NOSTALGIA

Customers keep asking Dana Madore, a manager at Aron’s Record Shop on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, the same question. “They want to know when we’re going to drop the word record from our name,” he says. “I tell them not any time soon.”

In the age of the almighty CD, the LP and 45, which have defined recorded sound from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello, have all but disappeared from chains such as Music Plus and Tower Records. David Reyes, manager of Tower’s Brea store, says 70% of his monthly sales is compact discs, and most of the rest is cassette sales.

So who buys records anymore? Record wholesaler Martin Levy says that fans of bebop (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and their peers) insist that records are superior to compact discs. “There is a certain warmth in the LP recordings,” Levy says.

Then there’s the nostalgia factor. “The baby-boom generation still has a real affection for records,” Levy says. “When we were kids, there was a certain romance to them.”

To some, oldies are just not oldies without a few pops and scratches.