 The Rabbit Hole Music Department now has over 3500 vinyl records, CDs, and cassette tapes in stock for you to peruse. It’s the best collection of used music media in the area. We have all styles and genres. If you haven’t checked it out in a while, we urge you to come on down and do so. You’ll never know what you might discover next! |
Just in at The Rabbit Hole, a slew of heavy CDs from top metal bands and guitar gods of the last 25 years. Check out our tower of a CD display featuring loads of Metallica, Megadeth, Lynch Mob, King’s X, Queensryche, Ozzy Osbourne and many others. In the same stack, find the majority of the Joe Satriani and Steve Vai catalogs, plus G3, Yngwie Malmsteen, and more. These are in outstanding condition and priced in the $5 range!
We’ve also doubled the cassette inventory and re-arranged our upstairs space for easier record shopping and better viewing of our many events (see our Events page).
Mark Bodanza is the author of A Game That Forged Rivals: How Competition Between Two New England High Schools Created One of the Greatest Traditions in Football.
You can get the description of this cool event on The Rabbit Hole’s Events Page, but here is even more for you, the trailer video for Mark’s book!
The era of the cassette may be over for the major record labels, but not for the millions of owners of cassette players out there. Cassettes served us well for a couple of decades there, and they still hold a ton of great music. And, just like LPs, the treasures that cassettes contain can be successfully transferred to CD (a service which The Rabbit Hole is glad to offer, by the way), so that they can live on in the digital age.
In The Rabbit Hole’s new cassette section, located upstairs with the vinyl and CDs, you’ll find a growing collection of cool stuff. We have highly acclaimed and sought-after indie rock of the ’90s like Juliana Hatfield, The Bats, Dinosaur Jr, Chainsaw Kittens, All, The Chills, Magnapop, The Connells, Classic Ruins, Miles Dethmuffen, Pavement, The Verlaines, Sugar, Pavement, even Nirvana’s indie debut, Bleach. These artists made the sound then that shaped the rock & roll on the radio today. We have mainstream, alternative, and progressive rock, easy listening, comedy, and classical, too. Another big batch is arriving soon.
And the big bonus for you, the music fan, is that most are priced in the range of just $2.00. As 
an added bonus, you can buy any cassette and elect to let The Rabbit Hole professionally transfer it to CD for you for just $5.99 more! Our regular price for this service is just $8.99 per album, which is well less than you’ll find it elsewhere. So, drop by and check out the tapes!
A big influx of big-time greatest hits packages on CD has arrived at The Rabbit Hole, all previously owned and in great shape, most for just about $6 each. You may not want to seek out every last deep album cut of certain pop artists, but you gotta admit they have a few great tunes you’d like to have. Here’s your chance to grab “best of” collections by Cream, The Beatles, James Brown, Aerosmith, Elton John, Bad Company, Kansas, The Beach Boys, James Taylor, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvis Presley, Steve Miller, The Police, Journey, Eric Clapton, and even more that we have in stock right now.
Arriving sometime Saturday, September 5, there’ll be more by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Rush, Kiss, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Rolling Stones, KC & the Sunshine Band, Thelonious Monk, and more, so come on down and check them out!
Here are just a few of the awesome new disks that have arrived at The Rabbit Hole this week. Generation X featuring Billy Idol were on the vanguard of UK punk rock with their first LP in 1978, and we’ve got the two follow-up albums, as well.
One of Boston’s most important local exports in the late 80s were the Blake Babies, featuring Juliana Hatfield, who, in 1992, went solo and became an alternative-music priestess almost overnight after appearing in an episode of the popular TV series My So-Called Life starring a young Claire Danes. The first and best three Blake Babies disks are on our shelves, including period newspaper and zine articles and even a few actual set-lists from the band’s shows! See a live video of a 2001 reunion.
Walter Wanderley was huge in his native Brazil and eventually cracked America in the mid 60s doing his bossa nova organ thing like no other, including one LP with Astrud Gilberto. Remember Summer Samba from 1966, which hit the US Top 20? We have three of his solo disks (two CDs and Cheganca on vinyl). This consummate musician is now legendary.
Another top local band who went on to national fame are They Might Be Giants. The duo from Lincoln, MA relocated to NYC to make it big, beginning with their first two LPs on the independent label Bar/None — the second of which is titled after their home town. Here at RH we’ve got them both, first editions, in pristine condition.
We have a rare find indeed with a perfect copy the Bats’ first US vinyl release, 1986’s Daddy’s Highway. These New Zealand indie pop legends are still going strong with all the original members.
Pristine copies of early albums by yet more local heroes, Dinosaur Jr. from Amherst, who took the grunge-rock style national a good two years before Nirvana, are on the shelves. We also have new arrivals from Frente, Moonpools & Caterpillars, Liliput, Same, and more. Come in and sample them on our new LP/CD listening station in the record department.
See this awesome live video clip of the band doing I’m the One, and another of Hope.
Here’s a live vid of the group doing Skin Deep, and another of Mary (song starts about one minute in), and one more of Postage.
One of the most critically acclaimed indie pop/rock groups of the late 80s were North Carolina’s The Connells. Lush, jangly, 12-string guitars, soaring melodies, emotive singing and strong, often melancholy songs have been the band’s hallmarks since 1984, though they sometimes foray into a harder sound or even a Celtic direction. They’ve even been Top Twenty hitmakers in Europe. The Rabbit Hole has acquired excellent copies of the band’s first three full-length LPs - a great find!
Check out videos of Over There and Stone Cold Yesterday.
Many people don’t know it, but you take the records you buy at The Rabbit Hole, any newly acquired used vinyl, and the records already in your collection, and make them sound better with a good, deep, 
cleaning. This is especially true if the vinyl looks scratch-free but still suffers mysteriously from crackles and pops. Invisible dust in the grooves is usually the culprit. Here’s how to get it out, and you don’t need any special tools!
Run some room-temperature water in a sink. Hold your vinyl disk by the edges and rotate it, at an angle under the tap and turn it, avoiding the paper label, until the grooves are completely filled with water. Use a scrunched-up paper facial tissue (toilet paper doesn’t work as well because it falls apart) and gently rub the the entire surface on each side of the disk.
When done, lay the disk on a soft towel. Use a soft, absorbent, cotton cloth (a rolled-up, old, white sock is great — laundered, of course), and rub with moderate pressure in the direction of the grooves. You can press to really rub the disk, absorbing the water and cleaning out the grooves, and it will not hurt the surface. Repeat on the other side of the disk.
The disk will still be slightly wet, even if it doesn’t appear so. Never put away or play a wet disk. Hold it by the sides and wave it up and down to air dry the disk. It doesn’t take long to do this. In a minute or two, your vinyl record will be read to play and sound as good as it can.
Sticklers for the cleanest-possible vinyl might want to use distilled water, instead, poured into a cup, and dip the facial tissue in to saturate it.
Maintenance cleaning can be done with a mixture of 50% water and 50% isopropyl alcohol from a spray bottle. Spray your cleaning sock with the solution and wipe down the record to remove dust.
Take care of your vinyl and it will serve you for years!
The Rabbit Hole has widened its window into the Boston indie heyday of the 1980s with even more classic vinyl slabs from that wildly creative era when New Wave, Post Punk, and pre-grunge guitar growl ruled local stages. Stop by and get an eyeful of these disks: the stripped-down glam-punk of Lou Miami & the Kozmetix, the Blondie-meets-Spaghetti-Western innovation of Rubber Rodeo, the Mission-of-Burma/Wire style avant garde of Native Tongue, darkly gothy Mrs. Peacock, the experimental eclecticism of Men & Volts, the joyously driving roots rock of Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, Wild Stares, Scruffy the Cat, Skin, the polished rock and pop of The Buddy System, the Pixies-informed grunge of The 360’s, the garage rock of The Last Ones, Loose Ties, The Drive, and many more earlier arrivals in our new Local Indie bin, but don’t forget to check the CDs, 7″s, and DJ Vinyl sections for even more.
Check out some MP3 excerpts:
The Boston area is famous for many things, some of which not everyone is aware. For instance, the local original rock scene has been on the vanguard of new music for over 40 years!
Thought to be due to the special concentration of colleges and universities, including the Berklee School of Music, Boston attracts a lot of young, smart, artistic, and talented folks, creating a surprisingly sizable audience for new, independently made, original music. The number of good college radio stations in the area is legendary, as is the number of nightclub venues that cater to the original rockers — a higher number per capita, by far, than New York City.
With such a supportive atmosphere for art, the number of original rock bands in Boston at any given time is between 500 and 1000 — astonishing!
One of the main goals of any original artist is to record. And in the 1980s, recording studios boomed in the Beantown area. Punk-inspired bands like The Neighborhoods and Mission of Burma released 7″ singles in 1979 that actually became local radio hits. Other bands followed suit, local record labels formed, studios got more professional, and the 1980s indie boom began! Things didn’t cool down until the late ’90s when corporate radio became more rigidly programmed and pulled support for independent artists, which eventually reduced the number and size of original rock venues — but oh what a time it was as the major record labels came calling and picked up such artists as The Pixies, Buffalo Tom, Dinosaur Jr., ‘Til Tuesday, Digney Fignus, Jon Butcher, The Atlantics, Big Dipper, The Neighborhoods, Throwing Muses, and many more.
The Rabbit Hole’s music department is pleased to have many gems of independent production from this golden era when influential bands like The Neats, Lou Miami & The Kosmetix, The Outlets, Classic Ruins, Noonday Underground, The Unattached, Boy Wonder, The Puppet Rulers, and hundreds more graced the local stages. Check out some locally produced and released sounds right here.
- The Outlets, Knock Me Down, 1980, on Modern Method Records.
- The Gluons, Enter Your Void, 1983, on Eternal Turtle Records out of New Bedford.
- The Skeletones, Siamese Sister, 1986, on VAR International Records.
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