The Valhalla of vinyl - Village Music record store, Mill Valley, California

Sunset, Feb, 1999 by Peter Fish

"I don't do change well," John Goddard says to explain why he still does what he does.

Goddard is owner of Village Music in Mill Valley, California, just north of San Francisco. In the opinion of numerous people who ought to know, Village Music is the best record store in the world. Note the terminology: record store, not Compact Disc City, not World of Cassettes. Village Music specializes in flat disks made from vinyl. In this sense, Village Music may be one of a dying breed, although not if Goddard can help it.

The world's greatest record store started out like any other record store of the 1950s and early '60s, a mom-and-pop operation where Goddard, then a teenager, worked after school. He used the job to broaden his musical tastes - "I went from Elvis Presley to Little Richard to Muddy Waters in six months" - and pay for concert tickets, and when he got out of college, he bought the place.

That was 1968. Since then, Mill Valley has changed from a countrified middle-class town with vague hippie overtones into a soigne suburb. The music world has likewise changed. The long-playing 33 1/3 and the saucy 45 have joined the venerable 78 in the graveyard of abandoned musical technology. "Records really started to fade in the 1980s," says Goddard. "Now if you're a musician you have to be on a real esoteric label or have a lot of clout to be able to release a record album."

But Village Music didn't change. It only grew more itself, as Goddard bought the stock of other record stores that had gone out of business. Step inside and you think you've fallen into the world's largest jukebox, a place that attempts to squeeze the Apollo Theater, the Grand Ole Opry, and Fillmores east and west, all into one retail space. Decorating the walls are posters and photographs and signed sheet music covers promoting everybody from Roy Acuff to Joni James to Gladys Knight.

Mostly, though, there are the records, more than 500,000 of them. For anyone older than 30, a stroll down the aisles of Village Music is a trip down musical memory lane. Over there is Patsy Cline, over here the great Dusty Springfield. The Clash coexists with the Magic of Mantovani. Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller preside in the room devoted to 78s, and playing through the speakers are Goddard's favorites: R&B royalty like James Brown, and swing kings like the Louises, Prima and Jordan.

Goddard says he isn't one of those audio purists who insist that records' superiority can be appreciated only on a $50,000 turntable. Still, he finds the sound of music on vinyl to be warmer, truer than that digitized on compact discs. "I don't like digital. It takes out a lot of lows and highs. Maybe you can't hear them, but you know they're there. To me a record gives a happier sound."

The amazingly eclectic nature of Goddard's collection has lured music fans from around the world. One such is New Waver turned rock Renaissance man Elvis Costello: he has called Village Music "maybe the greatest record-collecting store in the world." Blues giant B. B. King delivered his own praise. "The first time B. B. came into the store," Goddard recalls, "I was playing a Louis Jordan video. And I looked down and saw B. B. King sitting on the floor looking through a box of records, swinging his arms, singing along with Louis Jordan. I thought, it doesn't get any better than this."

The last time I visited Village Music, fellow customers included a cabaret singer from Connecticut who was looking for some obscure Lotte Lenya, an Australian looking for Jaco Pastorius, and a San Francisco musician looking for anything by Spike Jones. I wasn't looking for anything in particular but was just happy to go back to the time when the world revolved at 45 rpm, the universe at 33 1/3. There is something about a record, after all. The label: the rockabilly yellow of Sun Records, the sophisticated silver on black of Decca, the way Motown's map of greater Detroit spins into a rhythmic blue blur. Then the sound itself: Chet Baker or Dinah Washington or the Four Tops summoned up from out of nowhere, the needle floating over black vinyl as mysterious as the sea.

And who knows? Records might be making a comeback. The current swing revival means younger audiences are embracing Goddard's own old favorites. "My 16-year-old daughter came in a couple of weeks ago," he says, "and I had just put on a Louis Prima album. She said, 'That's really cool.' All of a sudden, I had credibility."

Village Music, 9 E. Blithedale Ave., Mill Valley, CA; (415) 388-7400.