Sound approach:
A widely beloved vestige of the golden age of records lives on in another form.
For a certain breed of music lovers a visit to Berkshire Record Outlet in Lee used to be an essential part of a visit to the Berkshires, almost as important as attending concerts at Tanglewood. That category of aficionados would be the record collectors.
They’re the folks (usually men, don’t ask me why) that pride themselves on having an expansive library with complete runs of symphonies, not just all nine by Beethoven but also all 15 from Shostakovich, or maybe even all 106 of Haydn. A collector might also pursue a special niche like French baroque lute music or a favorite artist such as the short-lived cellist Jacqueline du Pre. These guys find a satisfaction, maybe even a sense of joy, in hunting for certain titles and discovering unexpected treasures along the way and then going home to listen.
Berkshire Record Outlet was the place to find closeouts and overruns, the aging product that record labels needed to quietly unload. Another term for that stuff is “cutouts,” referring to how the LP jackets were notched to indicate deleted titles. Prices at BRO were well below full retail, which made it easier for a collector to look at a disc and say, “Well, why not give it a try?”
Though my days of being an active record collector are behind me, discographies are a regular part of my research. While looking at some databases online recently, BRO popped in my mind. It came as no surprise that the storefront closed, yet the business continues with a strong online presence. But I did a double take at seeing the company’s mailing address in Albany – the same address on North Broadway as Albany Records.
BRO founder and owner Joe Eckstein decided to shut down the retail side five years ago when a commercial tenant of his in the same building wanted to expand. Rather than start construction on new space for the tenant, Eckstein moved out and struck a deal with Peter Kermani of Albany Records to warehouse the inventory and fill the online orders. The transfer involved 45 miles and an estimated 300,000 CDS. “Many, many truckloads,” recalls Eckstein. After that, it took the Albany team four months to get everything reorganized. When he founded BRO in 1974, Eckstein bought the majority of his inventory from British labels and distributors. He was in the U.K. making contacts and striking deals so often that he felt like a transatlantic commuter. The frequent travel stopped after 9/11 and by that point the business had been well established. After streaming led to a vast contraction of the music industry and the almost complete disappearance of record stores, the decision to close the BRO store came easily.
“Other people were more sentimental about the outlet than me. I was happy to see the back of it,” says Eckstein. “Retail is just hard. My hat goes off to the people working at Walmart and other stores.”
Back in the day BRO issued monthly fliers with new titles and also compiled the occasional mammoth catalogue. But the company has never advertised, and that was a good thing in the eyes of label execs who didn’t want extra attention drawn to their discounted product.
On the website broinc.com, you won’t see any flashy CD covers. It’s all data – performers, composers, compositions, digital or analog – and most everything is priced under $10. Also searchable is the label and here’s another indication of the breadth of what’s available. I counted more than 900 labels
listed in the little pulldown menu. The site also says that 22,844 titles are currently in the catalogue. All that classical music is shipping out of a basement warehouse right here in Albany.
Eckstein, 72, says that business has been holding steady in recent years and there was even a small uptick in sales in the months since Covid-19 reduced everyone’s entertainment options. Nevertheless, he acknowledges classical recordings aren’t exactly a growth industry.
“It’s more of a hobby than anything,” he says. “There’s no future in making recordings. It’s an older generation that buys CDS and we’re dying out.”
Eckstein has a compatriot in Peter Kermani, 80, who says, “Joe and I have known each other for a long time. Heavens, I was his customer over there 40 years ago.”
Kermani, who once owned a hifi store, is well known in the Capital Region for his long tenures as chairman of the Albany Symphony as well as of the Albany County Republicans. He founded Albany Records in 1986 as a platform for American performers and composers and 1,836 titles have been issued to date. His partner in the company is Susan Bush, who takes care of contracts, production and promotion from her home in Block Island, R.I., where she moved about 10 years ago. Kermani is in charge of A&R (another industry term, short for artists and repertoire), supervises shipping and minds the books. There are four other staffers in the Albany headquarters.
“Everything changed in
2006 when Tower Records went bankrupt,” says Kermani. “One month I got a check and the next month a letter, the same letter everyone else got. They owed me almost $400,000.”
That sum of money, mind you, did not represent the volume of sales for Albany Records titles alone. A few years after launching the label, Kermani and Bush started a distribution company, Albany Music, which at its peak represented 140 labels, mostly from overseas, to retail accounts in the U.S. With record stores a thing of the past, they were looking to shut down the distribution business and this was around the same time that Eckstein was at a crossroads with BRO. When the distribution product was cleared out, the CDS from BRO came in.
Just steps away from Kermani’s pristine desk are tall shelving units with rows and rows of CDS, some in loose piles and others in orderly boxes. The abundance of inventory overflows into several more rooms until you reach the shipping dock around back. For a music lover like Kermani it’s a dream come true.
Asked if he identifies with the term “record man,” Kermani quickly agrees and he offers a description of the obsessive collectors, like himself, who can’t get enough classical music. “We are addicted, and I’m using that word with good cause, to the aural experience of listening to music attentively.” Joseph Dalton is a freelance writer based in Troy.