(TV) NY Times article

[The Barman <cregan@optushome.com.au>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/nyregion/thecity/13reco.html

March 13, 2005

GREENWICH VILLAGE

Vinyl Idling

By PETER VON ZIEGESAR



ONCE a week for several weeks, I have been taking my 9-year-old son, 
Alden, to
see Michael Carlucci at Subterranean Records, Mr. Carlucci's narrow, 
cluttered
store on Cornelia Street.



Subterranean Records, which under one name or another has been in the 
same
spot since the late 1970's, is underground in both a physical and a
metaphorical sense. You reach it by climbing down a long, narrow flight 
of
concrete steps, and its gated door is so far below street level, you 
feel
justified in looking around for an entrance to the nearby Fourth Street 
subway
station.



When we arrive this particular day, the gate is up and the lights are 
lighted,
but the door is locked. After knocking for a minute, we head away,
disappointed, but soon run into Mr. Carlucci, cheerfully scurrying down 
Fourth
Street with a takeout container of coffee in his hand.



Michael Carlucci is a small man, just shy of 40, thin and quick, with 
gentle
eyes, pockmarked cheeks, a salt and pepper beard and long, tapered 
fingers. He
dresses like the rock 'n roll survivor he is, in black jeans and boots, 
and a
ponytail emerges from his ever-present baseball cap.



Bins of vintage vinyl line one side of a narrow aisle in his little 
store,
while a trove of rock arcana, recorded on CD, lines the other. If you 
are
looking for Tom Verlaine's first solo album after he left Television, 
or an
obscure early Bob Dylan import from Japan, or, perhaps, the unsurpassed 
mono
version of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," you can find it 
here.



Mr. Carlucci is obsessed, not just by audio fidelity but by fidelity to 
the
recorded artist's first, deepest, most personal vision, the vision that
prevailed before fat living, burnout or some small clause in a contract 
made
him lose control and turned his small miracle into a large-scale 
commercial
joke.



Most of the CD's in the store have handwritten yellow flags tucked into 
their
corners. "How awesome is this!" one might say. "These guys haven't 
sounded
this good in years. If you buy one record this year, buy this one, IT 
WILL
CHANGE YOUR LIFE!"



After Mr. Carlucci and I chitchat for a moment, he and my son get down 
to
business. Mr. Carlucci slides out a well-scuffed tube amp from under the
record bins. He produces a custom-made Fender Stratocaster and an 
acoustic
guitar, and the two of them sit on whatever is available in the cramped 
space
- - a folding kitchen stool, the amp itself - and begin to trade riffs.



Alden tentatively picks out the opening bars of "Day Tripper" and 
Michael runs
through something from Cream's 1967 album "Disraeli Gears" before they 
settle
on a pre-Led Zeppelin version of "Dazed and Confused."



To me, standing with the liner notes of "Another Side of Bob Dylan" in 
my
hand, the two remind me of ancient collectors, hunched over baseball 
cards
from another era, one whose players were long ago sold off and whose 
stadiums
were long ago razed. "Sure you can finger it that way," Mr. Carlucci 
says with
quiet concentration, "but you want to see how Clapton did it?"



MY son takes guitar lessons nearby; Mr. Carlucci's role is to keep him 
on the
straight and narrow of rock-and-roll cooldom. Partly as a result of 
Alden's
visits to Subterranean Records, his hair is already longer than mine 
was when
I was in high school, and he has started a mini-fad in his fourth grade 
class
for both tonsorial excess and 60's rock: at a recent sleepover at our
apartment, five electric guitars made their appearance.



One or two customers enter and stand there for a moment, breathing in 
the
musty, cardboard-scented air and exuberant confetti of all those album 
covers,
the art of 50 years, but they leave without buying.



Things were not always this quiet at Subterranean Records. For years, 
Tom
Verlaine and countless other members of the New York rock-and-bohemian 
fringe
used the store as a place to use the phone, check paranoid theories 
over the
Internet, flip through vinyl sides that often featured themselves, and 
sip
coffee. Patti Smith's son worked the counter, and before his death by 
suicide
last year, Robert Quine, the crusty side guitarist for Television and 
Lou
Reed, came in once a day, every day, Mr. Carlucci swears, for a hug.



But with the rapid and relentless upscaling of Greenwich Village, as 
well as
the rise of rap on the airwaves, stores like Subterranean Records, 
along with
Bleecker Bob's, Record Runner and Strider Records, are fast 
disappearing from
the local landscape. At Subterranean, fewer of the outsider elite drop 
in to
sip coffee and listen to alternative takes from an early Traffic album.
Internet sales float the rent, but the store itself is in danger of 
becoming
redundant.



"I was telling my landlord the other day that I never thought business 
would
get this bad," Mr. Carlucci says with regret. "If I sell four or five 
records,
that's a good day. I'm going to give it until April or May, and if 
things
don't pick up, I'm going to move everything to my wife's studio in 
Chinatown
and just sell over the Net."



I go out to do some errands, and when I return, my son is still perched 
on Mr.
Carlucci's old tube amp in a pool of fluorescent light, fingering his 
way
through the changes of "Purple Haze." We reluctantly grab our coats and 
make
our goodbyes, though not before buying a rare Stones CD, which we will 
listen
to as soon as we get home.



Climbing up the narrow concrete stairs, I reflect that when Subterranean
Records is gone, there will be no more afternoons like this one, no more
passing of the hipster spark from one generation to the next. We pass 
the
building that held Dylan's first New York apartment, and then several 
vacant
storefronts before reaching Dave Van Ronk Street at Sheridan Square. 
History
is all around us, but it's drying up fast.



One or two steps later we board the bus, and in a minute, it's all 
behind us -
a blur of headlights in the blue evening, a few stray guitar chords 
running
through my son's mind.




Peter von Ziegesar is a documentary filmmaker.
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