It was the holy grail of record stores..Real Groovy in Auckland. It was time for a visit. I hadn't been in a few years and found out it had moved to the side of Victoria Street. Dad was keen for a visit and we caught the train in from Sturges Road. It took about 40 minutes and I got nap time, but it meant Dad wouldn't get all stressed about trying to find a park.
This time we had to navigate some escalators upwards toward the glowing neon signs, old jukeboxes, and new record cleaning machines, and there it was, a record collectors paradise where you flicked and browsed to your hearts content. The 12 inch vinyl LPs were all there face out in their shiny mint plastic shrink wrappers, some selling for up to $79.95, there was a new K-pop section, there were still CDs and DVDs, but I was heading for something Queen Street didn't really have anymore - books.
For the audio-phile, you'd think maybe they'd have audio books as well, but no, its those real eye candy art type books, manga, and musicians biographies and discographies. There's a selection of orange Penguin classics of course - the usual suspects - 1984, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Art of War, Catch 22...and food porn like Snoop Doggy Dog's cookbook, Anthony Bourdain's recipes, and what kind of booze to drink with your gourmet meal.
And then on the other side are those games and knick nacks that seem drug-induced. Old hippies never die, plus they have all got into the merch. If you have disposable income, what better way to spend it than on some monogrammed hoodie with the name of your favourite band?
Dad flicked through the 45s that old timers were constantly feeding into Real Groovy's inventory, but he came out empty handed and declared he'd seen them all before. I was after maybe a CD of Selena, since my last purge where all my CDs disappeared from my last giveaway. But Selena was nowhere to be found, or maybe I didn't look hard enough - is she under Pop/Rock, Spanish, or is there some Latino section hiding away somewhere under World music?
Sometimes it's just sheer luck. She wasn't there but I decided what I was really after was Jagged Little Pill, as last time I had Alanis on cassette and played it to death back in the 90s, and I thought it was high time I revisited her again, even though she's made many albums since, it would be nice to have her on CD. You can't buy CDs from the Warehouse anymore, new stock is the sole domain of JB Hi-fi and you're lucky if there's one in your area. New CDs seem to still sell for $29.95..the same amount they were back in the 90s.
So a second hand CD made into my bag along with a hardback copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The cashier, who looked young, approved of my purchase and declared he'd read it and was beautifully written... but I didn't tell him I'd read it about ten times already and it was engraved on my brain.
Dad put it on his card that was still racking up points and bought some blank CDs so he could rip/burn more tracks, despite all this being quite illegal, like photocopying entire books. I started reading The Bell Jar back on the train and was instantly transported back to the New York summer of 1953 where Esther Greenwood was stuck in her Madison Avenue internship when she really just wanted to be a poet.
We dropped into Unity and Marbecks on the way back too, where I picked up Cranberries No Need To Argue. I was going to have to process my latest work break-up somehow, and singing 'Disappointment' 'Empty' 'Zombie' and 'Daffodil Lament' was probably for me the way forward. I had quite forgotten how painful it had been to be rejected and ditched by so-called high school friends at a Cranberries concert back in the 90s.
We all live in our own time warps and Dad would always point out some old train fact along the way where this and that used to be in Auckland's ever-changing geography. I ate gummy worms and Dad had a break and a kit kat. As long as we stayed on track it was fine, there were no Anna Karenina moments and so we rode the Western Line all the way back home.
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