special, man, this place is special.” Prior to purchasing the 26-year-old business late last year for an undisclosed amount from Wes Nichols, Milan had been working at the store since 2015. He was most recently the store manager. Milan says Nichols moved back to California, where he has family. “He started talking about retiring pretty much ever since I started working for him,” Milan says. “I didn’t want the place to go into the wrong hands. … Let’s see how far I can go with it.”
Middletown, NY | 55 Plus: Catch you on the flip side – vinyl’s back: …One of the best places locally to get deals on vinyl is at the Friends of Middletown Thrall Library’s Used Book Store, where some records sell for as little as 25 cents. Most sell for between $2 and $3. You can donate vinyl too. The manager, Peter “Bruce” Swenson, said collectors have come in over the years, looking for a favorite track, even if the records were scratched, and for liner notes, especially jazz collectors. Right now, Thrall has about 600 records in stock. They’ve got a good selection of musicals, classical records and pop artists. “I remember when Frank Sinatra died (in 1998),” Swenson said. “All the Frank Sinatra records disappeared.”
Southgate, MI | Still spinning: Stormy Records celebrates 20 years in business with anniversary party: Stormy Records has weathered the changing music industry landscape for 20 years and celebrated the achievement the only way they know how: with live music, vinyl, and dogs. Hundreds of people attended the celebration at the Dearborn store, 13306 Michigan Ave., throughout the day July 20, according to Stormy Records co-owners and Dearborn residents Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren. The day included live performances by local performers along with free food and refreshments. Customers and friends also were encouraged to bring their dogs to the party because Weber and Hultgren, who have been married for 18 years, are both dog lovers and have two Labrador retrievers at home. “To run our own business and keep it going for 20 years through all kinds of ups and downs — the amount of work and toil and sweat and tears — we deserved to celebrate our accomplishments,” Weber said.
Looking back at a time where major labels were releasing witchcraft rituals: During the 1960s, Capitol Records, A&M, and Warner Bros capitalised on the witchcraft phenomenon with spoken-word albums of occult incantations. From the late 1960s to the mid-70s, occult and witchcraft records became an unlikely phenomenon in the UK and USA. These spoken word LPs included narrations of rituals and spells by witches and covens, usually accompanied by bizarre, early electronic esoteric music. Some were relatively obscure private press releases – just look at The Art of Witchcraft by Babetta, AKA ‘Babetta the Sexy Witch’, and Ian Richardson and Barbara Holdridge’s Malleus Maleficarum, which were both released in 1974 and which today fetch hundreds of pounds online – but what’s odder is that major labels were often the ones putting these records out. It wasn’t unusual to find albums like Alex and Maxine Sanders’ A Witch is Born or Louise Huebner’s Seduction Through Witchcraft arriving through Capitol Records, A&M, or Warner Bros – but why did these occult oddities exist in the first place?
