Crossroads Records

Used records have stories to tell. I recently purchased a used copy of a 1967 pressing of The Rolling Stones Between the Buttons, and in the top left was written the name “Rebecca”. The last name was barely legible. I googled various iterations of the name to see if I could find the original owner. No luck. Whomever Rebecca is, and why she parted with her record, is forever lost to time. But that is not always the case. Sometimes records find their way home. One such story happened in Portland, Oregon. But first…

Portland is home to Crossroads Records. It was founded in 1993 when CD sales were skyrocketing. Nobody thought that would ever change, so many record stores allowed their vinyl stock to dwindle to make way for jewel cases and longboxes. That wasn’t the case with Crossroads (then known as Crossroads Music). As co-owner and co-founder Eric Swedberg tells it, “If we had stopped selling vinyl… we would have been on shaky ground.” That’s because, in 1999, Napster hit the scene and slammed the brakes on the juggernaut inside the jewel case. Digital File sharing made the purchase of digitized music almost obsolete overnight. Record companies sued, and stores that relied on CD sales took the biggest hit.

“In the first decade on the new Millennium, some specialty labels were licensing titles to re-press on vinyl,” Swedberg says. “But it was mainly for people who were still into vinyl, not new vinyl fans, although there were some. How it grew from there defies description.”

This leads us to today. It may defy description, but there can be no doubt vinyl is back. The story is in the numbers, with vinyl now the preferred physical format when it comes to sales. Having never given up on vinyl, Crossroads Records has evolved into a setup much like an “antique mall”. It’s now home to over forty vendors who maintain their own inventory. That inventory represents combined totals of “50,00 LPs, 10,000 45s, 5,000 CDs, 1,000 cassettes, even 8-tracks, open reel tapes, SACDs, DVDs, with some esoteric options for the discerning listener,” according to Swedberg. You can find almost any genre imaginable here. And some lost treasures, which leads us back to the story we started with.

Back in 1958, a young man moved from Seattle to Portland to attend Portland State College. He had a roommate and, when the roommate moved out, he took the young man’s entire music collection with him. Life went on. Forty years later, the man whose records were stolen decided to check out the store in Portland, which still carried vinyl. As he browsed through the shelves, he saw a title he’d once owned and flipped it over to reminisce over the track list. Imagine his surprise when he saw his name written on the back. 

“The Crossroads vendor who had it for sale had found it in the Puget Sound area, so that means it traveled back to Puget Sound and then returned to Portland in the interim. Nothing else is known about its odyssey.”

Used records do have stories to tell. Unfortunately, they keep those stories to themselves. But they do give us music in return.