56 San Diego Reader April 21, 2016
continued from page 55
make it 4/20? “Yeah, but we got too high
and turned it in nine days late. :-)” How has the San Diego
Mario Rubalcalba are the two live drummers on this record. It was an honor to have Mario play drums on a couple songs. I’ve looked up to him and all the dudes in Earthless forever. He injected the tune ‘Red, White and Blues’ with a punk/Motörhead-style groove that we otherwise may have never tried out, and it sounds insane! “Nasty [Hulson]
Joy thanks “folks that let us crash on their floors” on this year’s Ride Along!
scene grown and changed since you’ve joined it? “The SD psych or stoner
(or whatever you call it) is the best. It’s grown so much since we started in 2009–2010. Back then, we weren’t playing with too many bands that played as loud or as wild as we did, but now we’re struggling to keep up! Ocelot, Loom, Pharlee, Petyr, Monarch, and Sacri Monti come to mind. Look out!” Who are your band mem-
bers this time out, and what does each bring in? “Thomas DiBenedetto and
plays bass on all the live tracks and he’s always on his shit. Thomas and I hardly ever have to queue him into the changes we’re doing because he’s just that darn intuitive about jam- ming. Thomas, Nasty, and I have grown tight as a live trio, and I think that shows on the record.” You thank “folks
that let us crash on their floors” in your liner notes. Got any great/awful/weird crash- ing stories? “Craziest one is the
sleepwalking knife dude. Our buddy’s roommate had started sleepwalking and waving a knife around at me and Nasty while we were trying to snooze on their couch. We totally figured if we stayed really still this dude wouldn’t catch one of us! Best part was when we woke up in the morning he was already awake and making breakfast for everyone. Fuck,
that was a trip.” — Andrew Hamlin
Eat the record. Last weekend marked the seventh time Spin Records has celebrated the annual Record Store Day. “It’s our biggest day of the
year,” says Ken Kosta, who brought Spin Records to Carlsbad 23 years ago. “We do three or four times what we would normally do on a Saturday.” Hundreds of people
shuffled through the store as Trouble in the Wind, John Meeks, Nena Anderson, and the Scruffies played out back. Kosta says things are bet-
ter at his Grand Avenue store but admits Spin barely sur- vived the “decade from hell.” “It was touch-and-go
during most of the noughts,” Kosta says. “It was a struggle every year from 2000 until 2010. That’s when Napster and Amazon really affected us. People just weren’t buying vinyl and CDs as much. It’s
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Spin Records proprietor Ken Kosta: “People are attracted to the old- school record-store vibe. We’re not a neat and clean mall store.”
did survive, he’s buoyed by a new business reality: sales of new vinyl LPs were up 30 percent last year over 2014. “We’re up 20 percent com- pared to this time last year.” But the mini-boom in vinyl hurt one beloved
vinyl bandwagon. “It is hard to compete at
their price level, considering how big they are,” Kosta says of the corporate vinyl outlets. But the big chains don’t
have the soul of a Spin. Five of Kosta’s seven employees
not as good now as it was in the good old days [of the ’80s]. But there was a time where I wasn’t sure record stores would even be around in ten years.” Because Kosta and Spin
L.A. record store. The L.A. Times recently reported that Echo Park’s Origami Vinyl shuttered in part because major chains like Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfit- ters are now jumping on the
play in a band. “People are attracted to the old-school record-store vibe. We’re not a neat and clean mall store.” And Spin carries
local product. “We get vinyl by [local
bands] Mrs. Magician, Harsh Toke, and Joy from their national distributor. Trouble in the Wind and Sacri Monti bring it in themselves.” The flip side of vinyl, says
Kosta, is that as record- pressing plants struggle to keep up with demand by rushing their output, their quality diminishes. “And nowadays, they won’t take back any records even if they are defective. When people bring them back, we have to eat them.”
— Ken Leighton Find Blurt online at
SDReader.com/blurt
CONTRIBUTORS Chad Deal, Dave Good, Dorian Hargrove, Mary Leary, Ken Leighton, Bart Mendoza, Jay Allen Sanford, David Stampone
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