After returning from our trip to Europe in April, my wife and I were visiting the various art galleries dotting the Asheville landscape and stopped for a snack and beverage at the Battery Park Book Exchange + Champagne Bar. While enjoying our mocktails as the Jazz duo at the sidewalk tables serenaded us with my favorite samba, “Agua De Beber,” I couldn’t help but noticing that behind us, to our left, across the street was Citizen Vinyl. The more-than-a-record-store that opened during the pandemic. As such, I had not been there. Ever. After finishing our repast, we thought we’d take a look at what can only be called the facility.

The place came by its name honestly. It is inside the former Art Deco office space to the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper, which no longer needs office space in the journalism-free era we now inhabit. There are no longer reporters and editors within; the Gannett paper prints what it’s told to from their remote mothership. Currently inside, there’s nothing but vinyl. As we entered the space, display racks of LPs pressed for various and sundry labels were on display for purchase. Locally sourced, artisanal records, as it were.

I have two Citizen Vinyl pressings in my Record Cell. Both are colored wax in 140g pressings. The quality thereof was near the front of the queue. They were certainly better than many years of GZ pressings from Old Europe [though GZ quality is finally on the uptick, recently]. They have three presses; the first a modern, state of the art LiteTone™[by Viril] that is designed for quickly shifting from one stamper to another for short runs and is optimized for trendy splatter vinyl.

The workhorse pressing machine is a Southern Machine + Tool Model 1500. This vintage machine has been hot-rodded by Record Pressing Machines LLC to give it a modern interface and it’s capable of faster, larger press runs. No garage bands pressed on this one. It’s probably monopolized by major labels. Finally, Record Pressing Machines built a custom pressing unit in 2022 for Citizen Vinyl. It’s designed for ease of maintenance with off-the-shelf parts that don’t need to be 3D printed by bespoke fabricators in case of a repair! So the workload there is offset nicely by the suite of machines covering various bases of production.

On the glass walls of the pressing area was a sign trumpeting free tours of the pressing room. They lead up to 8 people through the plant at six times per week, and have a QR code you scan to register for a tour. Or you can click…

…And get whisked to the Citizen Vinyl page to book passage into vinyl wonderland. It sounds like fun and one day I should probably take the tour. Especially since the sign below implies that sooner or later, they will be charging admission for this. Century old Deco office buildings don’t come cheaply. In Asheville, little comes cheaply.

I noticed that inside the pressing area, was a bin full of used stampers; looking for all the world like good old fashioned Laserdiscs. I wish they sold those like the splatter wax! They would make excellent mockup platinum albums for presentation purposes!

As we were there this Saturday afternoon, the cafe and store were full of people either eating and drinking or shopping in the record store portion of the store. As we already had refreshed ourselves, I skipped the cafe area. There is also a recording studio inside of the large facility. The former newspaper used to have a radio station [WWNC] and studio A now is a recording studio with Studio B used for rehearsals and special events. Ideally, it may be possible to rehearse your songs, record them, and then press them in the same day at one location! With all the stars in alignment, of course.

As I entered the store area, I noted the requisite “display stock” on the wall by the checkout where examples of highly desirable, and commensurately expensive, disques are there to tempt wealthy tourists. I used to have the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” 12″ but I famously cut it loose during the Great Vinyl Purge. The “Maggot Brain” album is something that I’m ashamed that I don’t have! Is the Social Distortion really all that desirable? It feels weird seeing it rubbing metaphoric shoulders with Joy Division, John Coltrane, and Funkadelic.

So I saw that the used records were tightly curated into artist sections with several albums worth of the featured artist. Strangely enough, I didn’t recall there being alphabetical order applied to the sections. But don’t quote me on that. I was pleased to see love for John Cale, so I rifled through the small pile and saw a hot one; “Artificial Intelligence!” Could there be a trendier album 39 years later? It’s one of the few Cale albums to have never seen life on the silver disc. I looked at the price…$25.00. That seemed to be agreeable. I could see myself buying this if I had the spare cash [but I didn’t this day].

At this point I started looking randomly at discs of attraction; whether I had them in the Record Cell or not. I saw the now strange-looking US “Get Happy!” pressing [without the simulated ring wear on the UK LP and subsequent CD reissues] and it felt off for the asking price to be $20.00. Surely this was an album that should cost under half that? I saw a Prince stack with “Dirty Mind” scraping $100. Yow! Truly a classic, but that seemed to be priced egregiously high! My blood pressure was starting to rise.

Another deceased star caught my eye. Sinead O’Connor had a section. I pulled the LP of “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” and I turned it over to see the price sticker proclaiming…$90.00! That was it… I was feeling like this was another clip joint record store catering to rich tourists in this town! It was Simon LeBon time from my cheapskate perspective!

Just when I was starting to get angry [like I do almost every time I visit a record store, these days] I noticed a “cheapie bin” where unbagged discs [you don’t get a polyester slip at that price point!] could be had for what constituted a pittance here. In this case $12.00 instead of the more classic “dollar bin.” What was in there? Anything good? I pulled out both “The Right To Be Italian” as well as “Holly Beth Vincent” and was happy to see these stellar discs in evidence. But is their value rising beyond the usual $3.00-5.00 I was used to seeing these discs for?

Diving deeper revealed actual Monk-Bait with a Thomas Leer 12″ that didn’t reside in the Record Cell. The Cherry Red pressing of “All About You.” I would like to buy any Thomas Leer I didn’t have, but would I dish out $12.00 for one? Not this day. With that, we left after being there maybe 15 minutes. It was all my sinking heart could take. I had to look and I should not have been shocked by what was within surely the most tourist oriented record store in Asheville.

As I was driving home that afternoon, I was mentally composing the poison-pen letter to Citizen Vinyl that was going to be this post. I had the photos. All I had to do was to write it…no! It was writing itself…in my mind! [taps cranium]. But a voice inside my head told me when I got home to check the market values of the discs in question…just to see what constituted a fair price. I got an eyeful. The Cale album was priced at the lower end of the spectrum on Discogs, with NM copies at $40.00 with mint discs at $75.00.

My theories were correct on “Get Happy!” This was plentiful in amounts less than $10.00, but I got a schooling on the prices that “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” change hands for these days. A VG copy will cost $35.00 with NM hitting $200. Maybe $90.00 was a bargain?

Next “The Right To Be Italian,” after decades of seeming neglect, was hitting squarely in the $7.00 to $25.00 zone. Making the $12.00 asking price at Citizen Vinyl seem on the better side of fair. The bulk of the copies of “Holly Beth Vincent” for sale on Discogs were in the $5.00-$10 region; with only two copies slightly more than the $12.00 here. Hmmm.

Finally, the Thomas Leer 12″ single was an eye opener. Copies of that from domestic US sellers were priced from $23.24 to $100.00!! Making $12.00 a top bargain. When I checked, Leer’s “Contradictions” CD reissued in 2008 only had the A-side on it, and that’s a hefty two figures these days! The B-side, “Saving Grace” still remains only on this 12 inch.

So I take back everything I insinuated about Citizen Vinyl. Their prices ran the gamut from pricey on a low end item, to bargains on upper tier records, with a flat out best buy on one of those. About what one would hope for an average record store. And “average” is hardly the case of Citizen Vinyl. They are a multifaceted record experience that also happens to be a store as well. The outlay can’t be cheap, and the facility is clean, well curated, and engaging. Given that fact, the prices felt pretty fair. Not “dirt cheap” but this was no hole-in-the-wall. It’s a tourist destination store that behooves keeping an eye on what’s going down every now and then.

The bigger picture here are the trends that affect all record stores and the secondary market in particular that have seen records I’m simply used to seeing go for no more than a five spot now selling for 4-6 times that amount in my old age. As I can’t help but notice, record collecting is no longer an inexpensive hobby that any can partake in. The big squeeze is on for records of many stripes, with formerly cheap pressings now ratcheting up in sale price. Whether I like it or not.

Though I would have preferred to still see records plentiful and inexpensive for most releases in the 21st century, this is not the case. The cost of all real estate has been in a huge bubble for the last quarter century and this affects all prices across the board. Anyone selling records in a storefront knows the pinch as well, so the pain naturally gets passed along the food chain. Maybe it’s better for me if I just stop going to record stores. What I really want are CDs and finding any store that deigns to carry the silver discs these days is a small miracle. Meanwhile, the licorice pizzas are selling at inflated premiums to start with, and the 40+ year old records that are all I really care about are getting taken along for the ride.

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