Park Blvd Records has collection of fans
Park Blvd Records opened with a crate full of Too $hort and Andre Nickatina albums, a used stereo and limited expectations.
The music store is down the street from the long-abandoned Parkway Theater, where storefronts can cycle quicker than new Lil B releases. The owners initially populated the music store with titles from their own enormous personal stashes — including the greatest collection of Washington, D.C., rap the Bay Area has seen.
“Our $500 counter was the most expensive purchase,” proprietor Andrew Nosnitsky says. “I honestly thought of the whole thing as an experiment. Worst-case scenario, just no one comes.”
But two years after its 2015 inception at 2014 Park Blvd. near Lake Merritt, the business is doing just fine, with support from an Oakland community that has disposable income and a love of old-school music.
Park Blvd Records is built for discovery. It has a deserved reputation as a place to find rare rap releases on tape, vinyl and CD, but a quick tour of the small space (there are only quick tours) shows a healthy collection of R&B, rock, a surprisingly strong house/ electronica section and even a few ambient/ new age albums.
“If someone brings me a good punk collection, I’m not going to turn it away. We’ll
be a punk store for two weeks until it sells out.” Nosnitsky says. “I’d like for everybody to be able to walk in here and not only find something, but find something they’re not going to find at a typical record store.”
The store was founded by Nosnitsky, a hip-hop journalist and blogger in his 30s now, and Jason Darrah, who blogged about classic Bay Area rap and sold albums online. Darrah left the business earlier this year.
Park Blvd Records was seeded with their massive collections. Nosnitsky is from Washington, D.C., and moved to Oakland in 2011. After he started working in digital music but hated it, the store seemed like a natural next step.
“If you smoke enough weed, eventually you become a dealer. It’s kind of the same thing with records,” Nosnitsky says. “I’ve been buying records since I was 10 years old. Eventually, your apartment fills up and
you have to figure out what to do with them.”
Music at the store is organized by era and region, instead of alphabetically by band name or album. Popular acts, including A Tribe Called Quest and Kendrick Lamar, are in the front of the record bins, but a deep dive reveals some amazing finds — oldschool Santa Rosa rapper Ray Luv is well represented in the cassette section, as is smooth-as-butter Oakland rapper/singer Fatha Dom.
Although some artists, including Chance the Rapper and Kanye West, have thrown all their efforts into digital downloads (Nosnitsky laments that Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” didn’t get a vinyl release), popular artists still produce niche physical releases. Solange’s vinyl album is on display at the store. Artists including Eminem, Justin Bieber and Twenty One Pilots have released on cassette.
But the biggest draw is still the local legends, including San Francisco rapper Nickatina, Oakland’s Too $hort and, most notably, Vallejo’s Mac Dre, whose label recently released “Genie of the Lamp” and “Ronald Dregan” on vinyl.
“Mac Dre outsells everything two to one in the store. Genuinely. That’s not an exaggeration at all,” Nosnitsky says. “Even the 15year-olds when they come in here are immediately drawn to our Mac Dre bobblehead.”
Nosnitsky never gets bitter in a half-hour interview, even as he laments the rapid ascent of the digital era, where popularity is personality-driven, and it’s arguably harder to discover new things. He says he would be happy if younger consumers simply viewed his store as a museum, dropping by just to check out the album artwork and see artists who never got a major label contract.
“I would love it to be like when I was a kid and there was a new release and a line around the block, and all my friends had the new Jay Z album or whatever,” Nosnitsky says. “But that’s not reality. That’s not how it works. And I think it makes the cool little unique things you can get here all the more special.”