From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
I had the pleasure of visiting Neptoon Records on Main Street for the first time last week. The place was packed with browsers, most of them young. The second thing I noticed was the sheer number of records—thousands of them everywhere you look. They are filed neatly in the store, stacked down the stairs, and they fill the basement. Owner and founder Rob Frith, tells me that he had to stop renting one of the upstairs rooms so he could use it for storage.
You can pick up a used album for as little as $1 or pay up to $1,500 for a 1960s sealed copy from a Canadian band called the Haunted. Most things will set you back between $5 and $25.
Rob bought the building around 2000 and moved his stock from the Fraser Street store that he started in 1981. At that time, he was in construction, the economy crashed, and when he was casting around for things to do, he knew he didn’t want to work for anyone, and he liked collecting vinyl. “One day I thought maybe I should open a record store.”
“People who collect are obsessive,” says Rob. He knows because he’s a collector—records, posters, menus, old contracts, buttons, photographs and concert ticket stubs.
His store is now the oldest independent record store in Vancouver. It’s survived CDs, and iTunes and Spotify.
“We hung on long enough that there was a resurgence almost 20 years ago,” says Rob. “It’s gone leaps and bounds since then.”
It started when kids wanted to be deejays and increased when they found mum and dad’s turntable and old records in the basement. Now music labels are releasing new pressings and reissues on vinyl and that’s created a whole new market.
The building also comes with a great history. Rob, it turns out, isn’t the only owner who liked collecting.
The storefront first pops up in the city directories in 1951 owned by Harold and Barbara Morgan. The Morgans lived upstairs and ran a spray paint rental business downstairs. Every year since the ‘40s the couple travelled to a different place—New Guinea, Borneo, Africa, Guatemala—and brought back souvenirs. When they retired in 1989, they turned the store into the (free) Museum of Exotic World packed it full of collectables—a stuffed alligator, butterflies, a shrunken head and hundreds of photographs—and opened it for a few hours each day.
There’s a suite upstairs that’s straight out of the 1950s with brand new appliances from that decade including a clothes dryer and a stove that was never used—it still had the instructions inside. Rob has rented the suite out to a TV show.
When the Morgans died they bequeathed their vast collection and their ashes to Alexander Lamb’s antique store at 3271 Main Street. Which as you might expect, will be the subject of a future blog.
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