Fine Groove Records

A true gem of a record store now closed (at least the retail operation). The owner, Brian KenKnight, knows more about 20^th century popular culture (music, film, fiction, pulp fiction) than you will find at any University. Louis Armstrong to Moby Grape, you will never find someone who knows more about popular music.
Northfield is the home of two colleges, with a small population, and Fine Groove records was the repository of a many a retired professor’s eccentric and well cultivated record collections. It needs to come back to life!

Sadly, this usually-​empty record store is closed.
I’m disappointed, because I had my eye on that Loose Fur album all four years I was at college in N-​field.
Was a terrific place to pick up obscure, kitschy vinyls for pennies. You have no idea the kind of merriment old children’s educational records can provide.

All throughout youth the sense among the children and pubescents and pimpled and college-​bound of Northfield (literate, imaginative, undersexed) was that the strong jawed and slack cheeked owner-​operator of this stalwart shop was a hardass, a bastard, a suspicious and friendless miser who deserved his loneliness and poverty.
Thinking back, he did watch us, protecting his stock from thieves (and rightly so); but would it not have been worse had he not given us the breadth of wing to cherish our discoveries alone as he had discovered them, for us? And it’s not that he wouldn’t speak, he just never presumed to.
There are things more violative to a child than a strong and voluble aesthetic when he, the child, has not yet developed his own; but we’re not here to discuss them.