The record collector

Jonathan Richardson remembers the first time he said goodbye to his entire vinyl record collection. It was in the 1980s, and the music world was converting to the compact disc.

“I probably had 200 or something like that, and I sold them and bought CDs,” he said. “I was young.”

But when he nearly had to part ways with his rebuilt collection again in 2008, it was against his will. During a particularly brutal storm that year, his basement sump pump broke, causing a room dedicated to his records — roughly 7,000 of them now — to flood.

Richardson is an audio engineer, DJ and member of local veteran indie rock group EDM (formerly Early Day Miners) who has been collecting records on and off since his aunt, a former roadie for KISS, gave him his first one when he was a kid: KISS’ “Alive II.”

It was his mother, though, who first sparked his interest in vinyl when she handed down her box of Beatles and Rolling Stones seven-inches.

“She totally got me started on records. She gave me a record player, and I just started playing them all the time,” he said.

Originally from Yuma, Ariz., Richardson came to Bloomington via Portland, Ore., in 1999 with about 300 albums. Shortly after, that number began to multiply once he discovered the Bloomington Public Library, which had sales in its lobby on Tuesdays. There, he found many old and rare records being offered for less than $1.

“I don’t know where they got those things, but they were just the most amazing records,” he said. “I’d leave with a stack every single Tuesday.”

Those stacks now fill shelves that take up most of the space in Richardson’s own personal records library in his basement, accompanied only by some furniture, stereo equipment and his own artwork.

He loosely organizes the records into sections by genre: rock, reggae, hip-hop, soundtracks and “weird records, like incredibly strange type things.”

Richardson was out of town on the day his basement flooded, and he lived a collector’s nightmare when he received the call from his friends who told him that many of those sections were underwater.

They managed to salvage most of the damaged records thanks largely to knee-jerk reactions from Landlocked Music co-owner Heath Byers.

“I had to take the sleeve off, take the record out, take the paper insert off, and I just had hundreds of piles of records, inner sleeves, outer sleeves and plastic sleeves throughout his entire house,” Byers said. “We managed to save more than he ever imagined, that’s for sure.”

Richardson buys records less often today, and when he does, it’s mainly to bolster his repertoire for when he DJs, which he often does at the Bishop under the moniker DJ Jonny Yuma.

Richardson might not be adding to his collection as actively as when he first arrived in Bloomington, but the vinyl industry is no longer completely dependent on people such as him, since vinyl sales have spiked again in recent years. He attributes that to listeners’ increasing disillusionment with the CD — the very same effect he experienced after selling his records all those years ago.

“There’s no physicalness to mp3s, and people are tired of CDs,” he said. “It seems like digital blips, ones and zeros. It’s not physical, and I think people are craving that.

“With vinyls, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is cool. It’s got inserts, it’s got a gatefold, and it smells like a record.’”