Miami’s oldest indie record store takes music lovers back
One might not expect to find some of the shiniest and most coveted Record Store Day exclusives in the country in a cramped music shop accessed by a narrow cement stairway sandwiched between an Asian Spa and a storefront travel agency and perched above a pharmacy.
But the pounding heartbeat of South Florida’s oldest independent record store, Yesterday & Today Records, the one that has been the lifeblood for serious record collectors since 1981, is tucked here on the second-floor of a 1960s-era strip shopping plaza at 9274 SW 40th St. on Bird Road. The cluttered front window is plastered with vintage LP jackets like The Beatles’ “Something New,” Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots” and cumbias collections. The store draws customers from its West Miami-Dade neighborhood and beyond.
MUSIC EXPERTISE
“People relate back to the Blockbuster days where you would go in and ask the sales rep, ‘What kind of movie should I watch?’ and they would give you suggestions. Same kind of thing here,” said Yesterday & Today Records customer Colton Randell as he chatted recently at the front counter with store owner Evan Chern, 69, about his purchases. The two, owner and customer, share an interest in 1960s’ psychedelic rock music so Randell keeps coming back to the store near his home.
Longtime customers know the shop interchangeably by its full name or its nickname,
Y&T. The name was inspired by the title of a 1966 Beatles album but it also describes the makeup of the inventory the store carries: new sealed releases by contemporary acts and used vinyl of vintage titles.
Chern can talk with ease about contemporaries like Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift ,as well as the four albums released between 1965 and 1969 by The 13th Floor Elevators, a Texan psychedelic rock band.
“You go to any other indie record stores down here, same thing,” Randell, 24, said. “All these owners have this vast library in their heads and they want to bestow it on their customers. Whoever you talk to in the store, they give you music and then you pass it on to other people so it’s kind of like a domino effect.”
RSD AND BLACK FRIDAY
The yellow brick road twisting its way upstairs here where, on Saturday, some customers may find a copy of Elton John’s “Caribou: 50th Anniversary Edition” that has pressed only 3,000 copies on sky-blue vinyl for this 2024 Record Store Day occasion, is framed by faded mustard-colored paint and black metal storefront railings.
That strip mall and its rectangular Yesterday & Today store, stocked floor to ceiling with so many thousands of records Chern can’t even fathom a guess as to his exact onhand inventory — an off-site mini storage warehouse holds his overflow — is about to get quite a pounding.
Twice a year, all day for 12 or 13 hours, the first on the third Saturday of April for Record Store Day, vinyl record fans, hundreds strong, will snake their way up those steps from the parking lot near a bakery on ground level to pass through Y&T’s front door, as well as at other participating indie record stores.
The throngs will come out once again in November for the related RSD Black Friday on a post-Thansgiving pilgrimage to find something other than a mass market “Taylor’s Edition” of one of Taylor’s Swift’s albums — though those are here, too. The first Black Friday Record Store Day was held in 2010.
Every other day of the year many more may come to flip through stacks of the other thousands of used LPs and leftover RSD titles that are regularly on sale from the likes of hometown pop music favorites Bee Gees and Jimmy Buffett to jazz icons like John Coltrane and Billie Holiday.
PREPARING FOR SWIFT FANS
Chern, a former DJ who once hosted an informative alternative music program, “Notes From the Underground,” on
Miami community radio station WDNA, says he is prepared. Along with free soda and a drawing, he’ll keep a steady flow of five customers coming into the store for 15-minute or so intervals to make their purchases and then let the next batch in and so forth given the tight quarters.
When a really “huge” title is a featured RSD exclusive, like an Olivia Rodrigo 45-rpm single this year or Swift’s “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” 12-inch vinyl on RSD 2023, Chern may try another strategy to keep customers satisfied.
One concern with Record Store Day, he says, is that people may swoop in and gobble up hot titles and then sell them online for a big profit given the limited run. But then the true Taylor Swift fan, for instance, can come up short on Record Store Day.
So here’s what the soft-spoken Chern, who enunciates with the quiet grace of a lost Paul Simon brother, has tried in the past when he only has about 20 or 25 copies of a hot commodity like “The Long Pond Studio Sessions.”
“What I do, no big deal, is I go down the line of people and I say ‘Listen, here’s a paper, write down one thing that you really, really want and we’ll try to pull it for you.’ So at least we’re weeding them out and they were able to get what they really want,” Chern said from his perch on a stool inside the store near a window that spills in whatever available light is possible through the walls of inventory and the one or two vintage turntables placed nearby.
MIAMI MUSIC MEMORIES
Chern is almost dwarfed by a stack of new arrivals on LPs and 45s in protective clear plastic sleeves to his left on the counter. These are yet to be organized into the sales bins. There’s a “Love and Mercy”
If the musty smell of vintage cardboard record sleeves and paper inner sleeves is an intoxicant, Chern, who writes out your purchase by hand on a receipt pad like a record store clerk did at the 10-years-gone Spec’s Music in 1978, must be perpetually high.
No worries of writer’s cramp. The practiced Chern’s been a customer of Yesterday & Today from day one.
Chern says he helped his pal and Yesterday & Today founder Rich Ulloa unload records when Ulloa opened his first Y&T store that had been at 6344 Bird Rd. Chern worked at the former Red Bird Shopping Center Y&T location. Chern’s been a business partner of Ulloa’s in the record store since the mid-1990s, an owner of Y&T for 26 years and, after a couple moves, he’s housed the sole-remaining Y&T at this location in this Bird Road space for 20 or so years.
Ulloa ran several Yesterday & Today stores locally through the 1980s and 1990s from Miami to a dance music outlet on South Beach. The chain is now the one existing store Chern runs.
Ulloa and Chern have been buddies since bonding in a joint eighth- and ninth-grade Spanish class at Miami’s Kinloch Middle School in the 1960s. They were business partners at Yesterday & Today in the mid-1990s and Chern bought the store from Ulloa in 1998.
The annual Record Store
Day event was conceived in 2007 to boost indie shops like Y&T through the release of limited and exclusive editions of vinyl records by names both mega like Rodrigo’s and obscure like 1960’s Greenwich Village folk trio Richard, Cam & Bert whose “Somewhere in Stars” album will be pressed onto transparent cherry vinyl on 1,200 copies for RSD 2024.
The first RSD was held in April 2008 and about 300 stores participated nationwide. Metallica opened that inaugural RSD with a performance at a California indie store.
“What Record Store Day means to the stores like Y&T? It means everything. It’s the biggest day of the year for all the independent music stores. It brings regular customers and new customers and creates just a tremendous buzz for all the