I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for about three years now and I love the place. One of the best things about this town are the surprising amount of quality record stores they have. I’ve mentioned the awesomeness of Jerry’s Records several times over by now, so I thought in this post I’d take the chance to single out some other retail outlets in the Pittsburgh area, some good, some not-so-good.

R.E.M.
Finest Worksong (Lengthy Club Mix)
Finest Worksong (Other Mix)
Time After Time (Live)
I got this single at Half-Price Books, which is a semi-national chain that sells used books, VHS tapes, DVDs, CDs, computer software and LPs. It’s a great place to buy stuff but a lousy place to sell. A while ago I was trying to unload my laserdisc collection and there only offered me 4 dollars for 40 laserdiscs. Not four bucks a disc, but four bucks total. I was able to get around 30 bucks for them at an Exchange down the street. Thankfully they’re idiots when it comes to selling stuff too, because I was able to get some great singles there for less than a dollar. I also picked up a rare Mindless Self Indulgence promo for a buck. These are three tracks taken off of the 12” single of ‘Finest Worksong’ that I got from them a few weeks ago. The two remixes are excellent and the live version of ‘Time After Time’ is actually a medley of a few different songs, including Peter Gabriel’s ‘Red Rain’. This track was a little scratchy and I did what I could to fix it, but it doesn’t sound that great. Sorry about that.

Erasure
Stay With Me (NY Mix)
Stay With Me (Flow Mix)
If I don’t start posting Erasure more often my backlog of semi-gay dance tunes is going to become overwhelming. I got their latest on order at Dave’s Music Mine, a quality CD store that shares space with Jerry’s Records. It’s a good store, but is a little unorganized and disheveled. I’m willing to credit that to the fact that they’ve only been in that location for a few months though and they are still trying to figure out how to use the space. They have a ton of great used CDs and sometimes get some pretty oddball stuff that’s not easy to find new, like the Depeche Mode box sets. Check them out if you are ever in Pittsburgh – they get The Lost Turntable Seal Of Approval. These Erasure remixes are off of the single for ‘Stay With Me’ more from it later in the week.

Garbage
Bleed Like Me (Kupper’s Klub Extravaganza)
My collection of Garbage singles is severely lacking. In fact this is the only one I have, and the B-side instrumental was so fucking scratched I couldn’t record it. I got this one at Eide’s Entertainment, another locally-owned store here in Pittsburgh. I have mixed feelings about Eide’s. On the plus side they have a ton of stuff and it’s an absolutely huge place. Throughout their three floors you can buy comic books, new and used CDs, VHS tapes, laserdiscs, DVDs and books. They also have a decent selection of LPs and 45s as well. Just don’t expect to get much cheap there. A record I could buy for 10 bucks at Dave’s or Jerry’s would probably run twice as much at Eides. They sell a lot of bootleg videos of out-of-print and rare stuff, which is cool, but the quality of them usually sucks. I swear their copy of Urgh! was taken off of the same video that’s at my local video store. Most importantly, the people that work there can really be a bunch of assholes. They have a no cell phone policy there, which I kind of understand (trying to ring someone up while they blabber on their phone is amazingly annoying) but if you’re going to run a store that is so massively huge that people could easily spend hours in it, it’s unrealistic to expect them to not get any phone calls during that time. The clerks constantly bitch and moan in front of the customers and kind of go out of their way not to help you. Finally, the owner seems to have some ill-advised grudge against the local Exchange. Two years ago one of his employees stole a few thousand dollars of stuff from his store and sold it to the Exchange. After he found out he expected The Exchange to just give him the stuff back. It sucks that his stuff got stolen, but he shouldn’t expect The Exchange to take a two-grand loss just because he’s not good at screening his employees. I only go here when I have to.

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