Atlanta celebrates Record Store Day this weekend on Saturday, April 23. A holiday observed in cities worldwide, Atlanta’s Record Store Day is an especially festive observance, blessed as we are with a bounty of independent record stores. There’s JB’s Record Lounge in the West End, Ella Guru and Wuxtry Records in Decatur, Fantasyland in Buckhead and Wax ’N Facts in Little Five Points. Also in Little Five Points is Criminal Records, a staple of the Atlanta community since the early 1990s. Its owner, Eric Levin, is also one of the co-founders of Record Store Day. He joined “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes to share the history of this now nationwide celebration of music, vinyl and the neighborhood hubs keeping us connected.
Levin offered a sense of the mood among the record store community 15 years ago when Record Store Day began. “It’s like a miraculous conception, where there’s several people that had this notion at the same time,” said Levin. “At this time, record stores were thought to be antiquated or extinct. This was right when Tower Records was going out of business, and the rise of Napster, iTunes and digital were on everybody’s minds.”
He went on, “We, as coalitions of record stores that were doing quite well, didn’t really agree and we were just looking to tell our story. So we wanted to celebrate ourselves and get on the radar of publications and new customers.”
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