By Davy Carren
That slight fizzy crackle when the stylus tilts down to engage the needle with the vinyl grooves. Every nuance of imperfection, warp, or scratch will come through to muffle, screech, or even embellish the recording. A record is a time capsule; it wears every scrape of wear it’s had to endure, beautiful in its simple turning.
Even though it seems like everyone taps Spotify or some other streaming service to put on their favorite tunes, over 43 million vinyl albums were sold in the U.S. last year, about 43 percent of all album purchases. With records now outselling CDs for the second year in a row, more hipper-than-thou, trendy record stores are popping up all over Bay Area “posh pockets,” and they are flourishing.
Tucked away just north of a Highway 24 overpass in North Oakland, there’s a rare, boxy survivor of those decades of CD dominance that’s been consistently satisfying the cravings of vinyl lovers the whole while: Groove Yard.
As I’m following shop owner Rick Ballard around as he opens up — 11 a.m., pretty sharp — and peppering him with questions while he flips his signs from closed to open, a lovingly smudged cordless phone suddenly yaps like a chihuahua behind him. He picks it up, hits a button on it, and sets it on the counter by a calculator, a credit card machine, and a scattered pile of papers.
“A scammer,” he says. “I get a lot of these robocalls.”
Stuck to the doorjamb is a slew of pre-scrawled notes ready to leave on the door, each stating a different specific time Rick will be “back at” if he needs to step out for a moment.
Rick, who is Groove Yard’s staff of one, has been in the record business since the late ’60s. He started off working at a record store in college, and his affinity for jazz records, which were becoming hard to find in the U.S. because of limited distribution, led him to track down some distributors in Paris and Munich who each sent him 100 unsealed records for $250. He took them all down to Leopold’s in Berkeley, a student-run non-profit record store, and they bought every record from him on the spot.
That was his “light bulb moment.” They kept sending him more records from Europe, and he kept selling them to local record stores. Eventually it became a full-time pursuit. He got a warehouse by Jack London Square, which he kept until 1992 when the lease expired, and that’s when he shifted his focus from wholesale to retail and started Groove Yard.
Groove Yard was originally located on 48th and Telegraph in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, where Rick still lives. But the building that housed it was torn down in 2004, and so he moved the store to its current location at 5555 Claremont, in a nondescript strip-mall-like building that has been lacking retail tenants (except for Rick) for a while, at the crossroads of three North Oakland neighborhoods: Shafter, Rockridge, and Fairview.
Groove Yard is quirky and charming without being kitschy at all. The records are overwhelmingly jazz (Rick’s favorite and top-seller), but the sections are neatly divided into other genres and themes as well, all alphabetically arranged.
With just a little digging, you can find the most odd and wonderful albums here, and that’s its magic. A Clara Rockmore theremin recording? Absolutely. Sound recordings of farm animals from the 1960s? Sure thing. The Eraserhead soundtrack? You bet. How about some Flamenco? There’s a whole section for it.
As vinyl records are in high demand these days, he does a brisk business, even with three other small record stores nearby. All the big chains are gone, yet Rick, burrowed in his tiny, cramped redoubt, has thrived. He’s been around long enough that he’s widely known as a used record buyer, and he never takes a record home for himself — they all stay in the store to be sold to his loyal vinyl-loving regulars.
He rarely sells a CD anymore, though he still keeps a few stacks of them in the store. “I sold a few CDs last week,” he tells me. “You just never know.”
Even the pandemic didn’t really affect his sales, as Rick’s is a niche business, specialized and catering to a crowd of aficionados and collectors who are always in need of the rare promotional import or the next record to complete a set, regardless of the circumstances. In fact, his best two years ever have been the last two.
“I haven’t been in another record store in 10 years,” Rick tells me while he peels off the canvas drop-cloth sheets covering his World Music records, revealing an Astor Piazzolla and a Jaki Byard album.
“I know what a record store is like. I’ve got no desire.”
Two new record stores recently opened up on College Avenue within walking distance, but they mostly sell shiny, new albums and re-pressings and do the bulk of their sales online through sites like Discogs. Rick doesn’t do online sales; it’s too much extra work for too little profit margin. And besides, he likes his customers to know that his records will be there waiting for them to find serendipitously as they skim through the bins.
Record collectors are a breed all their own, with very specific tastes and an esoteric knowledge of their milieu. Even just a whiff of old records can fill one with wonder and nostalgia and expectation. And perhaps what has kept Rick’s Groove Yard going for all these years is that it somehow assuages the incomplete and ever-expanding boxset of their record-hunting souls.
I, for one, am sure glad that it’s still keeping the dust off all those turntables.
Groove Yard is located at 5555 Claremont Ave in Oakland. (M-Sat, 11 am–6 pm; Sun 12 pm–5 pm)
