The move to 8700 Georgia Ave. turned out to be more complicated than expected, says the store’s owner, Johnson Lee. He’d planned to reopen the shop last month, but he says he didn’t realize he needed to obtain a building permit from Montgomery County to open a retail operation in the building’s basement.

The space was previously occupied by Hearts & Homes for Youth, a nonprofit now headquartered in Burtonsville. In Montgomery County, a commercial change of use requires a new building permit.

“When you have a change of use at the place, you have to really do a lot more, and think about fulfilling requirements that you just may not know about,” Lee says, “and that is a risk.”

While Lee scrambles to meet county requirements, Joe’s Record Paradise remains closed. Most challenging, he says, is missing out on annual vinyl event Record Store Day this weekend.

“Not having that nice chunk from Record Store Day I was going to use to pay off things” is difficult, Lee says. He adds that he’s been selling off his personal record collection to make ends meet.

Lee says he’s especially concerned about retaining staff during the transition. “I just want to be able to get my employees taken care of,” the store owner says.

The GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $5,000 as of Friday morning.

Photo by Flickr user David Hilowitz used under a Creative Commons license.

That’s according to an update owner Bill Daly posted on the shop’s Facebook page Thursday. Daly says he is looking into a new location for the record store because of poor conditions at 2116 18th St. NW.

“There have been issues with our building that have progressively gotten worse that I will not elaborate on,” Daly writes. “I work very long hours in this space and it has come to light that some of the existing problems are affecting my health.”

The proprietor says he recently turned down a long-term extension on Crooked Beat’s lease because of the building’s issues. “… even with efforts to remedy the problems with this old building, the attempted repairs have not been sufficient and the issues continue to persist,” Daly writes.

Crooked Beat Records, which also runs a record label by the same name, was once one of four record stores in Adams Morgan. Neighbors Red Onion Records and Joint Custody both moved to U Street NW. Smash Records still operates on 18th Street, less than two blocks north of Crooked Beat.

According to his Facebook post, the shop owner is considering a move to H Street NE, or possibly Northern Virginia if he can’t find affordable space in the District.

Daly did not immediately return a request for comment.

Top photo by Flickr user Rick Phillips used under a Creative Commons license.

But today, Lee says, he signs a new lease at 8700 Georgia Ave., just a 10-minute walk from the store’s current location and the Silver Spring Metro station.

Joe’s will begin moving its stock to the new spot in mid-February, and Lee expects to open by March 1. (He says he’s hoping for the last weekend in February, assuming he doesn’t run into logistical problems.)

The 42-year-old business is just the latest local record shop to find new digs. Recently D.C.’s Red Onion mosied over to U Street NW, and the Falls Church location of CD Cellar (which is co-owned by my husband) relocated to a different space nearby.

One advantage of Joe’s new home, Lee says, is that it comes with more storage space — “so it won’t look as messy.”

Photo by Flickr user Orin Zebest used under a Creative Commons license.

On Dec. 31, the shop relocated its flagship location in Falls Church from a small storefront on West Broad Street to a larger and more Metro-accessible spot at 105 Park Ave.

“The Falls Church shop had expanded beyond a manageable size,” says David Schlank, who co-owns the store with Dave Giese, one of its founders. “We wanted something easier to handle. The old space was three rooms on two floors. The new space is one big room.”

The change puts CD Cellar in good company with other Falls Church musical landmarks. Its new neighbors include guitar store Action Music, audio repair shop HiFi Heaven and Cue Recording Studios.

The transition is not without its setbacks, however. Schlank and Giese are phasing out the store’s second location in Arlington, Virginia, which closes for good on Jan. 15.

“We didn’t necessarily want to close the Arlington store, but rent was getting higher and higher, and it didn’t make sense to keep it going,” says Schlank, 42. “It’s bittersweet, because it really is a cool store. The guys who work there really put a lot of effort into it and made it a destination.”

Despite this, Schlank has no regrets. “Combining the stores will be a very positive change, and so far the response from people has been terrific,” says the Silver Spring resident. “For us, there is no downside.” (Other D.C.-area record stores have been making adjustments recently: D.C.’s Red Onion relocated to a U Street NW location; Joe’s Record Paradise plans to move in the coming months; Frederick’s Vinyl Acres overcame a disastrous flood with some fundraising help.)

Employees of the Arlington shop will host a two-day goodbye concert at the store this weekend, featuring electronic duo Protect-U, garage group Foul Swoops and guitarist Anthony Pirog, among others.

CD Cellar opened in Falls Church in the summer of 1992, when Giese and another local record store employee decided to open their own shop. Schlank came on board two years later while studying at George Mason University and looking for a part-time gig. He eventually became a business partner.

Over time, CD Cellar grew into a respected regional source for new and used music, as well as the occasional in-store performance. (Despite the “CD” in its name, the shop sells vinyl records and DVDs, too.) Schlank credits CD Cellar’s longevity to the flexibility of its stock.

“We’re predominantly a used shop, which means we’re able to adjust to the actual market value of the products we carry pretty quickly,” Schlank says. “That kind of nimbleness eludes stores that sell only new product.”

“We’re part of the landscape now,” Schlank says, “and we expect to be here for years to come.”

CD Cellar hosts two goodbye shows in its Arlington location Jan. 8 and 9. See Facebook for details.

Disclosure: David Schlank is married to Ally Schweitzer, the editor of WAMU 88.5’s Bandwidth. Schweitzer did not edit this story.

Last month, Portlandia co-creator Fred Armisen reportedly sang the praises of D.C. label Dischord Records during a taping of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. A few years back, he dropped references to D.C.’s punk scene on Portlandia.

Now the ex-Saturday Night Live cast member is showing once more that his love for the nation’s capital is true: The actor is scheduled to appear Friday at Red Onion Records in D.C.

According to Red Onion’s Facebook event, store staff have “no idea” what Armisen plans to do during his lunchtime appearance, “but it will be interesting.”

Drag City Records, which organized the event, doesn’t know exactly what Armisen has in mind, either. But label rep Kathryn Wilson says the actor’s D.C. appearance might resemble what he did in October at Santa Cruz shop Streetlight Records: songs from his fake soft-rock band The Blue Jean Committee (from Documentary Now) as well as other phony ensembles he’s invented in the past.

Wilson says Armisen will probably wind up doing a “super-minimal” set with either an acoustic or electric guitar at the U Street shop.

Red Onion owner Josh Harkavy says Drag City pitched him the Armisen in-store show last week. “I responded ‘heck yeah’ as quickly as possible,” he says.

Top image via YouTube.

But that was the burden foisted upon Martha Hull and her husband, Bob Berberich. In late September, their basement record store in Frederick, Maryland, was overcome by floodwaters brought on by a massive storm.

“We’ve been in the building for about two years and we, personally, have not had any flooding issues,” says Hull, who opened Vinyl Acres with Berberich in 2013. “We have heard that there have been some floods in the past — last time about four years ago, but nothing on this scale.”

The storm on Tuesday, Sept. 29, dumped about five inches of rain on downtown Frederick, impacting numerous stores along the city’s popular commercial strip. But Vinyl Acres got hit particularly hard. Most of the record shop’s merchandise was either damaged or destroyed.

“The water on Patrick Street was so deep that our stairwell just filled up, and the force of that six feet of water just pushed the door right in,” says Hull. “The water hit like a tidal wave, knocking over two 300-pound glass display cases in addition to a whole lot of lighter stuff.”

The store owners can’t put a dollar amount on their losses. They say it’s tough to gauge because the value of used vinyl and CDs lands somewhere between their purchase price and whatever sale price they can get. But it was immediately apparent that the flood had dealt a mighty blow.

Then the shop owners’ luck kicked in.

Hull and Berberich have deep roots in the Washington, D.C., music scene. Hull fronted local legends The Slickee Boys for the band’s first two years, later playing with D.Ceats, Steady Jobs and The Dynettes. Berberich played with The Hangmen, Grin and The Rosslyn Mountain Boys, among others, and he still plays music today. The Slickee Boys, in particular, still have a community of committed fans.

After the flood, the Downtown Frederick Partnership started a GoFundMe page to solicit donations for Vinyl Acres. In just a day, the shop had raised nearly $6,000 for its recovery fund, with a big chunk from folks involved in the regional punk and rock scenes.

Music filmmaker Jeff Krulik, Old Indian frontman Cory Springirth, Danny Gatton biopic director Virginia Quesada, Kevin Longendyke from The Ar-Kaics and Dig! Records and Vintage, Punk the Capital co-creator James Schneider, Mobius Records owner Dempsey Hamilton, WHFS documentarian Jay Schlossberg and ex-Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty were among the donors.

Canty says helping Vinyl Acres was a no-brainer. He relishes traveling from D.C. to buy records in the shop’s neighborhood.

“Frederick is a record-buying Mecca,” Canty says.

A little more than two weeks after the campaign launched, Vinyl Acres reopened. It rounded up some local bands and hosted a reopening party Oct. 17.

Hull calls the GoFundMe campaign “something we never would have thought of ourselves, and it has been like a miracle.” So far, the ongoing effort has raised more than $10,000 with donations from 176 people.

Without the outpouring of help, Vinyl Acres might have seen its last sale.

“This, and an astonishing amount of support, manpower, donations of supplies and salvage equipment — plus actual records — are already what has prevented us from closing for good,” Hull says. “We are so grateful and overwhelmed we can’t even pull together a proper expression at this point.”

Vinyl Acres’ GoFundMe campaign is still accepting donations. On Oct. 30, JoJo Restaurant & Tap House plans to host a benefit for both the record store and Whidden Willow, a Frederick boutique damaged in the flood.

Ally Schweitzer contributed to this report. 

Actor Colin Hanks — Tom’s son — loved Tower so much, he spent seven years making a documentary about the chain. It’s a love letter to Tower Records called All Things Must Pass.

“Tower sort of helped pave the way for your identity,” Hanks says. “For lack of a better phrase, music makes people, sometimes, where you sort of latch on to music as a way of identifying yourself or your tribe. I got that at Tower Records.”

In Hanks’ documentary, you see founder Russ Solomon and his innermost circle — many of whom were there when Tower was founded in California — having a ball building this thing together.

Everyone, from clerks to customers, could feel those good vibrations. During its flush years, Tower was a pilgrimage place for music fanatics — even for the world’s biggest stars. Elton John talked to Hanks about how he’d go into one of the Los Angeles stores every week to buy stacks of new releases.

“Tuesday mornings, I would be at Tower Records,” John says in the film. “And it was a ritual, and it was a ritual I loved. I mean, Tower Records had everything. Those people knew their stuff. They were really on their ball. I mean, they just weren’t employees that happened to work at a music store. They were devotees of music.”

Solomon let them decide what each store stocked, Hanks says.

“New Orleans had a huge heritage music section; Nashville had a gigantic country section,” he says. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom and pop record stores, you know? Although they were all under the same banner, the same name, the same yellow-and-red signage, each one was run individually by the people in the stores: the clerks, the buyers for each individual store, the art department from each individual store. Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.”

Tower started out as an offshoot of Solomon’s father’s drugstore in Sacramento, Calif. He tells Hanks how he got his friends and relatives to help him get off the ground.

“Luckily, my cousin Ross was a builder — electrical, carpentry,” Solomon says in the documentary. “And so he volunteered, ‘Oh, I’ll go down and fix it up, put some lighting in there, put a new floor in, and paint it.’ And that was it. He went in and did it.”

Solomon’s California inner circle eventually became some of Tower’s top brass, and that family atmosphere spread as the company expanded. Jason Sumney started out as a clerk at Tower’s store at 4th and Broadway in New York before moving into its regional operations.

“Never in my life before, and probably never again, will I experience anything like that,” Sumney says. “Everybody got along, and it was such an amazing vibe. Every day was fun, you know? Even the downs were fun.”

Over the years, Tower grew and grew. It became a multinational empire, with stores and licensees from London to Buenos Aires to Tokyo. But in 2006, Tower declared bankruptcy.

Ed Christman has been reporting on music retailers for Billboard magazine for 26 years. “It took eight or nine years to unfold,” Christman says. “The things that proved to be a mistake, in hindsight, occurred in 1998.”

Christman says that Tower wasn’t alone in the hunger to expand that eventually proved to be its undoing.

“There was at least 10 or 15 large chains that were racing to be the dominant force in music, and Tower decided to take on $110 million in debt,” Christman says. “So they did a bond offering, and they were going to use that debt to drive global expansion. It was just the mood of the day — it was grow and go.”

Tower’s competitors weren’t just other record stores. Big-box outlets like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy wanted music fans’ dollars, too. But they discounted CD prices drastically to get customers through their doors, in hopes that they’d also pile things like clothes, pet food, batteries and TVs into their shopping baskets.

“What they did was they looked at the basket — was the basket profitable?” Christman says. “So if there was a lot of other items in there, they didn’t care if it was music or not. Whereas at the record store, Tower Records, they needed everything in the basket to be profitable.”

Tower couldn’t afford to discount CDs much. And Tower couldn’t persuade consumers to spend somewhere between $12 and $19 for an album. Solomon couldn’t persuade the labels to lower their prices or start selling CD singles.

By then, music fans had already started turning to other options, from file-sharing sites like Napster to download stores like iTunes.

Hanks contends that Tower started acting as if it was just too big to fail.

“Tower, in almost 40 years, had always grown,” Hanks says. “It had always made money. It had never lost money. … Well, I think there was a lot of stuff that Tower did not see coming.”

You can hear that in a 1994 promotional video from Russ Solomon, in which Solomon says: “As for the whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday, that’s for sure. But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection — and our CD inventory, for that matter — it’s going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.”

Solomon and Tower had their critics, none of whom are in Hanks’ documentary. In the 1990s, for example, Tower — along with other megachains like HMV and Virgin — was often accused of putting independent mom and pop music retailers out of business. But for Hanks, making this film was a chance to revisit a time and experience that molded him.

“Tower was one of those places. It was special, it was unique,” he says. “You forged a connection with it, whether you knew it or not. I didn’t know it when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I started making this project that I realized just how informative it was for me when I was growing up. And it’s like that for a lot of people.”

Even though it’s been nearly a decade since Tower closed its doors, its memory still burns bright for fans whose musical tastes were shaped below those yellow-and-red signs.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Record-making is a specialized business. Not many vinyl-pressing plants exist in the United States these days: Reports estimate that there are between 12 and 20 facilities making records stateside. But it’s not enough. Existing plants — including ones located overseas — can’t keep up with soaring demand for new vinyl.

That’s why Northern Virginia company Furnace MFG is planning to open its own pressing plant.

Based in Merrifield in Fairfax County, Furnace MFG has been in business since 1996, when it began cranking out large numbers of CDs and DVDs for various clients. Later on the company got into the vinyl business, which proved to be lucrative. It started taking vinyl orders and sending them to pressing plants in Europe, handling packaging and shipping from its Virginia facility. Furnace’s sales doubled, according to Virginia Business magazine.

Furnace still didn’t manufacture its own records, though. Even with annual revenue reportedly in the multimillions, the company deemed the equipment too expensive. A new press could cost as much as $500,000, Furnace president and CEO Eric Astor told the New York Times in 2013.

But in February, Astor says, he got his big break. He’d been in touch with a man in Mexico whose family had purchased a number of presses to use in their plastics business. The man initially wanted to start his own pressing operation, but decided it was too big a job. So Astor bought the machines and sent some of his employees to pick them up from Mexico City. Retrieving the presses was no small task, Astor says.

“It was quite an adventure, like a telenovela, if you will,” says the business owner. One of the men helping his staff move the presses out of their facilities armed himself with a machete to scare away squatters, he says, and Furnace employees were encouraged to lay low to deflect attention in public.

“It was obvious [that] gringos were in town taking equipment out of the country,” Astor says. “We had to shut down streets, and there was all kinds of commotion… We really didn’t think the machines would make their way to the U.S…. It was kind of a crapshoot.”

But he says it was worth the trouble because usable, affordable record presses are hard to find. It could be a big boon for his business, too. Word of a new American pressing plant should relieve the many musicians and record labels frustrated by existing facilities’ long wait times, caused by relentless demand at a limited number of plants.

Furnace MFG hasn’t decided on a location for the facility, Astor says, and that might take a while. He wants to buy a building — concerned about the risk of installing more than $2 million in equipment in a leased space — and he wants to stay close to Merrifield, because he’d like to keep the skilled staff he already has.

Astor estimates that getting the plant off the ground will cost several million dollars overall, and could take at least a year or longer, especially considering the level of technical savvy required.

“This is kind of an art form,” Astor says. “You really need to know the machines. You need to know the squeals and squeaks and hisses and know what they mean. Because there’s no manual for any of this stuff.”

Modified image by Flickr user [a.d.] used under a Creative Commons license.

For more than 25 years, Tuesday has been the standard release day for new albums in America — a tradition Keith Caulfield, co-director of charts at Billboard, says had a lot to do with shipping in the pre-digital era.

“One particular retailer might get that album on, say, Monday morning before they open,” Caulfield says. “And they can have it on their shelf. Boom, great! So, if you walk in and you want Michael Jackson’s new Bad album, they will have it.”

“However,” he continues, “a store a couple blocks down the road may have not got their shipment.” That store couldn’t do anything but wait until it showed up.

In 1989, the recording industry settled on Tuesday as the day every retailer could start selling new releases at the same time — but that was just in the U.S. Albums came out on Mondays in the U.K. and Canada, Fridays in Australia and Germany. Recently, the industry decided it needed a global standard.

“In the digital world, you can’t make consumers wait,” says Adrian Strain, head of communications for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a trade group representing over 1,300 record labels worldwide.

Under the old system, Strain says, a fan in Britain could buy a new album on Monday and upload it — so her friend in Australia could listen before it came out there on Friday.

Strain says “New Music Fridays,” the nickname for the new global release schedule, “should give less reason for those people who can’t get the new release legally to go to illegal sites.”

The new release date isn’t just popular with industry officials. The IFPI asked consumers across eight countries when they would like to get new music. Of those who expressed an opinion, 68 percent said Friday or Saturday.

Still, album sales have been declining for years. Nielsen SoundScan just released its midyear report, and total album sales are down 4 percent over the same period last year. Total album consumption was up, thanks in part to the growth in music streaming services.

So, it might not seem to really matter when albums come out. But it does to the people who still sell them, like those at Amoeba Music in Hollywood, which calls itself the world’s largest independent record store. Co-founder Marc Weinstein says he was not consulted about the new global album release day.

“It’s not something we would choose to have happen,” Weinstein says. “I mean, it’s a logistic nightmare on a lot of levels.”

Weinstein explains that Amoeba now has to change its ad schedule, weekend staffing and live in-store performances, which were typically held when albums came out on Tuesdays.

“It gave us an opportunity to get a bump in the middle of the week when a lot of people would come in on a Tuesday, which normally wouldn’t be a busy day,” he says.

With many stores already struggling to survive, “this is gonna be perceived as kind of another nail in the coffin for brick-and-mortar retail, and it’s kind of sad that no one takes any of that into account when they make these kind of fundamental changes in the way things work,” Weinstein says.

Adrian Strain says not everyone will be happy with such a big change — but that the industry can only follow what it thinks the music fan wants.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Lee says he found out today that the store’s landlord won’t be renewing its lease come March 2016. He doesn’t know yet where the shop will move — it’s too early to guess — but he has his eye on Plaza del Mercado, the Aspen Hill shopping center where Joe’s operated in the 1980s. Lee says he can’t overlook the plaza’s convenience.

“I live literally one minute from that location,” Lee says.

Lee — son of original owner Joe Lee — estimates that Joe’s Record Paradise has moved six times, usually in search of cheaper storefronts. Its current spot on Georgia Avenue is nested within an increasingly upscale area that’s seen new restaurants open up in the last several years.

Lee says he lucked out with the roomy, 6,000 square foot location in Silver Spring, but when his store’s six-year tenancy comes to an end next year, he anticipates having to move into a tighter space.

“My thought is no matter where we go, we’re going to have to pare down a bit,” Lee says.

What does that mean? Slashed prices. Not bad news for loyal record buyers.

“The less stuff I have to carry over, the better,” Lee says.

The business owner says if he moves the shop to Plaza del Mercado, it could help bring life to the declining Aspen Hill shopping center pocked with vacant storefronts.

“I’m wondering if I can tempt them not with tons of money, but with more fame for the plaza,” Lee says.

The news of Joe’s relocation arrives just one day after D.C. shop Red Onion Records announced it’s moving to U Street NW.

Photo by Flickr user PauliCarmody used under a Creative Commons license.