My train ticket from Bristol to Frome read ‘Bristol TM to rome; this typo afforded a grandiosity to my day that was entirely unwarranted. I was not visiting one of the founding cities of Western Civilisation, I was visiting a Somerset market town with a new Lidl to flick through records. No matter how you print it on a train ticket, there is nothing glamorous about rummaging through dusty slabs of pressed plastic surrounded by men that are smellier, weirder versions of yourself, just further down the line.
I left my house for the train station twenty minutes late. I had to run half the length of Bristol, dodging vehicles and shoppers, to make it. What if one of the cars had hit me? I can imagine the driver sobbing, shaking, and mumbling into their palms: “He just ran out so fast. I couldn’t stop. So fast…” and the paramedic leaning over me to check my vitals, shaking his head: “Why?”
My reply, if I were able to make it: “I wanted to get to the record shop. I wanted to make sure that I could look at every LP and 45 single in a three-storey shop. What if I missed a Little Anthony and the Imperials 7” or a rare pressing of Scott Walker? ”
Thankfully, I made it to the train station just in time; my heart beating a little too fast, my armpits a little too damp and a slight hangover becoming rapidly less slight. I took a seat next to an old lady and breathed a long, slow sigh of relief. The train pushed through gentle countryside, from Wiltshire to Somerset, passing fields of lambs and cows, even rabbits jumping in and out of view along the hedgerow, before the concrete shadow of Frome station rolled into view.
It was always my plan to visit another shop before the record shop: an antique shop, a charity shop, a book shop, it didn’t really matter, just somewhere else before Raves from the Grave so it didn’t seem like the pilgrimage it quite evidently was. But as I headed down the hill into the town centre, I was drawn to a pretty cobbled street with a river flowing down a gutter in the middle of it. After following it for a few metres, I came across a sign with a skull and the words Raves from the Grave. Three floors of vinyl heaven. I knew I had to go in then. Meteorites could fall, atomic bombs rain, and the very earth rip asunder, destroying all of that delicious dusty music. I was a nerd, this was a pilgrimage; I had to accept my fate.
Walking into Raves from the Grave, I had a religious episode. There were three floors, six rooms, and hundreds of thousands of records. It dawned on me in one terrifying instant that I needed to look at each record or else I may miss laying my hands upon music that would change my life. Where would I start?
After spinning around just a metre inside the entrance and jabbering inanely for ten minutes, I managed to start my journey up the stairs and all the way to the top floor. The room was full.of soundtracks, novelties, blues, jazz and country. Some time later I found myself lost in a cubby hole full of world music and gospel – I may have been here for a good while judging by the record-flickers arthritis already entering my fingers. I mean, there was a section of Scottish pipe music bigger than my entire record collection and albums with titles like, Tribal Music of the Head-hunters of Papua New Guinea – this place had everything.
The next room I enter is the 45 rpm room – over 20,000 seven inches, divided into compartments, arranged alphabetically, with large sections for significant artists and a separate a-z for lesser artists. I walk up and down the racks for several minutes before settling upon Jamaican dub. It’s a good a place as any. I then look through the soul for about half an hour before moving to the fifties section and finding more Johnnie Ray 7” inches than I have ever seen in all my years of searching.
It starts to overwhelm me; there is stuff here that I have been lusting after for ten years. Not only that there are multiple copies of everything. I decide to move to an area of music that I am less familiar with, to be confronted with thousands of names that I don’t know. In a way this is worse. What am I supposed to do? I go into panic mode and I cop out altogether, picking up 90s Indie, a genre so horribly familiar and undesired that I feel safely grounded. Flicking through 10 copies of Menswear’s Stardust is like breathing into a brown paper bag: however stinky, it calms me.
Eventually, after an hour of near-blindness, where I forget the name of any band I have ever liked, I decide to ask at the front desk if they have any original Johnnie Ray albums. A sallow-skinned chap, fingering a limp rolly looks up at me, acknowledges me with a nod, then picks up the phone. He calls a man in the shop down the road (Raves from the Grave has a separate shop for CDs and videos) whose speciality is the layout of the fifties section. Staff are trained up on a genre, a specific area, because to know it all would be too much for any mind to take. Some men have tried and inevitably lost their marbles. These brave if foolish pioneers can be found in Frome’s psychiatric hospital shouting out the serial numbers to Jean-Claude Vannier’s back catalogue at the pale face of the moon.
Two minutes later, a man comes through the door, slightly out of breath and with a keen look in his eye. He tells me to carry on looking around and he will find me when he has something. Ten minutes later, I head upstairs again. An old man with a pronounced stoop says to me:
“You’re the Johnnie Ray one. I’ve just been through all these,” sweeping his thin arm to indicate the expanse of floor to ceiling records in the room, “I don’t recall seeing anything.”
The word recall says it all. This man came into this shop when he was thirty-two years old, he is now eighty-eight. He has lived on a diet of the fluff found in original pressings of Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk and the occasional lick of the Velvet Underground’s banana. It has taken him an actual decade to make his way through each musical decade housed in Raves from the Grave.
Suddenly, the man from the other shop pops his head out from behind a tower of vinyl with three Johnnie Ray albums. Even after his efforts and another hour and a half of my own, all I buy is a Garnett Mimms’ LP. As delicious as it is, it seems like a failure. I walk out of the shop into daylight and instantly wince and cower in the glare of the sun, but also of my own shortcomings. I took on Raves from the Grave but wasn’t up to the challenge. It did for me in the best, most frustrating manner. Amen.
For more record shopping adventures check out this incredible tale of the Bristol Vinyl Fairy or about my trip to The Thing, Brooklyn.