The Rabbit Hole USA

Hey folks — we’ve stocked up on some classic comedy LPs for your laughing enjoyment. Check out new arrivals by George Carlin, Steve Martin, Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, Jonathan Winters, The Smothers Brothers, Allan Sherman, Bob Newhart, Barry Diamond, Robert Klein and more. It’s amazing how good these guys were. Look for our neatly marked COMEDY record bin. We also have CDs by Jerry Seinfeld, Dane Cook, Lewis Black, The Simpsons and more. It’s a riot!

The Rabbit Hole regularly has fun-filled on-site events of all kinds, including live music.  Don’t forget to check our Events listings to see what might interest you!  www.TheRabbitHoleUSA.com/events.html.

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.

The plethora of snotty, young, sugar-coated, high-energy power-pop-punk bands that inundate American airwaves today are the musical descendants of, ironically, The Descendents. And perhaps no band has ever done the style better! Started by powerhouse drummer Bill Stevenson (who, during the group’s 1983-1984 hiatus, was drafted by Black Flag), this quartet emerged from the Los Angeles punk scene and, fronted by angry young nerd, Milo Aukerman, virtually invented, in raw form, the sound that is so popular today. We have all four of their full-length 1980s LPs. They disbanded in 1987, sort of, when Milo went off to pursue a career in biochemistry. But not only have they intermittently reformed for several albums and successful tours since then, but the other three members continued in the same style with other singers under the name All.

See this awesome live video clip of the band doing I’m the One, and another of Hope.

All has blazed a stunning power-punk-pop trail since 1988. First with ex-Dag Nasty vocalist Dave Smalley, then Scott Reynolds, and then Chad Price, while always remaining true to their sound. They even achieved a major-label record deal in 1995 with the release of Pummel. The Rabbit Hole has Pummel on CD and the first three All albums on vinyl. That’s seven straight years of all the releases by Descendents-All, virtually one group, and they prove it often by doing All songs at Descendents shows, and Descendents songs at All shows.

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!