“LOT FULL,” warns a sign in the driveway of Estonian House, just north of Danforth on Broadview, this past Sunday afternoon. A small crowd stands outside, a few hooting on vapes and one-hitters, but most are just taking a breather.
“It’s hot in there,” sighs a young man as he leaves. But he’s smiling, with a full tote bag weighing down his shoulder.
This is Toronto’s answer to New York City’s annual WFMU Record Fair, organized by The Record Guys, Aaron Keele and Akim Boldireff. There are two rooms to peruse at Estonian House. The first is huge and stuffy, housing a wide range of old records, each table manned by a different vendor. It’s hard to find an empty bin to dig through, as each one already has someone hunched over it, hoping to find that precious dance hall single or Japanese psychedelic gem.
The second room has the new stuff and a very popular $5 section. In the middle, people are squatting over eight or nine piles of LPs, all completely unorganized. There’s reggae, there’s folk music, there’s stuff from all eras – you don’t know what you’ll find, which, as it turns out, is what makes it fun.
“I was getting kinda gnarly in there,” says Aaron Levin, a friend, record collector and creative director of the Weird Canada, a national treasure of a music blog.
About half of the people there come with an idea of what they want, says dealer Don Sutton, who used to own Zap Records in Hamilton before it shut down in 1992 during the recession. His specialty is psychedelic imports, like Eduardo Bort.
Levin’s hunting for traditional Irish tunes (“Have you ever heard a Uileann pipe before, man? That sound will crush you. It will crush you.”). Others bring lists, and taking an efficient approach, and pass it over to each vendor rather than hitting the bins. Some go by genre and just flip through, waiting for something to catch their eye. It could be an artist’s name, a city, a record label, the cover art – whatever piques their curiosity and inspires them to find out more.
But one person’s trash is also just another person’s trash. Case in point? Korn’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, in compact disc form, skulks in the corner.
“There’s a nice democracy in a way because you’re digging in the bins, just getting so nasty in the bins, and then like directly to your right is someone, like, shouting to their friend behind them, like, ‘Ya want B-52s?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘You want Jethro Tull?’ ‘Nope,” Levin says. “And then to your left is the guy who flew here from Japan who came to buy the rarest spiritual jazz and you’re all digging through the same turds and the chances of anyone actually finding that thing is so unbearably low…. It really seems to be the thrill of the hunt that really unifies people here.”
Aaron Keele, one of the organizers of the fair, has turned that thrill into a career.
“I get to go out and go, ‘Who the hell is this guy from 1978? Some folk dude, oh, and it looks like he’s crying on the cover. This is sensitive! Let’s check that out!’ I get to enjoy it that way every day,” he says, between saying hello to customers and admiring their finds.
At age 16, Keele left school to learn more about the record business at his dad’s shop, Don’s Discs, at Queen and Parliament. He was smitten, never returned to school and worked at Vortex Records at Yonge and Eglinton for 10 years before branching out on his own.
While it’s harder than ever to operate a record store in the city with the pressure of high rents, Keele doesn’t seem to miss the shop atmosphere.
“The explosion, or the re-explosion of vinyl, meant that everyone went to stores,” he says. “And we’d promote the shows, and no one would come. Now, we’re seeing them come. It’s great. It’s a whole different vibe – it’s 50 record stores in one, right? So it’s exciting.”
kater@nowtoronto.com | @katernow
