Val Shively doesn't like customers browsing for Oldies records in his store but he'll tell you what a 200-pound shark has to do with the four million 45 rpm records he stocks.
It has to do with obsession, genetics, and how the charmingly cantankerous owner of R&B Records in Upper Darby wound up with four million 45 rpm records — “Or maybe it’s five million, I don’t know” — in the fantastically cluttered shop that Smithsonian magazine has called “the world’s greatest record store.”ReCollections: Val Shively — 50 Years of Collecting Records in Philadelphia
Now, what’s that got to do with the 200-pound shark that Shively’s father caught in Cape May when he was 12 years old? Plenty, the way Shively sees it. And if you step inside hisIf you’re entering the Garrett Road shop, which opened in 1972, don’t be cowed by the DO NOT ENTER sign on the door. Or the warning that “Trespassers will be shot, Survivors will be prosecuted.
While Dabagian makes sure the record goes back from whence it came, Shively explains why he doesn’t have a working turntable in the store — “I don’t want people to play the records unless they’re going to buy them,” he says.é, British musician and journalist Bob Stanley said he made a Philly pilgrimage to a store that’s “a collector’s paradise … but the owner was a jerk, he wouldn’t let us browse and it turned out to be a wasted journey.
Commonly referred to as “doo-wop” — a term Shively finds overused and limiting — it was impossibly romantic music made by mostly Black groups of big city teenagers with heavenly flights of vocal prowess. A mission had taken over his life. As a collector, every need fulfilled with a pristine copy of one obscure 45 needed to be followed by another. He bought from other collectors, jukebox operators, radio stations.
“That’s the connection. That’s me at 12, the same thing. Ruined! Something happened that captured me for the rest of my life. With him it was fish. With me, it was records!”In 1975, the National Enquirer published a story, “There’s Gold In ‘Golden Oldies,’" about a 31-year-old “hip-talking Philadelphia-area store owner” Val Shively, whose shop housed a staggering “100,000 records.” Readers’ vintage 45s, it suggested, might be worth big bucks.
The music warehoused at R&B Records has been mined by hip-hop producers like DJ Shadow, bringing the music full circle. Jerome Hewlett, the Philadelphia DJ known as Cash Money, has been shopping with Shively since the early 1980s. Shively and Dabagian guided him through the dos and don’ts of Quincy Jones and Aretha Franklin, and gave him a 15 LP crash course on the Sound of Philadelphia. whose University City-headquartered company Radio Kismet producesPlant walked into Shively’s store, and quickly decided he wasn’t making a podcast. He was about to embark on his first documentary film.
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