Jonny Numb

There is a certain comfort in traveling to “the city” and uncovering hole-in-wall establishments that pander to your hoarder/collector mentality by offering bins of records, movies, books, or…anything “collectible,” really.

Of course, part of that addiction…er, mentality…is the accumulation of “stuff” to ensure we’ll have a satisfactory queue to pull from once the streaming services run out of intellectual properties to reboot, retool, remake, reimagine, re-reimagine, etc. After all, we physical-media collectors are a smart bunch – we’ll get our much-needed exercise when the power grid fails and we’re left pedaling like crazy people on exercise bikes to keep our generators all juiced and ready to operate our TVs and Blu-ray players!

Heaven knows what would happen if we actually watched or listened to everything in our ever-growing piles-o-stuff!

But even better than hitting familiar haunts in well-loved spots is discovering new haunts with heretofore unknown treasures eagerly awaiting discovery.

Take, for instance: Baltimore. Perhaps best known for filmmaker John Waters, The Wire, and being the final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, it’s also home to two of my favorite live-music venues: Metro Gallery and Baltimore Soundstage.

Me and my friend Lizard have our favorite locations in Philly. And, over the past year, me and my buddy Bret have turned Baltimore into a day-trip destination where we hit shops around the city before making our way to a concert once the sun goes down.

Baltimore is a largely unexplored territory for me in terms of its physical-media storefronts, so I embrace Bret’s itineraries with curiosity and anticipation. Being able to talk with someone about the nerdiness of collecting is an anomaly; being able to hang out with someone and investigate and recklessly drop a couple bills after pawing at shelves full of temptation is an extra reward.

Last year, he introduced me to Atomic Books (where Waters did a signing for his latest novel, Liarmouth), Normals Books & Records, and The Sound Garden (which I’ve ordered from online several times since visiting their physical shop at Fells Point).

On May 20, prior to our trip to Metro Gallery to catch Japanese psych-rock-freakout band Acid Mothers Temple for the third time, Bret came up with another itinerary to keep us busy for a couple hours before doors.

Our first stop was Celebrated Summer Records, an almost vinyl-exclusive shop (used and new), with some T-shirts and cassettes corralled near the front of the store. A display of indie/mainstream new releases gave way to a back section jammed with punk and indie LPs, in addition to a veritable gallery of framed vintage show flyers. My current audio setup doesn’t justify extravagant vinyl purchases (though I let myself off the leash a little later on), so while there were albums I could’ve easily shelled out for, I kept my whore-wallet closed.

We then made a return visit to Atomic Books (conveniently located next door), where I knew I’d pick up some stuff. A cool alternative bookstore that focuses almost 100% on the literary (unlike the book-music-movie-Funko-Starbucks cross-pollination of chain bookstores), it nonetheless has some other items hidden away from its main magnetic pull. Behind one window display, I found two copier-paper-sized boxes of DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs. As movies are my main collector vice, I scanned through the offerings, and my jaw dropped at the volumes of The Simpsons DVDs awaiting discovery. Lately, I’ve gotten in the habit of picking these up whenever I see them, since many seasons – except the most recent – are long out of print.

While the cases looked a bit rough on the outside (dusty, too), the $3 price tag on each was a rather insane cosmic signal that I needed to greedily gather up as many as I could. (Unfortunately, I’m bad at keeping a running list of the seasons I actually own, leading to some guesswork – and usually duplicate purchases – on my end.)

I also picked up a graphic-novel interpretation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and the aforementioned Liarmouth (autographed by Waters).

After dinner at Nepenthe (a brewery next to the bookstore), we headed out to the Metro Gallery with about an hour before doors. After parking, we explored a new-to-us record store called The True Vine.

After getting blasted with the overpowering smell of weed upon entering, I made a sharp left and pawed through a small selection of CDs, finding two for the collection (Miles Davis’ Love Songs and a Zoth Ommog compilation put out by Cleopatra Records). And I’ll admit, a soundtrack is the one thing that will get me to pick up a vinyl record these days, and I happed upon two.

The True Vine was a rather “rustic” shop that had its Venmo/PayPal information masking-taped to the front counter, as the “card machine” was AWOL when I went to check out. While I fiddled with the PP app on my phone, the clerk listened to a wino’s hard-luck story about needing bus fare. As he moved toward the door empty-handed, he still felt obliged to thank her twice before exiting.

Then it was on to the Metro for Acid Mothers Temple. We split before their set ended, but they always put on a great show. I love the meandering nature of their music, going to many different places sonically and emotionally, often within the span of a single 10-minute-plus song.

All in all, another triumphant trip to B-More!