Best Place to Get All High Fidelity

A A A Comments By Gavin Williamson Wednesday, Oct 4 2006

(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

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Best Place to Get All High Fidelity

There’s a plaque on the wall: “When I get a little bit of money I buy records, and if there’s any left, I buy food and clothes.” Sounds appropriate for a used, largely vinyl-based record shop with a rotating stock of more than 100,000 LPs and a back warehouse filled with an additional 300,000. Its slogan, “the last record store,” is appropriate, since digital music, downloads and big brother Amoeba have ransacked the L.A. music scene.

Opening as a venture business for Mike Colstock Jr. and associate Chuck Rose in 1984, Record Surplus proved successful enough for Colstock to develop two more stores, Mad Platter in Riverside and Rhino Records, Claremont — both of which survive on what Colstock terms “the college market,” though that’s certainly not where Record Surplus makes its dough. Today the store is entirely filled with middle-aged men. “I guess the women are scared of all the ‘plumber’s butt,’?” jokes manager and 20-year Surplus veteran Neil Cantor, “but it’s a great place to meet single men.”

Fabulous.

It was getting a little too High Fidelity on the first floor, so I went to check out The Attic, the store’s second floor filled entirely with vinyl priced at 92 cents .?.?. or less. The usual suspects filled the shelves. Plenty of Yes, Boston and Men at Work .?.?. but I also found some 92-cent gems: Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality and, funny enough, REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity. Nick Hornby would be proud.

Record Surplus11609 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A., ?(310) 478-4217, (310) 477-7509 or www.recordsurplusla.com

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