The store was a constant part of my week and it vied with Orlando’s Murmur Records as the epicenter of my music buying during my college years and slightly beyond. But not always in its South Orange Blossom trail location. After a year or so of hours spent weekly browsing bins of new stock, or chatting amiably with Craig or his second-in-command, Matt Gorney [who once called an album I bought there “modeling music”], a small bomb was dropped when I found out that the store was moving uptown to Fern Park some time in 1983-4. I lived in South Orlando, and Fern Park was practically in Longwood! Not my usual territory, so my “heavy hitting” period of relying on Crunchy Armadillo Records was to change.
The store in Fern Park was across from the Jai-Alai Fronton, so visits there were far fewer than when the store was in my part of town. But I will admit, that the store was larger, brighter, and just as thrill-packed with more vinyl than ever! It was in another small strip mall albeit one of a far higher caliber. The store’s name, as I recall, had mutated into the slightly-more-commercial Armadillo Records. The bins were still rich with goodness, but the most striking thing at that point were the loads of what I’ll call, ironic vinyl there in the store; as if Catskills entertainers who departed this mortal coil had provisos in their last will and testament that their Tubby Boots albums must be sold to this store! My respect for you, dear readers, prevents me from including a Tubby Boots cover. My friend Tom and I often contemplated loading up on these records just for the brain-boggling covers, but our modest music budgets prevented such excursions, alas. It would be a decade later when the book at right was released to give a focus to the ironic vinyl scene that was obviously being partially generated within the store.
It was some a few years later when I discovered that the store had moved for a third and final time. I found this out when I was working on my college newspaper in the advertising department and if memory serves, Craig entered the office to purchase space in the paper. He had moved Armadillo Records to the shiny new UC6 shopping plaza across from the University of Central Florida for the third and most glamorous incarnation of Armadillo Records. This would have been about 1-2 years after the Fern Park location, ca. 1985-6.
The store was big and roomy and this was the last decade of the bygone golden era where ex-DJs could reasonably open a record store next to a University and sit back and skim the cream… for the last time in history as we know it! I was the Ad Production Manager for the college paper, so every time Armadillo had an ad, I designed it and paginated that sucker on the pasteup sheets. Naturally, since I was attending the University, I could drop in on a daily basis to check out the bins. Since I bought my first CD player by mid 1985, I don’t recall buying any vinyl at Armadillo III… only shiny CDs. Armadillo still had a good selection to offer with the usual low prices. Such was my CD snobbery at the time, that I no doubt passed up huge amounts of analog delights I’d give an eyetooth for at any time in the last 22 years!
After I graduated, I took a job on the University Campus and remained there until 1988, when I ventured into the larger world via an ad agency. Until that time, I took advantage of the proximity of a great record store near where I worked and once I moved on to my next job, Armadillo Records fell off of my radar screens entirely. I don’t think it lasted much longer, though. When I caught up with Craig a few years later in the early 90s, he was working for an Orlando music magazine publisher and the store days were behind him.
Though it was proper seeing the fledgeling store blossom into ever more upscale digs, and no one wants to romanticize downscale values per se, the fact remains that by far the largest slab of vital vinyl in the Record Cell that came courtesy of this store dates back to the earliest days of the store with the full Crunchy Armadillo Records moniker. The days when it was sequestered behind an equally indie gas station on the borderline sordid South Orange Blossom Trail where all of the manifold delights of the Post-Punk era were there to be had for a song.
– 30 –
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Post-Punk Monk 
Since I lived on the “other side of town”, the Fern Park store was the store I remember. I think I was at the OBT location only once. One could make a trek to Armadillo, the mighty Record City, and that other little hole in the wall shop “Backtrack Records”. Yep, those were the golden days when a perfectly wonderful Friday night out would be to do the record store crawl. Of course I remember the last location by UCF, but what stood out to me were all those bootlegs on cassettes with their slick computer generated inserts.
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Brian Ware – Friday night record store crawl? I’m getting all misty-eyed! “Just got paid today… got me a pocket full of change…!” The Mighty Record City in Fern Park was indeed a store to make the mighty tremble. Just their cutout section put most record stores to shame. Sigh. I miss cutouts. Backtrack Records? Can’t say I was ever familiar with them… except that they were the first used record store I remember hearing about with their ads in “Rocks Off” or possibly the infamous “Free Bird” magazine. The first used record store I ever visited though, was Bob Ponder’s Retro… and that was another fine store in its heyday. I seem to remember that my first trip their entailed buying old Nice albums that may have been yours at one time! All of this years before we met.
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I know this is an old blog post, but I was unaware of its existence until today. I started going to Armadillo when they were in Fern Park. Never went to the UCF location. However, after that store closed, they had a booth at Flea World for many years. At one point their stock was mainly bootleg tapes. But even then, I could always find what I was looking for (when I was still listening to tapes). They were definitely still around in the late 90s, maybe even into the 2000s, but I could be off a few years.
I remember Record City too, but I was pretty young when that store was around, like still in elementary school. When did they close? I just remember them having such an amazing selection, all the imports and stuff. Peaches in the mid to late 80s kind of became my main store after that.
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CJ – Welcome to the comments! Nice to see a old timer from the Orlando scene finding this message in a bottle. I had forgotten about the Flea World years because I never went there and never saw that booth. But you mentioning it rings bells. I think that Record City Fern Park closed maybe in 1985? I don’t ever remember seeing CD stock there apart from the scant few imports in the glass cases in the dawning of the format. The same with the store on Colonial Drive, which lasted a bit longer, I think.
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I only knew Crunchy Armadillo (and Craig) at the OBT location. He and it were a huge part of my formative punk years (18-20). I left Orlando after that and lost touch with Craig within a few years of doing so. I’ll always remember that store, though.
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Robert Browne – Welcome to the comments! Aaaah, so you were one of the Crunchy Armadillo Prime regulars! Welcome to the club! As I sit here years later, I believe there was some legal impact on the bootleg tapes at the Flea World location. I think the legal boot may have come down on that operation which hastened the end of the Armadillo empire. I think I heard that he was lucky to escape the fallout but another store was definitely out of the question. About a dozen or more years ago, I managed to find Craig’s blog online. He’d moved to Nashville and had rebranded as “Silver Michaels” and was [shock!] writing about music. He asked me to provide him with copies of his writing clips from Dogfood [as “Michelle” – his pseudonym to avoid friction with the Rocks Off Magazine management as the radio station where he was working in the late 70s sponsored Rocks Off] so I did, but the emails were fitful and the reconnection was a blip in the radar. That website is long gone now, but the records remain in my Record Cell.
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I was introduced to Craig by my girlfriend at the time, Molly, and he in turn introduced me to a lot of music. I was pretty strictly a hardcore kid at the time but he changed that by turning me on to Ralph Records and The Residents, Tuxedo Moon (listening to “No Tears” as I type this), Culturecide (who I was listening to when I searched for him the other night and found this post), and many more. I hope he is well. Thanks for replying!
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Robert Browne – Wha…??!! Culturecide? Craig was holding out on me! I’ve not heard of that band…until now!
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Oh my! The album “Year One” is the one to check out. Look them (really him) up and read about them. I think of them as the first electronica band (but don’t let that dissuade you, it’s punk).
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Robert Browne – I searched in Discogs… bupkis on Culturecide! Will have to broaden my search!
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I tried to post a YouTube link here but this page won’t do it for some reason. Search YouTube for “Culturcide Year One” and you’ll find the whole album (43:13 minutes).
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Robert Browne – I have to approve any comments with links, otherwise every spambot in the northern hemisphere would be destroying what I’m trying to build here. I didn’t see anything in the spam or trash. Try again and let it happen the way it wants to and once it’s in the spam or trash folder, I can change its status.
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Ah, got it. It didn’t give any message to inform of that, just an endlessly spinning wheel.
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Robert Browne – Since I don’t comment on my own blog without being signed in, I actually don’t know what the experience is like. Particularly if you try to include a link. But I look in the spam or trash 1-3 times a day to catch any false positives.
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No worries, I’m sure you’re just as capable as I am in searching YouTube (no doubt more capable if anything). Like I said, you’ll find the whole album there (“Year One” was truly his best work).
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