Ain’t It Good to You

Is New York still a good place to buy records? Jonny Sklute (alternatively known under the handle Jonny Paycheck), owner, clerk, and CEO of Good Records NYC, would like to think that it remains a great place to sell them. A risk management broker turned record dealer, Sklute launched his storefront venture in 2005, right alongside the storied and busy market of East Village/Lower East Side record stores: A-1, the Sound Library, Gimme Gimme. I caught up with Sklute to see how the market was doing.

How did you come to records as a profession?

I came to records as a profession the same way as most folks, I guess: just by collecting. I was making music at the time and buying stuff to sample. I was doing little spot tours with my group, and so I would always go looking for records. Eventually, in the process of collecting and traveling around the country, I was finding records that had some value. Not a lot, by any means, but, you know, here and there I would sell them. Mostly I would bring boxes of records back to New York City to trade, and so I started to understand what sold well in the shops here. Often it was stuff I would’ve gone right past. And I ended up getting a lot of great records from stuff I had picked up out of town.

What was the name of your group? Any pressings still out there?

My group…yeah, it was actually California-based. We started back in high school, when I lived in the Bay Area. The group was called Kemetic Suns. I was part of various offshoots, and made one LP as Konceptual Dominance with my friend Kirby, and had a 12-inch off that. I produced all the tracks and I rapped on a lot of them as well. Also, my original group Fundamentals dropped two 12-inch singles and a CD or two.

Where did you tour? Did you come out of the experience thinking that this or that region was the best for finding records?

We toured in Texas, Canada, New York—although I already had moved out here—and up and down the West Coast. I haven’t really found one or another region to be better or worse for records, but as my connections have grown I have had to travel less and less. The whole East Coast is great, from Massachusetts down to D.C. I don’t have much experience down south but that is where it’s at! My buddies that work down there are always turning up sick shit. The West Coast is fantastic as well. At this point, every town has a designated “digger” or three, so it’s not really about finding a place with less competition. There’s always going to be competition—especially with so much information on the Internet now. Back when I started, there was none of that! You just had to know, or be instinctive, or just gamble and hope you won.

Was there a point for you where records had to become a full-time gig?

What turned me on to selling the most was when me and a couple friends went down to hit a shop that was going out of business. We had found out about it through a friend’s father who used to shop there. We found quantity of a few valuable titles and split them up, and I sold off my batch gradually and for good money. More and more, I started selling records I would find that were valuable, but not really to my taste or interest. At some point, it became more important for me to go out looking for records, and selling them for profit, talking and thinking about records, than doing the job I was supposed to be applying myself to.

The idea of opening a record store grew out of that. I wanted to apply myself to something I loved and obsessed about, and not have it be something I had to hide from my bosses. I was given a golden opportunity to leave the company I was working for with a severance, and with some investment from my family I opened Good Records NYC.

What was your job before Good Records? Was that era a hiatus for your collecting and dealing, or were there ways within the workweek to still dig?

My job before I opened the shop was as a junior broker at Marsh & McLennan, a commercial risk management and insurance firm based in midtown. I started with them in San Francisco, however, while I was back there after graduating from NYU. I definitely still dug and dealt records. That’s really where it started getting serious, because I had a lot of disposable income to buy records with. I traveled a lot for business, and had access to all the postage supplies I wanted!

How have records come to you since you decided to get in the game on a dealer level, and in the run-up to Good Records opening its doors?

As far as how records have come to me, you just start to develop a critical mass of sources when you get really deep into dealing records. I need a lot of records—all the time—because the turnover at my shop is really high. So I work all the connections I have. I travel a lot; I hit shows, fleas, and shops. And wherever I go, I look for records and I build relationships with people who can get them. Eventually, you develop a reputation for paying well and being fair and easy to deal with, and people begin to seek you out. When the shop first opened, not a lot of people were walking in with records, but now they are. And so every week, records come through one channel or another, whether it’s a house call, a buying trip, a defunct shop’s storage unit, a walk-in trade or sale or whatever.

How have your goals changed in dealing and collecting from your beginnings as a sampling producer?

I am less concerned with my own collecting, period. And the only records I keep are the ones I really love. Ever since I started collecting seriously, I’ve felt that you can make great tracks out of records you love; there’s no need to buy records you don’t dig just because they have a sample. Of course, as far as dealing, now it is very important that I sell hundreds of dollars worth of records a day. I used to be happy if I made $100 in a week! That was just pure spending cash. Now it’s my entire income. That said, I’m doing pretty well with it.

You have often said that New York is the only place where you could do what you do. Why is that?

It’s because New York City is the intersection of the world. You’ve got international tourists, domestic tourists, a local population with above-average disposable income, and the variety of records is like no other place. That said, there are more people looking, and competition is fierce. The economy of space in New York City creates the need for boutiques: shops which in relatively little space attempt to provide a pre-selected inventory that is smaller in quantity but arguably more worthy of the consumer’s attention.

In keeping your inventory as sleek and clean as the store, where do all of these records that are near mint thirty years later come from?

Records are everywhere. They are the effects of previous lives and lifestyles, sometimes filed away without a thought or played heavily. Records are kept near mint because either the owner didn’t care about them at all or cared about them a whole lot.

Selling records in New York, how viable is it to unearth LPs at flea markets and thrift stores? In Manhattan, all boroughs, and in other major cities on the East Coast?

I really don’t think a New York store can be funded by thrift or flea market digs, and I would be surprised if anyone selling records could actually make a living doing it like that. Even the most small-time, private dealer needs to generate more stock than can be, at this point, gotten out of any one source. It is true that the fleas, thrifts, and shops are overrun with weekend warrior types who are looking to score something for eBay to fatten their wallet, or trade off to a shop like mine. That’s why I do not look at those as reliable sources of inventory. I would go to the flea markets if there were much turning up there, but I can’t possibly hit all the thrifts and charity shops all the time and still run a store. Thankfully, a lot of guys that do hit those places end up bringing stuff in to trade.

What percent of your inventory can be had in the weekend digger sense, without networking and encountering other dealers?

If you are going to run a record shop, you need a lot of stock and so you need to be buying collections yourself, constantly taking trips and tracking down leads, et cetera. You cannot rely on just a thrift shop or a flea market. I rarely bump heads with your average digger or collector type. The people I generally run into over buys are guys from other shops or [guys who] have large eBay volume rather than the guys that populate flea markets and record shows.

Is the walk-in customer at a disadvantage in New York, due to siphoned-off hold-piles for producers and high rollers? I guess records, even at a New York boutique, are a unique commodity in that dollar items are available next to high-dollar items.

As for customers, yeah, a lot of places squirrel stuff aside for their high-spending clients. Me personally, I am totally against that, and if I was going to do that I would stop paying rent on a pricey storefront and just pack up a box at home to bring to the studio or the buyer’s house or wherever, and just keep it like that. I mean, why would you pay a premium to own a store and put stuff off to the side that the average customer can’t see? Just rent an office space or a studio apartment or something! I understand why some guys do that, though, because high-end buyers these days do not want to spend time looking through records. They want them delivered on a platter. And I totally understand that—it’s just not what I do.

It’s not like I have a big space; it shouldn’t take more than an hour to get through everything and there’s always something new to check. I cater to the guy who actually wants to see different records, listen to them, and make up his own mind. I price records based on their demand, their rarity, and how good they are, not whether or not somebody’s gonna make money sampling them or comping them or other things I’ve heard out the sides of dealers’ mouths. I mean, really, some of these guys are really prima donnas—on both sides of the counter! So I would say sometimes the high rollers are at the disadvantage, because they want to be able to come down twice a year and get a special hold-pile whereas I am more into selling hot records to whoever wants them, all the time, as they come in.

What are some of the recent titles that you had to keep for yourself?

Family Circle on Sky Disc. Cedric “Im” Brooks, Im Flash Forward. Vi Redd, Birdcall.

What kinds of records sell best at Good Records? What kinds of records do you want to sell the most?

There’s no real rhyme or reason to it, just stuff that hits me a certain way. If I’m not hurting for records, I’ll keep some stuff. Sometimes I’ll bring something down in exchange.

I find that what sells the best is in constant flux. Right now, mid-range psych and prog ($40-$75) is flying. Soul is always popular. Disco as well. Jazz goes through phases, and while reggae is very hot on the Internet, it’s cooled down somewhat in the shop. Stuff like modern soul, vanity press weirdness, and random rap is almost exclusively hot on the Internet. Very hard to move in the shop. Bargain bin records are becoming increasingly popular with the casual customer as well.

I want to sell records that I don’t personally like and am worried will stick around a long time. I think I am happy with what sells—it’s just important to keep up with the trends.

Is this where online forums like Soul Strut and Waxidermy have an influence on what sells?

These sites you mentioned are very important because they sort of chart what people are really digging at the moment. It’s good to keep in mind when you’re buying and when you’re pricing, although obvious plays to trends—thinking all the kids are really into this—almost always fail. Set sale lists on these sites are also great ways to move stock. I utilize the sales forums a lot, both to sell records and advertise.

With your hip-hop beginning, how much does collector culture still overlap with DJ culture in New York?

DJ culture is almost completely irrelevant to my business at this point, what with Serato. The only DJs who shop here are either deep collectors or are looking for specific sounds for mix CDs, remixes, edits, et cetera. It’s not at all similar to how it was pre-MP3.

Running a storefront in the East Village, and selling records retail, do you think the prices on records are inflated?

Do I think prices are inflated? A little bit. It cuts both ways, though. As soon as a record goes for some money, whether that be in a shop or online, people who are selling it—especially the types that bring stuff to shops like mine asking for fifty to sixty percent of retail, or wishing to trade—will reference that price. If I feel that I can make a profit on the record, I’ll buy it, and at that point I have very little power to change the price because I have so much money already in the record.

Also, I can safely say it is much harder than it used to be to score good stock. There are a lot of guys out there doing it. With eBay, every weekend warrior is trying to buy up stuff to flip, and the overall market tightens up a bit. When you factor in the cost of records wholesale, the cost of things like travel and storage, the cost of real estate…I don’t think the prices are very inflated. Especially when you consider that eBay has absolutely ruined the price on certain records. If you went into the Sound Library in 1997 or whatever, you were likely to see $200 records that you can’t even get $100 for anymore. Not to mention stuff like the Roosevelt show and the kind of prices dudes were charging there! $200 for POZ and shit.

That’s not a dig on Sound Library either; they totally started the model that I work on. I tweaked it a bit, is all: smaller space, quicker turnover, broader stock in terms of genres. I wanted to take a little bit of the rock/alt/experimental shops and integrate that with the breakbeat and rare-groove-oriented stores. And I wanted to price things a little more according to what I was seeing online than the traditional rare groove price. Selling stuff like Headless Heroes for $75 to $100 instead of $150. That sort of thing.

You mentioned the Sound Library. Why is it that the East Village has been the city hub for record sellers in the last decade?

The East Village wasn’t always the epicenter—many of the shops used to be on the West Side. There are a few holdouts, but they’re all pretty much bad news. A-1 and Final Vinyl are the first two shops out here I can remember. I think Sound Library took a pretty big chance opening on Avenue A when they did. It was still pretty “uncolonized,” so to speak.

Having grown up in the Bay Area, and now established in New York, how do the two cities or regions compare in their musical history?

I would say that the fertile music scenes in the Bay Area provide a really rich history of local music and interest in music for a collector to take advantage of. There’s a little bit of everything out there: great soul, jazz, rap, psych, metal. Even into the ’90s, there were some major label record company offices in San Francisco, and it has always been an important market. There is a ton of independent issue out there because the scene supported a large amount of musicians.

To contrast, New York City is the genesis of so much: the jazz scene, all the major labels. The 12-inch era is basically focused here with the disco and rap releases. There is great art-rock and punk from the Downtown Scene. Of course, there also is the international stuff: Jamaican and Latin are way more plentiful here than out west.