Orpheus Records is closing in a couple months. Whether or not you heard it here first, or even if you live anywhere near
Arlington or not, this should mean something to you. “Barefoot” Rick Carlisle broke the news to me last weekend while I stopped
by for my usual browse and splurge. For those of you who haven’t had the fortune of shopping at Orpheus, let me break it down
like this. Between Rick and his colleague Carl, you’ll find no two guys in the DC metro area with a more encyclopedic knowledge
of their inventory or their customers. Both are passionate music fans, of course (I believe that Carl knows more about Frank
Zappa than Frank Zappa did), but to keep a vinyl-specialty store with as deep of an inventory as Orpheus open in the face
of as much adversity as it encountered is pretty remarkable.
Twenty-two years after opening the shop in Georgetown in 1977, Rick moved to Clarendon to escape the neighborhood’s politics
and the increasingly suffocating real estate vortex. Now, ironically, those same things have chased him out to Clarendon and
are sending the entire area straight to hell. The real estate crunch is devouring my whole area of Arlington and spitting
out shitty, overpriced condos for yuppies who don’t even buy CD’s anymore much less records. Aside from that, it feels like
many don’t eat anywhere but places like the Cheesecake Factory, and don’t shop anywhere but Barnes & Noble or Whole Foods,
all of which are readily available within 4 blocks of where Orpheus currently stands. I know I’m generalizing, since I’m technically
one of them and I usually avoid all of those things, but there’s a reason those companies flourish, and this is my rant. Cut
me some slack, here. I’m already about to watch Dr. Dremo’s, one of the coolest bars I’ve ever entered, come down right down
the street for the same general reasons.
So, why that caustic Steve Albini quote at the beginning? Why analog format?
Because I, like many people in my generation, have realized that digital is not the best format for music, despite the last
25 years of successful marketing and gimmickry from the Sony Corporation, et. al. Such conglomerates spent billions of dollars,
man-hours, and all of those years trying to move us into the digital age, but then created products that have made digital
media increasingly ephemeral. You can rip a copy of a CD in seconds now. MP3s, which splice out a number of frequencies from
the original hi-fi recordings, are standard fare given the internet’s pivotal role in music distribution now. To me, records
are and will always be more permanent. I agree with the Slackers’ Vic Ruggiero that the only way to end this “rash” of music
piracy is to “just go back to analog, man!”
I’m going to miss this shop. I suppose I’ll eat at the Middle Eastern
restaurant a block over from it occasionally, until the developers buy that place out, too. It’s fairly depressing walking
by a string of abandoned storefronts on the way to Orpheus, but for a store as good as they have been to stick it out in an
increasingly indifferent world is something to admire. If it weren’t for
High Fidelity, many people wouldn’t even know
that bona fide record shops still existed outside of Greenwich Village.
So, unless there’s something quasi-superhuman
you can do to stem the real estate tide in Arlington, at least give some love to the analog movement. You’ll be surprised
how much you’ll have, even as a casual collector, digging out random crap from the dollar-bin. If you don’t own a record player,
BUY ONE. Orpheus has some for sale, and you can buy nice new ones uptown at Crooked Beat Records or pretty much anywhere online.
Be comforted by the knowledge that your record collection will never crash, or even become obsolete. Hopefully, places like
Orpheus never will, either.
Orpheus Records is located at 3171 Wilson Blvd in Arlington, across the street from the Clarendon Metro. They’re
open M-Sat from 12-10pm, and 1-8pm on Sunday. 
