This article ran on April 2nd, 2009, in The Weekly. The full version can be found here.

Vintage Vinyl owner Steve Kay looks like a record collector. He wears average glasses (no square frames a la alt-bro music store clerks), wears his hair long like a character in Dazed and Confused but with a lot more gray, and looks serious enough to be in record collecting for the long haul. You know the type - crate after crate of LPs in the living room, a partially scratched off list of sought-after treasures stashed away somewhere and more obscure knowledge than a thousand Internet fan pages.

Or maybe you don’t know the type. Only recently has vinyl has re-emerged as a popular medium, meaning you may not know any record collectors at all. In 2008, vinyl sales doubled from the previous year as 1.9 million wax records got pushed in music shops around the country, according to Nielsen Soundscan. If you’re interested in why anyone cares about a once-dead and cumbersome format, there are few better places to dive into the vinyl arena than Vintage Vinyl, which is located close to campus on 925 Davis St.

Kay’s made a living out of his record collecting for a long time; the store’s been open for 29 years, and with its massive inventory doesn’t even include any of Kay’s personal records for sale. “None of them were from my collection,” he says. “They were all things I bought with the idea of opening a shop.”

(Continued here.)