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.

Earlier this month, Light in the Attic released This Record Belongs To______, a compilation featuring Harry Nilsson, the Pointer Sisters, Donovan and others. It was inspired by a mix DJ that music supervisor Zach Cowie often gave his friends when they had children. Though available in all formats, the vinyl edition of This Record Belongs To_____ comes with a storybook from illustrator Jess Rotter. The label also partnered with Third Man Records to create a special mini turntable.

Many independent labels are engaged in a hearts and minds approach to getting young listeners to embrace it amidst the well-publicized vinyl resurgence. It’s a murky task for record companies — figuring out what they can do to tap into the purchasing power of a generation unaccustomed to paying for music, especially in physical formats.

In anticipation of Record Store Day’s Black Friday event, Ducker spoke with representatives from three labels about how their companies steer listeners to vinyl. Light in the Attic is reissue-focused and best known for making Rodriguez‘s music more accessible. Sub Pop helped lead both the grunge explosion of the 1990s and the mainstreaming of indie rock. Kompakt is the long-running Cologne, Germany dance-music outfit that’s been essential in the global house and techno communities. Each has a long history of embracing the format, and a distinct, well-informed perspective on how to help the next generation embrace turntables.

MATT SULLIVAN, CO-OWNER & FOUNDER AT LIGHT IN THE ATTIC

In developing the This Record Belongs To______ project, why was it essential that vinyl be a central part of it?

I feel it’s the best way to listen to music. It’s where you’re focused. It’s where it’s about the music and not background music. It just takes it so much deeper, regardless if it’s techno music or pop music or folk music. For me, there’s something about the vinyl experience that’s by far the most rewarding experience in terms of format. I don’t think anything comes close. I like CDs and I like digital music, but it just doesn’t have the longevity or timeless that vinyl does.

What do you make of young listeners, who don’t have the nostalgia for their parents’ or older siblings’ record collections, getting into buying music on vinyl?

It is a response to the internet. The internet can feel very soulless, especially when dealing with music. There are kids who are online, in their teens and twenties, they are intrigued by something that has a little bit more life to it and longevity and isn’t perfect. There’s something really nice about that, it’s warm and it’s natural. That would be my guess. Often people will send us ideas to reissue something and usually it starts with “Here’s an mp3 …” Or it’s a Dropbox link or a YouTube link. A number of times I’ll click it and I’ll listen to it and I’m usually listening to it on headphones while I’m working. There have been occasions where I’ll write back, “It was okay, but I don’t think it’s really great for us,” then maybe a year later or five years later or a day later, I’m in a record store and I see a copy, and if it’s reasonably priced, I might just buy the record. Then I bring it home and start listening to it on vinyl, and it’s just a different thing. I know how ridiculous that sounds. I want to put the record on and I want to be transfixed. It’s like walls go up and you’re really listening to this thing and it sucks you in. It’s such a beautiful thing to me.

As someone who runs a record label and makes a living off this, how do you cultivate in a new generation of young music consumers the desire to buy music on vinyl so they can hopefully have similar experiences?

A lot of it is giving context to it. We really try hard to reissue things that to our ears are timeless. Maybe it’s a record made 10 years ago, maybe it’s a record made 50 years ago, but it’s something that we feel isn’t about some current trend and it’s something that people are going to care about, and it’s going to hold up in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, or 100 hundreds. That to me is important. Why should someone care about Donnie & Joe Emerson or Rodriguez or Big Boys in 2015? It’s explaining that the Big Boys were one of the first skate-punk bands, or that Donnie is an incredible songwriter and vocalist and the record is such a genuine piece of music regardless of what genre of music you like. That stuff is really hard. Sometimes the general public doesn’t get it, and other times they do. Sometimes we’re really surprised that people got it even better than we thought. Day to day, it’s not about reaching the collector. We feel these records or music files or whatever it is, have significance now, so people should give it a chance, listen to it.

What percentage of your sales is vinyl?

It depends on the release. If we have something like Rodriguez or Black Angels, it’s a little different, because those projects might have more CDs or might have more digital. As a whole, I would say for sales of this year, vinyl’s got to be 60 to 70 percent. We also distribute over 50 other record labels, primarily reissue labels, and that stuff is primarily all vinyl. I wouldn’t be surprised if our non-Light in the Attic distributing catalog sales are 90 percent vinyl.

Are those numbers still going up right now?

Sadly the vinyl market it totally oversaturated, and primarily with crap. You got all these major labels printing dollar records and they’re $23.99 in the stores. And they have no extra stuff; there’s no bonus tracks, there’s not even nice gatefold jackets, there’s no liner notes, there’s no involving the artist. It’s just a quick buck off of what they see as a fad. I mean, I love Billy Joel, but I can go buy a Billy Joel record for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars used that’s nicer than the reissue. Unfortunately that’s making it really difficult for people like us. Eventually things will shift back to maybe what they were years ago is my guess.

How does that trend affect you?

Say Amoeba, or any independent record store, only has so much money to buy product, only has so much stock they can have on hand, and they only have so much space. The sad exploitation of Record Store Day, of people just throwing out crap, is another unfortunate piece of the puzzle. It’s becoming a very oversaturated market. It’s really a shame. The worst part is that it’s made the production of vinyl a nightmare. We used to be able to get a record out quick. We’ve had records in the last year where a reprint has taken nine months. It’s insane. You work so hard to get this out there and build up interest on it, and then they sell out and you go for a reprint, but by the time you get those records, can you even sell them? And that’s all because the plants are printing these one-dollar records. There are plants starting up now who don’t even want to take accounts from major labels, because they don’t want to deal with it. We work with a lot of major labels and license stuff, and they’re trying to make a living too, but it’s quickly suffocating the entire system.

In 2015 it’s hard being an artist, it’s hard being a record label, it’s hard being a record store, it’s hard being a music writer. People just devalue music so much, it’s kind of amazing that vinyl is one of the last formats where at least most people care.

So what do you do when this trend dies out and things re-equalize?

We’ll be fine. In 2002 when I started the label, I co-released with Vampi Soul a reissue of the Last Poets’ second album. We probably printed a thousand or two thousand. We’ll survive. We are also widening our reach. We do a lot of film and TV licensing, working with outside composers on creating music for ads for TV and film stuff. There are other revenue streams out there, we just have to get more creative in finding them.

Would you suggest that other labels not put too much stock in their vinyl sales?

Yeah. You’ve got to take it as it comes. I would say eight months, definitely 12 months ago, it didn’t feel like the market was so oversaturated. So who knows where it’s going to be in a year.

Do you feel like consumers are frustrated?

I mean, I’m a consumer, I’m frustrated.

This is a huge problem that people are spending million of dollars trying to figure out. What is your company doing to try to make that emotional switch and get people to see a monetary value in music?

It might sound naive or cliché, but it’s not releasing a hundred records a year and hoping that one hits. It’s spending more time on things and putting quality into the world. If someone’s 12, 13, 14, 20, whatever, 50, 70 yearsold, that person may not know who Lewis is, or what Cubist Blues is, or Alan Vega, or Alex Chilton. It’s our job and responsibility to educate people about who these artists are, why they’re important, why anyone should care. It’s getting creative with it and trying not to preach to people and scream at people. It’s a constant struggle for anyone these days trying to do something creative and with some backbone.

CHRIS JACOBS, GENERAL MANAGER AT SUB POP

How does Sub Pop develop its approach to the vinyl market?

We try to be responsive or attentive to how things are selling and not make silly decisions so we’re not sitting on a ton of vinyl, or of any format. But in terms of market analysis, we don’t really do that. Our commitment or continued long-term participation to putting out vinyl records is largely based on our own emotional connection. Many of us who have been here for a while came of age listening to records even before the resurgence of vinyl that has happened over the course of the past five or six years. I talk to a lot of people I work with about this, but vinyl is freighted with this memory of the way you would listen to music. It’s less about what people talk about with the warmth or audio qualities of vinyl. It’s just about attention. If you can only fit 22 minutes of music of a side of vinyl, you’re doing little else during that time, and that’s kind of nice. So it’s definitely an emotional connection.

You talked about the people who work with you that grew up listening to vinyl, but what about your interns or the younger people you hire? Are you doing anything to actively cultivate an interest in vinyl for people like them?

We definitely have an interest in encouraging that and paying attention to what is happening with younger people now. We spend some time talking to those folks about how they’re participating or listening to music, and it’s super encouraging that kids who are in our office are getting together and listening to records together.

Where does their emotional connection come from? Is it just because they’ve heard enough through the years people our age and older fetishizing vinyl?

Some of it might be that, a singed nostalgia. But the talks that I’ve had with those kids, it’s kind of what you’d expected. They’re stoked about having a big, palpable, demonstrable connection to the bands that they really give a s*** about. They’re listening to music primarily through all the means that you would expect — streaming music, YouTube, or whatever — but the stuff they buy on vinyl, they have a bigger fan connection to. It’s the same way that you keep books around that you’ve read. It’s less because you might read it again, and more because it’s a demonstration of who you are. And I think kids are doing that with our records as well.

It’s an affirmation to themselves and to others of what they care about.

Yeah.

When I was growing up, mainly buying music in the 1990s, it was more about how many CDs you owned — especially to show that I really cared about a certain artist. So it’s interesting that now to show you really care about music, you carefully select which vinyl albums to represent it.

Yeah, you used to show you’re so invested in music that you’re willing to make moving a really terrible inconvenience. That’s how much I love music, it’s going to be awful every time I move.

Do you think younger listeners still think about their devotion in terms of quantity?

My sense is that it doesn’t seem to be that way. The notion of having an exhaustive music collection on CD or vinyl, I’m not getting that hint off of those kids. Because [digital] is so convenient. You can pretty much listen to anything you want from the history of recorded music, so the necessity to have everything at a room in your house or apartment isn’t there. I get the sense that’s less important than to be like, “I have this version of the Father John Misty album.” It seems like it’s more analogous to T-shirts, or whatever.

With Sub Pop’s take on selling vinyl, is it like, “Well, I guess this is selling, so I guess we’re going to make more of it,” or are you doing anything to push people in the direction of vinyl?

Sure. If there are enough people who are interested in buying some elaborate vinyl version of the record, like the Beach House record we did with the red velvet sleeve, and we do enough of those, it allows us certain indulgences. It appeals to our aesthetics, which I think are pretty common. You play to the strengths of the format, and what people like about it is its physicality and it’s bigness and it’s realness. It’s an opportunity to do more with those attributes.

When you do something like a Beach House velvet sleeve, do you get a sense that it’s Beach House fans who are buying it, or is it vinyl collectors who are on the lookout for anything rare or different.

It’s a mix. There are definitely vinyl collectors in there. We do this thing called the Loser Edition — which is the first pressing that is available through our online store, the record stores we sell directly to, and through the band — that is a different color. Our intent with that is that it’s all sold out on release day. We’re playing to people’s interest in those short runs and trying to encourage that participation. When I was in college before I ever got a job at Sub Pop, I was a subscriber to the Sub Pop Singles Club and one of the cool things about that was these limited runs of colored vinyl singles. Some of it is feeding this collector mentality, or this minor OCD that goes along with any form of collecting. Some of it is just because that was super cool to us when we were first buying records.

Are you doing vinyl for every Sub Pop release these days?

Now we do. Ten years ago we’d have to have a conversation about every record and figure out if it was going to be viable on vinyl, which is such a bulls*** tealeaf reading kind of process. That was when LPs were less expensive to buy in a record store than CDs, even though they were more expensive to make. It took a little while for us to get to the point where we were like, “Oh wait, we should probably make sure we’re not losing money on these records now that sales are picking up.”

Was there one release that turned it around and you realized what the potential was with this format?

I don’t remember any one particular release. It’s been a gradual shift. The stuff that led was the stuff that you expect, which was selling well in other formats anyway — the early Shins records and Iron & Wine records. A lot of that stuff was doing well on LP, even back then. It’s crazy now, our pre-order sales on our online store, the vast majority are on vinyl for any release. It used to be that during that pre-release period, we’d sell 30 percent LPs and the rest were CDs. Then it got to be half and half, and now 95 to 98 percent of the pre-release sales are LPs. And that’s across the board, for every release.

So you don’t do any market analysis, it’s all feeling?

There’s no reliably scientific market analysis. It’s more anecdotal. You talk to people at record stores and see where their heads are at. A real good indicator to me about how that stuff is going is a chain like Newbury Comics, where we continue to do exclusive color vinyl runs for those guys, because they’ll buy enough to make it viable. Those guys are pretty smart about what they’re willing to go out on a limb for, and they’re continuing to do that.

Do you think it’s important for people to listen to music on vinyl? Is that something worth cultivating?

I’m hopeful that people will, and not because of any inherent sound quality stuff, but because it’s carving out a space where you’re only paying attention to music. I think that’s important, obviously for self-interested reasons because I work for a record label, but because my relationship with music has been real valuable to me and I hope that people who are interested in it now have that same type of relationship.

JON BERRY, ARTIST/LABEL MANAGER AT KOMPAKT

Over the years Kompakt has maintained a commitment to vinyl, but right now, what percentage of your sales comes from that format?

Vinyl still remains a primary focus of our day-to-day business. We still feel like it’s a deeply intrinsic part of what we do. Of course the margins have dropped significantly. Vinyl sales account for approximately 20 to 30 percent of our annual sales turnover as a label, and also as a distributor. As a distributor we handle about 80 labels worldwide, and much of that is vinyl distribution.

Is that number going up or down?

It’s been stable through the last few years. I’ve been with the company for about 10 years. There was a steady decline happening due to piracy, there were also issues surrounding too much product in the market with a lot of distributors being irresponsible and signing on too many labels. So what we saw was this over-influx of vinyl in the market around 2006, which led to a few distribution bankruptcies, unfortunately. We made it through it, thankfully, and what we saw was a severe drop in sales. People, including ourselves, were used to selling between 2000 and 5000 copies [of a single] — now we’ll be happy if we do 500.

Does everything on Kompakt get a vinyl release or are you selective about that?

I’d say 90 percent of our releases come out on vinyl. We try to put as much as we can out on vinyl. Keep in mind that the foundation of Kompakt was built from a record store and we still have a record store in Cologne. So it’s really important to us that when we have a record, it is released on vinyl. A lot of the artists we work with demand that. It’s just one of those fundamental policies that we have, in a sense. Since plants are running at capacity, there are huge delays happening now with manufacturing vinyl. We have to think three, four or five months ahead at times about releases, and with the spontaneity of dance music, a house or techno producer typically doesn’t want to be waiting four to six weeks for a release to come out. We’ll have records come that we’ll just have to get out there, so they’ll be released digitally.

You mentioned that Kompakt’s history as an actual record store and the importance to the artists to have the music available through vinyl. Is that a purely emotional decision? Are there situations where you know that financially it might not make sense to put something out on vinyl, but you do it because it’s something you stand for as a label and it becomes almost a philosophical issue?

There’s many ways to look at that. Bear in mind that Kompakt’s four owners are all musicians and they all come from making techno and house music. There is this ingrained, fundamental necessity with a lot of producers out there that they need to have their records not just available digitally, but also on vinyl. It’s a real contradiction, because when you look at the market itself, 98% of the DJs that play out there today do not play on vinyl. So what is the reasoning behind this? It’s not a very easy question to answer. But even with the newer producers that are coming up, there is something ingrained in their minds that no matter even if it’s going to be a money loss, that we do need to have it available on that format.

Do you foresee that ever changing?

As long as there is demand, we’ll continue to do it. Fortunately, touch wood, it seems that there is a continued demand for the format. There’s many different layers to look at with the demand for dance music vinyl in the market today. You do have labels out there, such as Perlon, which have maintained a strict policy of not releasing their music digitally, ever. That means that they sell a lot more vinyl. Their records are anticipated in record shops much more and cherished much more, because they are only available on that format. Coming more from the business side in the company, I say to the guys, “Look, it really doesn’t make any f***ing sense to put this on vinyl.” And they just look at me like blankly, like, “Of course we’re doing it.”

You mentioned the demand factor, and as you’ve said, the vinyl market has currently stabilized, but there’s always a possibility that another major change will happen and the market could go into a downturn again. Is there anything you guys are doing to try to cultivate in fans the idea that vinyl is the ideal format to listen to dance music?

There was an interesting fact that came out that MusicWatch reported, that 54 percent of vinyl consumers in America are 35 years old and younger. I live in Berlin and I’m surrounded by a wealth of record shops. The market here is very strong with vinyl, it’s remarkable. Record shops like Hard Wax and Spacehall are just excelling in the format. We share a similar strategy in how we try to drive our fans and our customers to come by the record shops, and that’s by offering exclusive releases. Wolfgang Voigt has been quite prolific over the past couple years releasing a lot of records under his Profan imprint and also his Protest imprint as vinyl only that we only sell in our record shop and through our mail order or to select record shops that demand it. We focus on projects and releases that you’ll only be able to get through our record shops, which is driving our fans and other newcomers and younger audiences to come buy records from us.

What are your personal feelings on this? Do you still mainly buy vinyl or are you mainly digital?

I go up and down with it. I’ve had my fair share of moving and I’ve moved my record collection around a lot. I’ve sworn and kicked and cried at my record collection a number of times, so I’ve reduced my record collection down considerably. I’m much more selective in what I buy on vinyl. There’s this record shop in Berlin, Spacehall, I go there every two weeks, I go through the bins, I pick up a few records still. A lot of the records are records that I won’t be able to buy digitally, because they’re not available that way, or records that I know just belong on vinyl, because of how they were produced.

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

The Voice-O-Graph was a do-it-yourself recording studio the size of a small closet. Walk inside, close the door, deposit 35 cents and make a record of your own. The machines cranked out a lacquer-coated disc that held about a minute of crackling sound. During World War II, soldiers and their families swapped the plates across oceans. They felt more alive than a letter, and they didn’t clog up what was then a limited number of long-distance phone lines.

Painted advertisements on Voice-O-Graph booths promised technological wonder rarely available to regular folks at the time. “Step in! Record your voice!” “Hear yourself as others hear you!”

Voice-O-Graph booths once peppered movie theaters, arcades, state fairs and bus stations across the U.S. But with the advance of compact cassettes in the ‘60s, the machines were relegated to garages, cellars and garbage heaps — obsolete and unwanted.

But recently, Voice-O-Graphs have made a comeback. A 1947 model appeared on a 2014 episode of The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. That Christmas, Apple featured a Voice-O-Graph record in a holiday commercial. And this year, people on the East coast got at least two chances to see one of the machines in person, when Brooklyn’s Rough Trade record store temporarily parked one on-site, and D.C.’s Songbyrd Record Cafe announced it had acquired one of its own.

Like vinyl records, old-fashioned recording booths are piquing the interest of young folks drawn to the quaint and pre-digital. And Bill Bollman deserves much of the credit.

One of Bollman’s Voice-O-Graph booths (via Bill Bollman)

A 55-year-old patent attorney in Bethesda, Maryland, Bollman has single handedly revived the market for Voice-O-Graph recording booths.

“These things — they haven’t been in the public eye for 60, 70 years,” says Bollman, speaking from his office in downtown D.C. “Now there’s a spike.”

A spike indeed. The White Stripes’ Jack White — who purchased a Voice-O-Graph through Bollman and brought it onto The Tonight Show — says his booth has recorded more than 1,000 musicians since he unveiled it at his label’s Nashville headquarters two years ago. That group includes Neil Young, who cut his 2013 record A Letter Home with the machine.

“You get inside it and you’re just in the zone,” Young said, showing off the Voice-O-Graph on Fallon’s show. “You close the door, and it’s like you’ve gone back. Way back.”

History inside the booths

When Songbyrd Record Cafe opened in Northwest D.C. last spring, its owners boasted that they’d acquired an authentic, 1940s recording booth for the shop. For just $15, they said, customers could make their own record at the café. It sounded like a hipster gimmick. But Songbyrd’s record machine is about as real as it gets.

Songbyrd’s Voice-O-Graph is a Bollman job. Purchased in the mid-2000s, it was the second booth he ever restored.

“I bought that booth from a guy out in California,” Bollman says. “It came to me in pieces. Literally.”

“J.D. + B.G.” (via Bill Bollman)

The man who sold the machine to Bollman said it had spent time inside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in the ‘50s. That seemed likely, Bollman says, particularly when he noticed an etching inside the box: HO 48111, the theater’s old phone number. And when Bollman looked closer, he found two other etchings: one said “James Dean ‘55.” Another spelled out “J.D. + B.G.,” surrounded by a little heart.

Bollman contacted Lew Bracker, who wrote a memoir about his friendship with James Dean called Jimmy & Me. Bracker told Bollman that before the actor died in 1955 at age 24, he made the rounds at Hollywood movie theaters. One of them could have been Grauman’s. Then Bollman examined Dean’s old letters and found the initials “B.G.,” written in a similar way. Those initials belonged to a woman Dean dated for two tempestuous years: Barbara Glenn.

Bollman says he’s nearly sure that James Dean made his mark on the 1947 Voice-O-Graph booth. He just can’t prove it.

Later in its life, the machine turned up in Santa Monica. It appears in the 1965 movie Inside Daisy Clover, one of Robert Redford’s earliest films. In the opening credits, star Natalie Wood records herself singing inside a booth on the Santa Monica Pier. The outside of the booth advertises a price: your voice on a record for just 25 cents.

(The price was artificially low, Bollman discovered. Inside Daisy Clover was set in the 1930s. To coincide with the era, someone had replaced 35 cents with 25. But they overlooked the fact that the booth didn’t exist in the ’30s.)

Today, that same recording booth — once used as a Hollywood prop and possibly vandalized by James Dean — sits in a Northwest D.C. cafe, mostly unused.

Songbyrd co-owner Alisha Edmonson says her business’ Voice-O-Graph needs a new part. It’s currently out of commission, and it’s been that way for months.

An audio time capsule

In 2008, Bethesda Magazine ran a story about Bollman and his wife, Barbara — or rather, about their basement.

“Clearly, this is not just any basement,” wrote author Julie Beaman. In addition to a basketball court and a climbing wall, she reported, the space housed a 1956 soda machine, a 1951 phone booth, a 1948 popcorn maker and 15 vintage arcade games, all of which Bollman had restored, either by himself or with help.

Bollman is a fanatic for coin-operated machines. He’s collected and refurbished them for years, funding his hobby with his career as a patent attorney. Voice-O-Graphs are one of his more recent obsessions. He got into them about 15 years ago.

“They talk about [the Voice-O-Graph] as being the first text message,” Bollman says. Then he adds — modestly — “I wrote the patent of text messaging, by the way.” (He’s not lying.)

Like early text messages, original Voice-O-Graph transmissions could only be so long — 65 seconds. Bollman has collected hundreds of those recordings, each one a sliver of history.

“Thanks for all the papers I got the other day, mother,” says a woman on an early recording. “Boy, I sat down and read for nearly an hour, and the washing never did get finished that day.”

“Happy New Year,” a man says to a friend, “and don’t forget to get drunk.”

Some people sing, some read prepared letters, others recite poetry. Bollman picked some of his favorite Voice-O-Graph recordings and strung them together into a 50-minute audio time capsule.

Bollman’s Voice-O-Graphs come from everywhere. He got one from a guy in New Jersey who said he plucked it off a truck headed to a scrapyard in the ‘80s. It sat in his mother’s garage for 28 years.

Then there’s the booth he bought from a Texas woman whose brother-in-law had kept it on his porch for a few decades. “Fortunately, Texas is dry and hot,” Bollman says. He refurbished the old machine and sold it to a scotch whisky distillery, Aberlour. The company now has the Voice-O-Graph on a world tour. As of this writing, it’s sitting inside London shop Phonica Records; next it goes to Canada.

Bollman says his first Voice-O-Graph restoration took eight years. He often sells the units he overhauls — he declines to say for how much — but he insists he doesn’t do it for money alone.

“All coin-op hobbies, we call it a labor of love,” Bollman says. “It’s not really a profit-driven thing.”

The Voice-O-Graph micro-industry is greased by wealthy collectors like Jack White, who first connected with Bollman in 2011. Bollman says White was hunting for a bag of wax — the kind used in another old coin-operated machine, a Mold-A-Rama. (Bollman knows a lot about them, too; he runs the website moldville.com.) Bollman’s pal in Florida usually supplied White with wax, but he’d left town. So the attorney offered to hook White up.

“I said, ‘I’ll send Jack a bag of wax,’” Bollman says. When he popped it in the mail, he slipped in an old Voice-O-Graph disc with a note. It said, “You guys have to get one of these booths. It’s right down your alley.”

White’s record label called Bollman right away, he says. They told him the rock star had been looking for a Voice-O-Graph for 10 years. It just so happened Bollman knew where to find one.

After White bought his first Voice-O-Graph through Bollman — he says the musician has acquired at least two — he opened it up to the public at his Third Man Records storefront in Nashville. Anyone can make a record in the booth for $15. Some convert their recordings to mp3 and get them posted on the label’s website. (A Third Man Records staffer said Jack White was unavailable to comment.)

Third Man Records’ Voice-O-Graph has proved to be enormously popular, says Angelina Castillo, the storefront’s manager. Though, it requires a lot of TLC.

“It’s very, very difficult” to maintain, Castillo says, and parts occasionally stop working. But the store tries to manage customers’ expectations, reminding them that the Voice-O-Graph is ancient by today’s standards.

“They are usually quite understanding after they see [the machine],” Castillo says. “They say, ‘Oh, wow, this thing is truly wacky.’”

White’s label markets its Voice-O-Graph as a novelty. But Bollman sees the devices as something more.

“It’s hard to appreciate the function they served in society back when they were introduced,” Bollman says. “They served a function — to be able to speak with someone away at war.”

Every so often Bollman will come across a recording that makes him feel like he’s doing more than collecting old things. Not long ago, he says, he found a Voice-O-Graph platter posted from Pearl Harbor the year after Japanese forces attacked the base in 1941. Bollman examined the address on the sleeve, and mailed it to a California woman with the same last name. He thought she might be related to the soldier who made it.

Bollman could have fished out the record and tossed it on his turntable like he’s done on countless occasions. But this time, it didn’t seem right.

“I didn’t feel like I should be the one to open it,” he says.

Bill Bollman appears on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show Thursday, Oct. 29. Stephen Kearse contributed to this report.

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/.

“I’ve never done this, walk around and count them,” Muller says, as he begins counting a row of jukeboxes tucked under a shelf of records.

He walks through the add-on garage, porch, living room and foyer. So far, he’s counted 62 jukeboxes, just in his own house — plus 40 in stock at his store, and plenty more in storage elsewhere.

“I’ve been telling people we have over a hundred,” Muller says. “Now, I know it’s even way more than that.”

Most of these jukeboxes are part of his company, Jukeboxes Unlimited, which he’s owned since 1971. He guts many of them to salvage their parts for assisting with repairs. Others, he fixes up to sell, while still others — the nicer looking ones, especially those that light up — he rents for parties and dances.

And some, Muller simply falls in love with and keeps for himself, like his 1948 Seeburg M100A. It sits in the corner of his living room at home.

“This machine is 100 percent original, every single aspect of it: the original cartridge, the original needle and original old 78 rpm records,” he says before playing Frankie Lymon’s “Goody Goody.”

Back when he got his start in the 1970s in Los Angeles, there were a lot of guys like him in the jukebox business — but he set himself apart by selling to the stars. His famous clients include Steve Martin and Mick Fleetwood, and their notes and copies of checks still fill books and albums of his. He even used to go to the Playboy Mansion to repair a jukebox owned by Hugh Hefner.

Muller, now 72, has seen many of his competitors go away. The business has gotten less glamorous, but he keeps busy through his online store.

“I get so many emails. I get ’em from all over the world, and it’s the same thing. It’s like, ‘Can you tell me what gear goes with this gear?’ And you know, for me to just get back to them and say, ‘What jukebox are you even talking about?’ I just don’t have time,” he explains.

He drives 50 miles to visit one of those people who contacted him online — Aline DeGroote, in Anaheim, Calif. She has promised to give him some records if he can take her jukebox off her hands.

Muller doesn’t need more records. The add-on to his house is full of them; he has hundreds and thousands already. Many are duplicates, and most aren’t worth that much — but he’s excited about the records DeGroote is offering anyway.

“I don’t collect records: I amass records,” he explains as he drives to DeGroote’s home. “I don’t even know what we’re getting today. I’m sure I already have 20 copies of what she’s got, but it’s an addiction.”

DeGroote’s jukebox is from the early ’60s, and she’s had some trouble selling it. She tried Craigslist and thrift stores.

“When I first tried to sell the jukebox, people were like, ‘Well, does it play CDs?'” DeGroote says.

Her dad, who died five years ago, used to keep the jukebox in the pool room. She grew up listening to it. But now it’s broken, and she’s selling it to Muller for $75.

“I wanted it to go to someone who would appreciate it for what it is,” she explains. “It’s a jukebox that plays old music.”

When she pulls out seven boxes of records, Muller’s face lights up. There are at least 2,000. He sorts through the records, putting them in other boxes he brought himself — “banana boxes,” he calls them, since he picked them up at the local grocery store.

“A packed banana box is 400 records,” he explains. “Four hundred 45s in a banana box.”

As he sorts through them, he gets excited when he sees a record by The Fleetwoods. He begins to sing “Come Softly To Me,” and DeGroote joins in.

Muller says he could make decent money if he sold his collection of over 400,000 records. But he doesn’t plan to unless someone comes along with a huge offer, because the records aren’t for his business.

They’re for his collection. And eventually, he’ll give them to his son.

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

Dan McNabb, the band’s guitarist, lead singer and primary songwriter, concedes his preference for a simpler approach.

“I like the three-minute pop song for its brevity, and [I] appreciate being left wanting more,” the Mount Pleasant resident writes in an email.

Like any great pop song, “I Found You Out” was built to be short, catchy and relatable. But McNabb would rather not delve into the lyrics.

“I don’t like songs to be too much about one specific thing,” he writes. “I like the mystery of other people’s songs. Give me the mystery, let me try to figure it out for myself so it can be mine. I want to make sure I give people the same opportunity.”

McNabb started The Beginner’s Mynd several years ago as a solo recording project. The name refers to a Buddhist term for the endless possibilities open to a novice — and that cute “y” in “mind” nods to the creative spelling used by ’60s psych-rock bands. McNabb calls the moniker “a name to write on the demo tapes that I thought nobody would ever hear.”

But when McNabb shared his early recordings with two Alexandria friends — keyboardist Carrie Ferguson and drummer Larry Ferguson — they loved the songs, and they started filling out their arrangements.

The trio released a self-titled cassette in 2013 through garage-rock powerhouse Burger Records. The tape earned them acclaim, but the band wanted their next release on vinyl, so they moved to Austin-based 13 O’Clock Records.

McNabb wants “I Found You Out” and its B-side, “When You Go,” to be the first in a series leading up to an LP. On wax, of course.

“Burger [isn’t] focused on vinyl as much as cassettes,” McNabb says, and vinyl is “where I want to be right now.”

The Beginner’s Mynd plays Sept. 21 at Comet Ping Pong. “I Found You Out” and “When You Go” are released on vinyl Sept. 22, and available on Bandcamp now.

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.