So as I sit here listening to iTunes, I just thought I ought to tell you that Saturday is Record Store Day, organized to salute those purveyors of vinyl and CDs who have managed to survive the onslaught of Napster and BitTorrent, iTunes and Rhapsody. There's a nice piece in the Times today, and because I saw the poster, I happen to know that my local store - Dyno Records here in Newburyport - will host one of many in-store performances nationwide tomorrow. Newbury Comics will have events at most of its stores, it appears, including the Dresden Dolls and Dennis Brennan at the Harvard Square location.
I was going to give you all the lowdown on Boston-area events, but the recordstoreday.com web site, perhaps ironically, sucks in several ways. Worst: It doesn't offer a way to sort in-store performances by location. So if you want to find out what's happening at your local record stores, you have to search the entire listing of hundreds of stores alphabetically and then click to each store's site. Or you can search a separate index listing performances by band name, which makes no sense at all. But you can't search to find the stores in your area, which seems like it ought to be the point. And the listings load incredibly slowly. And my local store, Dyno, isn't listed anyway. Sigh. Oh and if you click on the Record Store Day press release .pdf link, you get a 404 not found error.
The home page is filled up with celebrity quotes, some of which seem real ("You can't roll a joint on an iPod - buy vinyl!" - Shelby Lynne) and some of which were clearly hatched by publicists. Nothing can make me believe that Chuck Berry actually said, "Music is an important part of our culture, and record stores play a vital part in keeping the power of music alive."
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