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This summer, Philly music journalist and author Marcus J. Moore spent a week in residence at the popular new Pearl District listening gallery Mono Space. Moore spun spiritual jazz and explored the world of Parliament-Funkadelic, the pioneering ’70s art-funk ensemble led by George Clinton.
While spinning records on the gallery’s Devon Turnbull OJAS Klipsch stereo system, Moore found something in Portland the rest of the country hungers for.
“Wherever I go, there’s an overall push for the tactile,” Moore tells me. “But Portland is already kind of analog—it feels very unchanged by technology compared to other cities in America. And so it makes sense this city would be interested in listening to cool music on a cool stereo system, like back in the ’80s and ’90s.”
Matt Fleeger agrees. The longtime KMHD DJ, who now curates the lineup of DJ-hosted listening sessions at Mono Space, brought Moore to town as the gallery’s first artist in residence. Fleeger notes the city’s renown for record culture spans decades, citing the influence of Portland collectors like Rev Shines (a crucial sample source for J Dilla, Questlove and countless others) and the city’s seminal historic record shop, Music Millennium. “This city has always had an affinity for physical media,” Fleeger says.
Thankfully, Portland offers a particular paradise for the vinyl enthusiast, a store for any proclivity and genre. For jazz from the genre’s golden era (the early 1950s to mid-1960s), head south to Dig Vinyl. Something you can’t find on the internet? Little Axe Records in the Hollywood neighborhood. If you’re into global music—in particular, Japanese city pop and J-Jazz from the ’70s—head to Music History in North Portland.
That’s where Portland’s own mononymous Himiko digs crates in town. Himiko curates niche playlists as City Pop Songs to several hundred thousand followers across Twitch and TikTok. She also spins vinyl-only DJ sets around town under the name Seaside FM. “The crowd is so appreciative to hear original pressings on vinyl,” she says of her regular DJ set at Holocene. “Physical media culture is changing all over, and in Portland our events have been just wild.”
The soul of this analog affinity can be found in Portland’s record shops. Some are small and have opened only recently, while others offer much larger collections and have existed for longer than you or I. At their best, record shops function as their own analog algorithm, a system of curation and recommendation to promote discovery and stumble-upon acquisition. These are screenless places, mostly, unless you feel the need to cross-check your finds with their relative value on Discogs (regrettable but sometimes necessary) or snap photos of album covers for further listening at home before making a purchase (allowable with discretion).
Officially, Record Store Day is in the spring. And while the collective of small businesses behind the holiday also celebrates a half birthday of sorts on Black Friday, encouraging shoppers to perhaps stuff a few 45s into their stockings, anyone who’s browsed the stacks at Music Millennium on a Friday night knows that here in Portland, every day is Record Store Day.
Set out with a find in mind—a record you loved as a kid, or something brand new that reminds you how beautiful and moving music can be—or simply to see where the digging takes you.
Music Millennium
All roads in Portland’s record shop scene go through Music Millennium, our city’s oldest and largest independent store, a rightly beloved hub of physical media. MM opened in 1969, founded by Don MacLeod, Loreen MacLeod and Dan Lissy; current owner Terry Currier started working there in 1984 and became the shop’s owner in 1996.
Up on the shop’s back office patio, Currier tells me about the huge number of music retailers there were in the U.S. at the turn of the millennium, a number most estimates place between 6,000 and 7,000. “By 2008, there were only 2,400 left,” he says. He navigated this extinction-level event in part by getting organized: That year, alongside a consortium of other independent record shop owners nationwide, Currier helped launch Record Store Day, which has since gone on to become a major annual phenomenon. “If you look at the renaissance of vinyl, it started right there in 2008,” Currier says.
Hand-painted signage greets you on the shop’s windows, and you’re bombarded by a plurality of physical media everywhere you look inside, with not a scrap of AI to be found anywhere. Millennium presents two distinct listening areas; I like to start with the westernmost entrance, a bit farther down Burnside from the intersection at 32nd, which has the freshest used stuff and a rare records wall to crane your neck for. The store is labyrinthine, with nooks and crannies you might miss on your first or second trip. There are so, so many box sets here, and a pretty incredible collection of UHQR and Mobile Fidelity audiophile record pressings, along with plentiful used tapes, new tapes, an enormous volume of new and used records, and an excellent “staff selections” section. Be sure to wander upstairs, a balcony alcove dedicated entirely to country, international recordings, and especially jazz, including just about every release in the history of Blue Note’s Tone Poet reissue series (Currier was an early supporter). One of the coolest things about Music Millennium is that if, by chance, the store doesn’t have what you’re looking for, one of the shop’s 35 or so employees—from punk-rock elders to 20-something jazz cats—can help you place a special order. The best time to visit is at night; it’s open until 10 pm (9 pm Sundays) and has been since the very beginning, meaning you can go record hunting here after dinner or between bars.
If I had to take someone from out of town to just one Portland municipal attraction, it would be MM. Currier was in the press earlier this year looking for a buyer; it reminds me of a similar story around Greg Higgins of the eponymous Higgins Restaurant, two Portland legends who’d like to retire without losing the building to developers or selling out to private equity chuds or otherwise making choices that would be negative culturally for the city. 3158 E Burnside St., 503-231-8926, musicmillennium.com. 10 am–10 pm Monday–Saturday, 11 am–9 pm Sunday.
Music History
Geoff Zagarola’s little record shop represents the very best of what the Portland record scene has to offer: 300 square feet exploding with creativity and eclecticism, stocked with records from near and far, a complete discovery engine unto itself and refreshed with satisfying regularity, inspiring repeat visits. A consummate digger, Zagarola, 32, began collecting and trading records in high school. “It was a little more lonely back then,” he tells me. “When I first started, I felt like I was the odd one out looking for physical media, but now there’s so much more interest across the age spectrum.” At age 19, he launched a stall at Crossroads Music, and began traveling the world to hunt out rare LPs. Today, Zagarola visits Japan once a year, crawls record stores across Texas and Louisiana, and makes an annual pilgrimage to the famed WFMU record show in Manhattan.
His little shop has become a repository for it all, and a destination unto itself for discerning vinyl nerds—you’ll see them milling around the little courtyard in front of the shop off Killingsworth on Saturday mornings, waiting for Geoff to open. I’ve scored some killer records here—rare J-Jazz from cult Tokyo record label Three Blind Mice, Haitian polyrhythmic funk by the master Coupé Cloué, a perfect copy of Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages (his best record)—and been too late to swoop up others, like a copy of Lou Donaldson’s Swing and Soul (Blue Note, 1958) that disappeared from the wall at Music History roughly 30 minutes after Zagarola posted it on Instagram one summer weekend. The shop’s deep bench of the music Zagarola grew up listening to at home—Puerto Rican salsa, pan-Latin jazz, Caribbean pop—is worth a visit alone, and you can also find his records as part of the multishop-curated vinyl offering at Mono Space. 5400 NE 30th Ave., 503-974-4404, music-history.org. 1–8 pm Wednesday–Saturday.
Little Axe Records
This place is a rejoinder to the boring argument that everything is already streaming. There’s heaps of music in a shop like Little Axe you could never stream if you tried—because it’s from, like, a Lagos record label that existed only between 1972 and 1975. Little Axe exists beyond the beyond: There’s a mint copy of Pharoah Sanders’ Karma next to a Japanese import reissue of Marvin Gaye’s timeless What’s Going On next to a 1989 first pressing of The Cure’s second-best record, Disintegration (their best-best record being Seventeen Seconds, obviously). And all that vinyl is buttressed by a selection of highly recommended $3 mixtapes curated by owners Jed Bindeman and Warren Hill, featuring everything from ’70s Cambodian soul to Nigerian gospel to Jamaican rocksteady ballads.
New arrivals are up front, but the real action is toward the back of the store, where you’ll find a section of favorites of the shop owners and a zone dedicated to “Even More Wall Records.” On assignment for this story, I ogled an original pressing of The Pixies’ Bossanova, Pantera’s Projects in the Jungle, a copy of Common’s Like Water for Chocolate (notable for its J Dilla production), and just so, so much early mono jazz, from Joe Henderson to Jackie McLean to Cannonball Adderley to Mose Allison. It’s easy to spend too much money here, but there’s also a wait-and-it’s-gone factor at play. Once, I decided to defer purchasing a copy of the first Beat Happening record, only to return a few days later to find it gone gone gone. Such is the toil. 4142 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-320-3656, littleaxerecords.com. Noon–7 pm daily.
Landfill Rescue Unit
The horrific cartoon rat out front of this record shop is actually a shit test—breach his rodentia defenses and you’ll gain passage to one of the city’s best hubs for punk, noise, thrash, indie rock and metal, with plenty of classic album rock, smart jazz and country on the side. The shop is surprisingly large, and many of its record cabinets yield a lower-level pull-out containing even more LPs—I estimate at least one hour of dig time here to really see it all. There’s something charming about a record shop that’s unafraid to play weird tunes, and this is the Portland store in which you are most likely to hear, for example, owner Paul Anson playing music from the ’90s Japanese psychedelic synth metal band Sigh, or listen in on a couple of guys up front discussing the vanishing availability of early releases by Portland punk heroes The Wipers. An early pressing of the group’s seminal 1986 LP Land of the Lost graced the record wall here on my last visit, alongside a Kill Rock Stars first pressing of Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out, and some rare Melvins LPs. Where else can one purchase the Oregon Jazz Society’s “I’M A JAZZ FREAK” bumper sticker, a 1966 mono copy of Rubber Soul, and an album by Boston grindcore legends Anal Cunt? 2533 SE Belmont St., 503-679-8579, landfillrescueunit.com. 11 am–7 pm daily.
Tomorrow Records
If you think about record shops as unique ecosystems (and I do), then the offering at Tomorrow Records strikes me as the city’s most complete, a full life cycle of sonic enjoyment from records to stereos to furniture upon which to place and store it all. The shop is run by Patrick Dennehy and local DJ Bren Gaims—you’ll see them there each day, hand-cleaning records and restocking the shop’s selection of around 10,000 records. Dennehy worked formerly at Jackpot and Everyday Music, and has been here at Tomorrow Records since 2018, not long after the shop opened. “We were just gaining momentum when the pandemic era shutdowns [hit],” he tells me. Like many record shops, they pivoted to online sales for a time, then found themselves surprised by the significant uptick in business once restrictions were lifted. Alongside the records—and my personal pick for the city’s best wall, upon which I once found a highly rare original 1993 pressing of the best Donald Fagen album (Kamakiriad), among other treasures, such as the Bob Mould box set I continue to contemplate purchasing every visit—Tomorrow stocks an impressive assortment of used stereo hi-fi gear from great brands like KLH, Technics, and Audio-Technica. Plus, there’s some really cool furniture, record cabinets, tape racks and the like, including by local hi-fi furniture makers WickerWoodWorks. “Our hi-fi stuff always sells,” Dennehy says, “and there’s always new stuff coming in.” I purchased a refurbished 1970s Sansui 2000x solid state amplifier from Tomorrow over the summer, and am listening to music on it as I type these words. 700 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-206-4866, instagram.com/tomorrowrecordspdx. 11 am–7 pm daily.
Crossroads Music
Crossroads is a vast and important matrix in the local vinyl scene. Owners Thom Jones and Eric Swedberg run it like a multiseller vintage mall, with around 40 individual vendors occupying space within the racks. Each section has its own quirks and treasures, wall features and discoveries. One vendor specializes in sound effects and railroad noises, another in Nigerian soul and funk. Deep boroughs of jazz and rock and hip-hop are scattered across the shop, with some vendors offering sales and deals week over week. It is a truly unsearchable analog reality: Ask the old dudes up front (local legends) if it’s possible to look up what’s in the shop and they just laugh. Crawling Crossroads properly is a 120-minute affair, during which a kind of zen of digging takes over, a maximum super-index of analog information being fed into one’s own meat-computer. This place is a portal to the before times, and a superb way to kill an afternoon. 8112 SE Foster Road, 503-232-1767, xro.com. 11 am–6 pm Monday–Thursday, 11 am–7 pm Friday and Saturday, noon–6 pm Sunday.
Dig Vinyl
The journey to Sellwood is worth it for Dig. Outwardly, it comes on like a humble neighborhood record shop, but inside you’ll find quite simply the city’s best jazz section—an education for the emerging jazz cat—and an astonishingly well-curated spread, with genres ranging from funk to soul to rock of all stripes. The shop is 100% used records, with modern repressings interspersed with older stuff and a new arrivals section that appears to turn over in its entirety around once a week. Owner Scott Thayer and his small staff are intensely knowledgeable and experienced collectors themselves. On one particular visit, my 10-year-old was so taken with the tunes on the stereo she marched right up to the counter, asked what was playing, and bought it right there (Bewitched by Luna, Dean Wareham’s post-Galaxie 500 project). This was perhaps the proudest moment of my millennial parenting life.
Meanwhile, the shop has its own dedicated jazz wall. On my last visit, it sported an early pressing of Donald Byrd’s Off to the Races, a Japanese import copy of Brilliant Corners, and some rare Chet Baker records for Pacific Jazz from the mid-1950s. Some of the coolest records I own came from Dig: a sparklingly perfect copy of Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga, the sought-after Analogue Productions remaster of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, and a shockingly great hi-def early-’90s audiophile one-step CD release of Blonde on Blonde. Best of all, at checkout you’re invited to spin the wheel o’ deals, to earn perhaps 5% off your total purchase or a free record from the dollar bin. 8235 SE 13th Ave., 503-703-2408, dig-vinyl.com. Noon–7 pm daily.
Speck’s Records
Speck’s opened in Kenton in 2017, and owners Michael and Maia Gersten have quietly established it as one of the city’s most respected record shops over the past decade. This minimalist, neatly organized shop won’t blow you away on total record count or dig time. The impressive selection makes the shelves here. Recent visits featured a 1998 copy of Either/Or, first pressings of Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin records from the early ’60s, and a choice Lou Donaldson early mono session. The shop is small enough to have a high metabolism—every two weeks, Speck’s feels like a different store; it’s stuffed with CDs and tapes, too, running the gamut from 311 to Spaceman 3. Last time I stopped by, I scored a U.K. double-CD pressing of Prince remixes and a copy of Dookie on CD (as God intended) for my kid, who’s learning to play guitar. Speck’s sells some pretty rad audio gear—Rega turntables, Marantz amps—and every Sunday morning there’s a live ambient music set that draws a regular crowd for incense and bleep-bloops. It’s always a good time. 8216 N Denver Ave., 503-495-3455, specksrecords.com. 11 am–6 pm Thursday–Monday.
Notable mentions
The legendary West Burnside haunt Everyday Music (1313 W Burnside St.), which teems with used records and CDs aplenty; local icons Mississippi Records (5202 N Albina Ave.), whose reissue series, tape collections and abundant supply of records from Ethiopia and Nigeria remain essential; high-traffic Jackpot Records (3574 SE Hawthorne Blvd.), where the focus is on new records, but the occasional used treasure can be found; Mint Gallery Records (3912 N Mississippi Ave.), a newcomer with a well-considered stock of new and used; Paul’s Boutique (1627 NE Alberta St.), another newcomer with more of a new release and reissue focus, this time squirreled away in a basement below the hustle and bustle of Alberta; 2nd Avenue Records (121 SW 2nd Ave.), which remains a destination for punk and indie rock; Clinton Street Records (2510 SE Clinton St.), charmingly packed with a digger’s delight of rare soul, funk and electronica; My Vinyl Underground (1401 SE Division St.), home to a nationally notable collection of rare indie pop, jangle pop, and independent releases from the vanguard of the pop underground; Passenger Seat Records (715 NE Lawrence Ave.), which has an architecturally interesting quarter-loft space tucked back into the Kerns neighborhood, and specializes in ambient, electronica, DJ deep cuts, and choice repressed rereleases from truly excellent deep-dig labels around the world, from London’s Athens of the North to Portland’s own Albina Music Trust; and Everybody’s Music (1801 D St., Vancouver, Wash.), a wonderfully homey shop that stocks releases helpfully labeled by pressing edition and year and an epic selection of box sets, CDs, VHS, and first pressings.
Stereos
Fred’s Sound of Music (3760 SE Hawthorne Blvd.), a full-service 360 home stereo playhouse with high-end new gear from leading brands like REL Acoustics subwoofers, Rega turntables and amplifiers, AudioQuest cables and interconnects, Ortofon cartridges, and much more, including a raft of design dream vintage hi-fi from the 1970s and 1980s; Stereotypes Audio (1401 SE Morrison St.), a sharply appointed newish shop that’s home to terrific gear, including NAD Electronics amplifiers, Cambridge Audio pre-amps, Focal headphones and Hana cartridges, with a helpful and knowledgeable team there to answer questions; Pearl Audio (1038 NW Johnson St.), if budget is truly no object, for brand-new gear from heart-stopping wallet-ravagers like McIntosh, Bowers & Wilkins, and Luxman; the vintage audio tinkerers Audio Specialties (1416 NE 102nd Ave.), where old gear goes to find new life, and a plethora of cool vintage speakers, amps, and turntables are available; and the aforementioned gear sections of Tomorrow Records and Speck’s, both highly recommended.
