The interior of the shop’s third location.

I just received some terrible news from reader Zoo in a comment today. Yesterday, I had mentioned that I had purchased the CD-3 I was discussing at Tampa’s legendary Vinyl Fever. Zoo reports that the store had closed last year and when I checked up on it, the owner, Lee Wolfson, had decided that as of January, 2011, when their current lease was up, it was not viable to move the store, lock, stock, and barrel for a fourth time. So the Tampa Bay institution closed its doors instead. Wolfson had opened the store in 1981 in its original Fletcher Avenue location, adjacent to the University of South Florida, Tampa.

It was that magnificent Fletcher Ave. location where I got my first taste of this amazing store. I had a friend, Elisa, attending USF for her BFA and she hipped me to the goods. I matriculated in Boreblando, Florida instead, at the University of Central Florida. When I finally ventured to Tampa that first time for a concert in 1985 [Tears For Fears, if you must know] with some friends, and actually, my art history instructor as well, we made darn sure to hit Vinyl Fever’s bins prior to the show. The place had the goods in spades!

And by the goods, I mean lovely import vinyl! The store was a sprawling wonder that had a stunning stock in new and used records and even a few of those newfangled CDs. I distinctly remember seeing a copy of the Post-Visage “Strange Cruise” album for the only time in my life. I held it in my hands, contemplating purchase. Unfortunately, I had trepidation following the catastrophic [or so I thought at the time] third Visage album, and balked. I have been regretting it ever since. Particularly since I no longer think of that album as an unmitigated car wreck. Next to contemporary albums by the likes of Heaven 17 and Ultravox, it has a few merits even those bands didn’t possess in ’85-’86.

The second time I visited VF was before the awful, yet highly significant Simple Minds show in early 1986. My friend Tom and a van full of warm bodies converged on the store and I vividly recall buying the brand spankin’ new Cramps album, “A Date With Elvis” in all its lurid, gold leaf, embossed glory as a UK Big Beat import. I also bought a new, sealed repressing of “Song’s The Lord Taught Us” on I.R.S. back when that label was still in its glory phase of A+M Distribution. We found many great releases that day, but the Simple Minds show was a bummer. An all time low, really.

Tom’s van had a slow leak on one tire but we were unable to find a service station to get some air in Tampa’s confusing downtown district where the Curtis Hixon Hall was. After the show, Tom’s van had a flat tire and we had to scramble to get some fix-a-flat and try to hoof it back to Orlando. We’d run into some people we knew who needed a lift back, so there were even more of us stuck in Tampa around midnight than had originally drove in! I called the only person in Tampa I knew, the aforementioned Elisa, and she saved our bacon. Little did she know that she met her second husband that night, our driver. But in 1986, even hubby #1 hadn’t happened yet!

By the early 90s, trips to Tampa had stepped up. There were more opportunities for concerts and the Tampa record shows put any events in Orlando very much in the shade. After dropping serious coin at the shows, usually held in the voluminous Curtis Hixon Hall, we’d head over to VF afterward to play clean-up! By that time, the store had moved to a less distinctive location on South Dale Mabry, close to the Navy base and a captive audience of music hungry youth. Since it was the 90s, the store had less of the value it had packed back in the 80s. The contemporary music that filled the bins was calling out to younger, less critical ears than mine, but the cheapie bins by that time had all of the cast off treasures that managed to still get a sparkle in The Monk’s eye. That was where old New Wave had come to die.

Third time lucky…

I had already left Florida when the store moved for a third and final time in 2003. The store I see in photos had become a smaller, more modest enterprise, in these, the end times for record stores. When the store moved to its ultimate location on Henderson Boulevard, the photos reveal a typical surviving store of the 21st century. One with about a third the floor space that it had started out with. In a modest strip mall location common to upscale record stores that had managed to run the gauntlet of illegal downloading that had seen their primary target demographic swiftly seize upon as a means of stealing music where they used to have to buy it.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that Rolling Stone magazine in 2010 had touted the store as one of America’s 25 best record stores the year prior. That the store had managed to hang on this long after a decade of decimated music sales thanks to the horror of peer-to-peer file swapping, gives the decision to ultimately close when presented with the cost of simply moving an even greater sting. Vinyl Fever was in its heyday, an almost textbook example of a record store that catered to a local college age audience. The sounds that the young and hip required flowed through its bins like musical oxygen; bringing vitality to those who stopped in to partake of their wares. Even in the store’s second phase, it was still a solid contender if not the bomb it had been a decade earlier. I never saw the third phase of the store, but if they could get on the RS top 25 list, they had to be doing something right. The stores on that list that I have visited [Wuxtry, Grimey’s, Jackpot, Shake It] were clearly worthy enterprises.

Death of a record store

So let this be a warning to each of you not to ever take that record store for granted. It may not be a store of Vinyl Fever’s caliber but I guarantee this much; you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

– 30 –