Record Shows Bring Out Fanatics, Obscure Gems

You take your music seriously, and you feel pretty fortunate that you discovered Phish or Coldplay or De La Soul, because you've saved yourself from a lifetime of TRL purgatory. Now you safely boast among your less-enlightened friends that you know music.

You may count yourself as one of those knowledgeable few -- until you meet people like Letitia Walker and Whitney Shroyer and realize you still have a hell of a lot to learn.

Co-proprietors of the Asheville-based Whizz Records, Walker and Shroyer were plying their wares at the Raleigh Record and CD Show, held April 1 at the Four Points Hotel.

It's the regional record shows like this one where obsessive audiophiles come to haggle over the price of "deleted Smiths singles and original, not reissue, Frank Zappa albums," as John Cusack observed in last year's celebration of music fetishists "High Fidelity."

The success of that film might have given record junkies a stamp of cool, but it's business as usual on the record show circuit -- the business of music fanaticism.

Walker will debate the aesthetic merits of an Allman Brothers Band record cover, and Shroyer will explain the overlooked genius of swamp soulman Raw Spitt. All in a day's work.

"If you want to make music your passion, then don't limit your sources or your options," Walker said. "If you consider yourself a real music lover, then you've got to go out and buy CDs, buy records, just try and hear everything that you can."

That's no small feat even if you were to limit your options just to the Raleigh show, with roughly a dozen dealers but thousands upon thousands of albums. Wedged somewhere inside those bins, hard-to-find records await the appraisal of collectors, completists, obsessives and guys who should get rid of a couple thousand records before buying a thousand more but just can't live without a copy of Emmylou Harris' out-of-print first album.

But the question remains -- when it comes to the music you've never heard of, how do you separate the junk from Three Souls on my Mind, a band that Walker lauds as the Mexican Rolling Stones?

"You learn to develop the instincts to come across something you don't know about and realize this is what will give me the greatest reward, either aesthetic or financial," Shroyer said.

That distinction between a good listen and a good investment seems to separate Shroyer and Walker from several of the other vendors, several of whom specialize in high-end collectibles rather than cheaper but still obscure vinyl.

"The records we prize most of all are the ones that just continue to give every time you listen to them," Shroyer said. "Like this Raw Spitt album, it's just this great nationalistic social protest record, maybe the angriest soul album ever."

On the surface, not much is changed when the vendors pack up and head back to their stores or on to the next show.

Everyone at the show sold a few extra records to make room for that next Holy Grail, that undiscovered three minutes of pure pop heaven from some long-forgotten teenage garage band. That's what drives record junkies past the point where the rest just give up and settle for Everclear or Dave Matthews Band or Pavement.

"We don't discriminate against something just because it's popular, but at the same time we won't champion something if it's mediocre," Walker said. "We just search for things that are really good, and sometimes those things happen to be really hard to find."

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artdesk@unc.edu.