Vinylmania: An Oral History

As classic disco came bounding through the late ’70s and into the electronically orientated sounds of the ’80s, New York was one of the undisputed frontiers for the latest developments in dance music culture, nightclubs and the art of DJing. With the rise of the Paradise Garage and Larry Levan, the groundwork was being laid for the birth of house music on a swirl of new records from Italo and Hi-NRG imports to Moog-laden boogie and crisp freestyle birthed on US soil. Clubs such as Danceteria, The Saint, Studio 54, Zanzibar, 12 West and Funhouse were all buzzing at capacity every weekend, with DJs that needed the freshest records to play to their dedicated crowds.

At the center of this seminal time for vinyl culture was a store called Vinylmania, set up by Charlie Grappone in the heart of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, just as the culture of 12-inch singles and promo copies was taking hold. From supplying Levan, Tony Humphries and many more with the latest imports to championing the emergence of house music in the mid-’80s, Grappone and his staff played a significant role in New York’s own dance music story. Through the ’90s and up until closing in 2007, Vinylmania was a store that catered to DJs from across the complex mixture of racial, social and sexual demographics that made up New York and its legendary nightlife. Drawn upon Grappone’s chat with DJ History, as well as new exclusive interviews, this is the story of a haven for music lovers, as told by those who were there.

Charlie Grappone

I was a collector of records from five years old, heavily affected by the British invasion, The Beatles, The Stones and all of that, and I became fanatical about it. When I was living in Manhattan I started buying a lot of promotional records from this guy and selling them out of the basement of my apartment building, and then in 1978 I found a store in Greenwich Village for $300 a month. I opened it with my own collection and this promotional stuff I was buying.

Johnny De Mairo

The original Vinylmania was on 30A Carmine St. First it was a rock store, and then there was a disco store in 30B and they were right next to each other. The first time I got off the train in 1981, I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what he had. Charlie is probably the smartest retail person that’s ever been. Vinylmania had it all and Charlie was always very wired to people. He knew writers and editors and reviewers, so his pipeline to product was unparalleled.

Franklin Fuentes

The first time that I went to Vinylmania was right after partying all night at the Paradise Garage since it was only a few blocks away from the Garage. It was especially great to go there right after leaving the club as the music would be so fresh in your mind! That morning, I think that I was looking for records like Gwen Guthrie’s “Seventh Heaven,” Baricentro’s “Tittle Tattle” and Taana Gardner’s “Heartbeat.” That was my first time in a record store where I’d ask for rare music and they not only knew all of the music, but they also had 96 percent of what I wanted.

Charlie Grappone

At first I’d open up the store for a few hours every day while I was working for the Board of Education. Greenwich Village at that time was still a little bit of an Italian American stronghold, but around 10, 11 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday we used to see lines of people heading towards the subway, mostly African American, and they would come in the store and say, “Do you have any records that Larry plays?” Me and my wife were like, “Who the hell is Larry?” But we eventually found out about this club and I started putting a few 12-inch singles in the store and it just took off. Within a years time I was a disco expert.

I hired a guy that was in the first record pool, his name was Jose Bonilla, and he started explaining the value of some of these promotional-only 12-inch singles. I hung them from a wire in the store and started asking money for them. Candi Staton, “Victim,” put it up there, 25 dollars. Linda Clifford, “Runaway Love,” Tony Humphries bought that from me for 50 dollars. A writer for Billboard named Nelson George came to the store and did an article about me selling promotional 12-inches as rare collectors items. Then people started coming from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, all over.

Johnny De Mairo

I was never a Larry Levan guy, I was more of a Studio 54 guy, but the Garage was right around the corner from Vinylmania, so Larry would come in and get imports from Manny.

Charlie Grappone

I didn’t really go to the Garage, I didn’t know anything about nightlife, and then I met Manny. He came into the store with his roommate Judy Russell, to buy General Johnson’s “Can’t Nobody Love Me Like You Do.” It was hanging on the wire for 15 dollars. Then Bobby Shaw [MCA Records] told me, “You know that kid who bought the General Johnson from you is looking for work.” I said, “Does he have any record experience?” He says, “No, but he’s like best friends with Larry.” That was enough for me. At that time the whole idea was the guy at the counter was your salesman, so Manny would put the needle down on the record and we could sell 30 records in five minutes, and that went on all day long. He became a great salesman, everybody in New York knew him. He and Judy went to the Garage diligently, every Friday and Saturday night, so I got a full report of what was played, or what he [Larry]’s thinking of playing, what’s coming up, and it was fantastic.

Manny Lehman

I was very much a Garage head and a Larry head and I became very good friends with them, and eventually Larry started coming in as a customer. Charlie gave me permission to take some cool new records over to Larry at the club, and Larry would pop into the shop on a Friday afternoon when he was gonna play Friday and Saturday and we’d give him some hot new pieces, and we forged a relationship that way.

One prime example of the power of the symbiosis between Vinylmania and Larry and the pop world is Nu Shooz, “I Can’t Wait.” It came in as an import that Friday afternoon, and Larry happened to come in that day and I played him the song and he goes, “That’s cute, I’ll take two of them.” On Friday and Saturday he pumps that song to death. Right after that comes this enormous buzz for the song and our friend from Atlantic, Larry Yasgar, comes in on a Monday and says, “What’s the happening song?” They pick it up and it becomes a number one pop song. That’s the way it worked.

Johnny De Mairo

Because of his job at Vinylmania, Manny went on to A&M records as an A&R guy. He became a player just because he was a counter guy, but that counter position gave him a lot of power. When he had a hot 12-inch and he got a test pressing on a Friday night, he could blow through a hundred copies. I worked on Sundays there in the ‘90s, and it was great because I’d be behind the counter pushing what I want to push and it’s a great feeling. I used to just look back and say, “Shit, Manny must have really been on a high.” Because back in the ‘80s it was packed every day, all day. I remember Romanthony records that nobody even knew were on the rack. I’d say, “You know what? I’m gonna blow out of the Romanthony section,” and that was it. His first record, “What Price Love?” I’d get rid of 20 on a Sunday.

Manny Lehman

Sometimes I found a way to just play the break of a song over and over again and I duped people into buying it because they thought it was good! I had people bring back records and say, “This is not the record you played!” I’d say, “Yes it is, watch!” “Manny that part’s only a minute long.” I’m like, “If you’re a good DJ you make it last, right?!”

Joseph Longo

If Manny stepped out for lunch or went downstairs, sometimes he would leave me to watch the front of the store. If no one was up at the counter, of course I would go up there and play records, I was anxious for that. I wanted to hear cool shit and turn people onto it.

Charlie Grappone

People like Joey were incredible. You were able to come into Vinylmania and go up to Pal Joey and say, “What do I need?” They didn’t even listen, and Joey would pull out 10, 15 records, hand it to the guy, the guy comes up to the counter and buys ‘em on Joey’s word. Look at the records he produced. He knew what he was doing.

I was the main buyer, I was fanatical about it. I really focused on the store, I devoted all my time to it, and I was a music person so I not only pursued music by what I did at the store. I started visiting all the clubs, whether they were gay clubs or straight clubs, it didn’t matter. I visited all the DJs that ever came to my store. I went to 12 West, The Saint, The Cock Ring, you name it.”

Manny Lehman

Charlie was the buyer, but he would give me a stack of imports and I would do listening Mondays and Tuesdays. I’d say, “This song is the jam, let’s start out with 50 of those,” and I would listen to another one and be like, “This song is the jam, we could move a lot of these. Get 200.” Sometimes of course I missed the mark, but it was so instinctual musically. Your musical tastes really mattered. As a DJ, as a retail person, as a consumer, it was a lot of individualism.

Johnny De Mairo

Charlie knew how to get his hands on stuff like collectibles, and it used to piss me off because he always had mint records and he was always so fair. I’d be like, “Charlie, why are you selling that for 10? The guy down the block’s selling it for 20!” He would never go for the throat, and almost every retailer in that kind of environment went for the throat.

Manny Lehman

At that time the disease AIDS was still very rampant and people would literally give or sell their record collections to us, and we got our hands on things that were unimaginable. Promos, test pressings, that even I would have wanted. I’d be like, “Oh my god, Charlie please can I have that one?” “No. That’s a good one, we’re gonna sell that one.” He would think of the customers, like Joe Schmoe from Brooklyn was looking for this one song which was hard to find.

That’s what you do when you own a shop like that, where the number one thing is about personal service. It’s like Cheers. When you came there everybody knew your name, you felt like you were visiting your friends and not going to some cold impersonal store. There were times on a Friday or a Saturday that all you needed to do was serve some drinks and you had a party up in there, it was packed with people.

Charlie Grappone

Vinylmania was like a second home to a lot of people. There were people that came on a daily basis that lived right near the place. I came from a lily-white Italian American area of Brooklyn, but under the roof at Vinylmania was everyone. Black, white, straight, gay, transgender, it was unbelievable. That was the vibe in Vinylmania, and it lasted for 29 years. Whichever former employees you’re speaking to, ask them how they liked working there.

Joseph Longo

Charlie was the best boss that I’ve ever had. Sometimes he would give us promos for free, and of course he would give us a discount on records as well.

Manny Lehman

Charlie took me in as a family member. He taught me the ropes and he and his wife Debbie entrusted me with the whole system that they had created. It was instantly a family vibe. Pal Joey, myself, Susan Morabito, Jerel Black, my best friend Judy Russell. All of us worked as a team, and we would hang out after work.

Charlie Grappone

Most of the people that worked at the shop wanted to work there. An example would be Susan Morabito, who was one of the few females that worked there. She was living in Cleveland and she came to New York, to my store.

Susan Morabito

I approached Charlie while he was emptying a truck and said, “I wanna work here,” and he’s like, “Who are you?” So I told him who I was and why I wanted to work there.

Charlie Grappone

I said, “You moved here from thousands of miles away and you wanna work for me? You’re hired.”

Manny Lehman

Susan used to spin at The Saint and a couple of the other gay clubs like 12 West and stuff like that, and she used to do mail order too. She knew the customers really well. She supplied us with the Hi-NRG, the more European flavor of things.

Johnny De Mairo

Jerel took over the counter after Manny. He was very personable, whereas Manny could sometimes come off with the attitude. I could see people being intimidated by him, because he knew the position he was in, where I think Jerel was kinda honored and humbled to take over for Manny. Jerel was deep on liner notes, he knows about the album credits and the different versions.

Manny Lehman

I would say Vinylmania was one of the first places where we hired somebody that was specifically for hip hop, when hip hop was blowing up. His name was Emerson, and then you had Paul and Joey that were the Funhouse kids, and you had Jerel who was the house and the pop kid. You had it all covered between all of us.

Charlie Grappone

A lot of different kinds of people came into the store. You had Hi-NRG on one side of the room, and then you had this emerging house scene on the other side of the room, and the gay clientele were still more into the European imports. In 1985, ‘86, a lot of other stores started opening in Manhattan. A store opened a few blocks from me on Christopher Street called Decadance. He focused on the gay community, with Hi-NRG, the Italo imports and I said, “This house music scene is coming on so strong I’m really gonna focus on that.” So that’s mostly what we started playing in the store and the gay community started drifting towards that other store. It’s not like we were shooing it aside. It’s just some of that stuff was so powerful like Marshall Jefferson and JM Silk and Chip E and the Trax label.

Johnny De Mairo

At that time there was Downtown Records on Ward Street, which was a great shop. The thing about Vinylmania, Manny was on that early gay Garage thing, and everybody loved Manny, but there were a lot of Italian guys who were homophobes or whatever, so there was a lot of that weirdness where they would go to Downtown Records instead.

Charlie Grappone

Once the store became known, we became a Billboard reporting store, so we used to report on a weekly basis what was selling for the dance music charts. The record companies started sending me promotional items gratis, by the box load. The store was very well taken care of by the industry.

Franklin Fuentes

Charlie was, and still is, a popular and very respected person in the music industry. This allowed him many advantages over a lot of other record stores. A perfect example would be when Scott Blackwell’s club 4D allowed Vinylmania to open a record store in the club. That way, 4D’s club patrons could buy records as they heard them being played there, live. Charlie always promoted his store in uniquely clever ways like that.

Manny Lehman

Anyone that was anybody, you name them, they came to the store. DJs from London, everywhere. Their first stop was Vinylmania and probably their last stop before they went to the airport. From outside of New York they were coming for those really cool independent records that people used to sell out of the trunk of their car. Someone would manufacture 500 copies and their first stop was Vinylmania. “How many do you want?” I’d say, “Take ‘em all,” so we were the only one that had that.

Joseph Longo

Tony and Larry Levan and all the important DJs would come in there and scoop up records and audition new music. Todd Terry would come in and play his newest production, then “Little” Louie Vega with Debbie Gibson and his first remixes.

Charlie Grappone

Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang” wasn’t created in my store, but it was first premiered in my store with Will Socolov and Arthur Russell arguing about the mixes right next to the counter. People like Will and Cory Robbins from Profile Records would come in and listen to the latest imports that I was getting in and think about whether they should license it, or whether they should go to the UK and grab this artist or that artist.

People were coming in way before they were known. I met Louie Vega when he was probably 16 years old. We did an in-store with Madonna. She was Jellybean Benitez’s girlfriend; she used to come to the store all the time. One of the biggest ones we ever did, the actress Raquel Welch put out a 12-inch single on Columbia, and when she came to New York she said, “I want to promote this single where the people go and buy this music.” A tiny little store and it was a mob scene. Even my father came to that one.

Franklin Fuentes

Once, a guy came in and hired me to make multiple mixed cassettes for him. He’d always tell me that they were for famed actress Brenda Vaccaro. I never believed him, though. Months later, Brenda Vaccaro emerged out of a stretch limo with her mink coat dragging on the floor, and came inside and asked for me by name. When I approached her she hugged me, thanked me for the “amazing music” and then she left.

Manny Lehman

In 1986 Vinylmania released two of Larry Levan’s records, “Love Heartache” and “Jump.” Everybody wanted those tracks, but because of our closeness to Larry and because of Judy Russell we really brought him in and made him feel like he was releasing his child to a family that would care for it. When Charlie started the label he put me in the studio. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. We hired different engineers such as Bob Blank. I got to work with him a lot. There was Fascination who had probably the two biggest hits of the label I think, “Why You Wanna Go” and “Don’t You Think It’s Time?” which were produced by Todd Terry, and I did the remixes on those suckers.

Charlie Grappone

We started off at 30 Carmine Street. From there I was offered a store at 52 Carmine that was twice the size of the two stores combined, so I kept the two original stores and business started going so good by 1985 I had five stores on that block, all with different genres of music. One was a jazz store, one was a dance store, one was a rock store. Eventually I started paring things down, there was a little financial crisis in the world in the late ’80s, and the business was changing, CDs and cassettes were in, so I put everything under one roof at 60 Carmine which we remained in for 21 years as one store. Everything started changing. How you get your music, how you play your music. I was gonna try and do it till I was 60. I did it until I was 57, and that’s why in 2007 I just said to my wife, “Let’s get out of this now while we can,” and we stepped away from it and went on to the cyber world.

Johnny De Mairo

Charlie always had a big mail order business. After the store closed I’m sure he went through a little depression ‘cause he was doing that for so many years and he was so passionate about it, but he always had the warehouse and so now with the internet he has a whole new life where he sells on Discogs and eBay.

Charlie Grappone

My brother-in-law owns a building and he gave me this free space and I loaded it with records, and that’s where I work every day now. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of vinyl, CD, cassette. I never threw anything away. I was always an extremist like that. I still have it all and we do nicely with it. Vinyl sales are still good around the world. There’s nothing like vinyl. Nothing.

Manny Lehman

I run into people from the Vinylmania days all the time. I’ll be DJing somewhere in the world and a Vinylmania customer will come to the DJ booth and go, “Hi Manny!” It gave me a life experience that I don’t think anyone could get anywhere else.

Susan Morabito

Vinylmania set the tone in New York for DJs. It was the roots, the ground floor of the growth of dance music throughout the country.

Charlie Grappone

There was obviously a little kind of magic there. The name Vinylmania always seems to come up. We had a reunion party on October 19, 2015. It was absolutely amazing. People came from out of the woodwork that I hadn’t seen in years. So many people came up to me and my wife, thanking us for what we did for their lives, and I realized that night how influential and important that store was for so many people.

Header photo credit: Charlie Grappone