Walking into Philadelphia Record Exchange on 5th by South Street is something of a meta experience; there's almost too much to take in at once. Painted white walls are plastered with vintage vinyls and psychedelic prints casting down on an overwhelming stock of second-hand LPs and CDs. Go upstairs or downstairs and find the same madness, shelves filled from floor to ceiling. It's an ordered chaos, where the three floors and five rooms are a shrine to everything holy, unknown and just plain bizarre in music worshipdom.
"It's like a submarine, just trying to make use of every inch of space," says store manager Tony Vogdes. Vogdes has worked at the Record Exchange for the last 15 years, roughly four years after the store opened in 1986, and oversees its inventory. While he can't give an exact figure for the number of CDs he carries, he estimates about 30,000 vinyls waiting for a new home. The process is simple: You have music, you come to Tony Vogdes. Tony Vogdes buys it from you and sells it (hence the "exchange"). Within the last few years the store has even put merchandise on eBay, where some 30 to 50 items float on the site each day.
Genres are separated by room and categorized alphabetically. CDs are all on the first floor and run around $9. Most LPs range anywhere from $3 to $10 -- most cost $5 or $6, but rarer ones like the Beatles' Revolver or early Led Zeppelin go up to $15. Not surprisingly, Vogdes sells substantially more vinyls than CDs.
While even the most obscure tastes are easily satisfied here, Philadelphia Record Exchange also houses the largest rock inventory in Center City. Rock and jazz are the two largest genres in the store, but overall Vogdes says he sells more jazz and R&B. Vogdes recently started inviting local artists to peform in the store's basement and solicited customers via email to attend. "Why don't we have people perform here, we're just hanging out drinking beers anyway," he said, "If people aren't coming in to buy stuff we might as well have fun." But people are in fact coming and buying. Few other locales in Philly can match this sundry stock of retro rhythms -- just be ready to dig. "It's not a good store to walk into and ask for something. The bulk of our customers are down for the hunt." Groovy.
