#plainview ralph

[salesmans-ptm]

old plainview art i never posted on tumblr dump

bunch of stuff i drew for an attempted animatic-ish shitpost video based on the swallowed shampoo song, i never finished it

(november 19th 2022)

[tardigradedcaterpillar]

Cringetober 8 & 9! Sexyman and a crossover.

(THIS IS NOT A CROSSOVER SHIP I KNOW OT SAID CROSSOVER BUT RALPH DEVLIN IS AROACE.)

[gmod]

pv doodle thingy

[vulpixfire]

I was crazy once

PlainView belongs to @surfclown

[dillydoodletown]

Protagonists

[yourfaveeatsdrywall]

Sorry forgot ralph devlin was obscure!

RALPH DEVLIN from Plainview in Plain View eats drywall!

[omegaremix]

Needle & Groove, 2022.

Years ago there was a record store called Slipped Disc in Valley Stream which specialized in metal, punk, and hardcore, just like None Of The Above in Centereach. Both stores no longer exist with Slipped Disc exiting out in 2008. Owner Mike Schutzman now sells records online and is the organizer of Vinyl Revolution Record Show. What had this store on my radar was that his daughter Amanda was interviewed for No Echo’s record collector’s spotlight. She’s no longer really there but still acts as their buyer and distributor. My friend Danny From The 209 loved Slipped Disc back in his Brentwood days but I never got a chance to visit. Now, here’s Needle & Groove. I had an inkling that maybe there was a little sliver of Slipped Disc’s soul. I’d find out soon enough.

Driving there was a daunting ride taking five major roads to get to. Five. Long Island Expressway, Sagtikos Parkway, Sunrise Highway, Meadowbrook Parkway, and finally Route 27. It’s placed in the busiest and tightest section of Lynbrook, right across from the train station. It was fucking hell trying to find parking. Either you find a parking meter or pick a very tight spot behind a small out-of-the-way shopping center and cross your fingers that you won’t get towed. I chose the latter.

Needle & Groove was the Nassau County equivalent to Riverhead’s Sunday Records. (How many times will I mention that place again? Fuck around and find out.) Shelves all against the walls, boxes on the bottom, and a long middle island of more records. I walked around and saw the vinyl layout of the store. New arrivals, the used alphabet and dedicated artists section. Jazz, soul, reggae, soundtracks and 7” hits. The kicker? They’re having a June sale. $3.00 and $5.00 records, and 50% all 45’s and 12” singles. Any time a store offers you a discount, you take it. All throughout Needle & Groove I noticed that their stickers could be considered a tad high. They’re certainly not (Plainview’s) ‘Vinyl Bay 777’ high which price based on condition and justify jacking up the prices three to four times what you pay elsewhere. Needle & Groove didn’t do such a thing, thankfully. Unless marked, the lowest price for any above-bin record starts at $6.99 and go up from there. As I’d later find out, it wasn’t the pricing that prevented me from buying a lot there, as you’ll see.

Right where I walk in to my right are several rows of discs. Five minutes of quick perusing and I found nothing special. I look up at the cassette rack and I found nothing, either, but the usual pop and best-sellers of the Eighties and Nineties. More cassette racks on the bottom. Nothing. Amusingly, there were a few crates of $1.00 and even 25¢ records, but how good could those be? That’s only the first ten minutes of looking. I had to find something, right? Right? I didn’t think there were any new release LPs I wanted, so I kept perusing through the used bins. They had tons of mostly used soul, R&B, and jazz in the racks. I’m not one for the former two, but I’m always curious as to what jazz titles they carried. At least they carried a lot of obscure artists and unknowns I’ve never seen before. Besides, that section was where my most essential scores were.

I still have a few Ron Carter, Deodato, Hank Crawford, and Ronnie Laws albums I don’t have. Ron Carter’s Blues Farm featured the usual suspects of Billy Cobham, Bob James, Richard Tee, Hubert Laws, Ralph MacDonald. Hank Crawford’s We Got A Good Thing Going also has Bob James, Richard Tee, and Ralph MacDonald plus Bernard Purdie and Idris Muhammad. Deodato’s Artistry featured John Tropea and that was an automatic grab. You can very well see what makes a small portion of my vinyl library.

I spotted several bins of 45’s and thumbed through those as well. I didn’t find much, to be honest. Just only a handful of 7” singles of my Atari childhood and maybe one or two I grabbed if only for the paper sleeve design. They carried so many 45’s from Bobby Darrin…Bobby Vinton? - oh, they’re all the same to me. Lots of blank sleeves so unappealing that I jumped right past them and didn’t find much that struck me. I look below and there were a few more wooden filled with 7” records and 45’s. They were so heavy that I couldn’t lift them up and set them on a flat surface, so nothing helped that I had to kneel down to find gold. Not much luck. No shamrocks, no bars, no lucky ‘7’’s.

My knees were already aching from all that bending but there was no end in sight. Onto the 12” singles sections I go. The 12” format is where I usually land a lot of golden-era hip-hop and rap. I was satisfied to pick out some selections from old-school legends Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel; both from the Sugarhill label. One that caught my eye was a Solitair record in a generic black sleeve with matching shiny black and silver sticker. But that wasn’t the reason why I caught it. Appearances by Cardinal Offishal and Choclair made it mine since I remembered them from MuchMusic. There were a couple of more pop hits from my Atari childhood I took with me. And how about this one: Techno Animal’s “We Can Build You” from the Brotherhood Of The Bomb era featuring Vast Aire and Company Flow’s El-P. That one was the only compelling pick of my expedition, and one from a few key months at Stony Brook. By then I was aching. My knees were getting tired. “But don’t quit just yet!”, my head tells me. After another thirty minutes going through their used soundtracks, alphabet and dedicated artists’ LP sections I found nothing appealing. Now there were even more vinyl crates sitting on the floor I wasn’t looking forward to.

I took a few moments to re-collect and start digging through those $3.00 records on the floor. I was hard-pressed to find anything. Nothing but the typical ‘been-there seen-that’ albums and artists in rock, R&B, soul, and your gramma’s classic basement records I wanted no part of. Then I get to dive in through the $5.00 records. After sifting through two of those boxes and still coming up blanks, I knew what to expect. I just gave up and called it a day.

Not much from Needle & Groove struck me. There was almost no element of surprise. The only record that really did it was that Techno Animal single, and it was the furthest thing from everything that the store carried. It’s not that I was expecting gold and pearls and stacks of Benjamins because I drove 35 miles to get there, but you can’t control what stores carry so it’s not their fault. No, really. So what’s the point of staying? Don’t get me wrong, Needle & Groove is a neat store and they’ll definitely have their clientele whose into their selection, but that selection is just not for me. That’s the big reason why I left with only $50.00 worth of records.

Here’s a fun fact for that day: it took me two hours to get home. I drove east on Route 27 during rush hour traffic. Sure, it was congested and every vehicle jockeyed for mere inches, but I had layers of puffy high-altitude clouds and plenty of sharp blue sky to look forward to. I had no work the following day, so I could afford to relax and enjoy the tunes playing from my now-disconnected iPhone SE to my system and out of my speakers.

Deodato: Artistry LP

Hank Crawford: We Got A Good Thing Going LP

Ronnie Laws: Friends And Strangers LP

Ron Carter: Blues Farm LP

Grandmaster Flash: “Flash To The Beat” 12”

Melle Mel & Duke Booty: “Message II (Survival)” 12”

Solitair ft. Choclair & Cardinal Offishall: “No Doubt” b/w “S.O.T.” 12”

Nu Shooz: “Point Of No Return” 12”

Techno Animal ft. El-P & Vast Aire: “We Can Build You” 12”

Frankie Goes To Hollywood: “Relax” 7”

System, The: “Don’t Desert This Groove” 7”

[kthulu278]

oh, who is she? a misty memory

[doctormargarine]

Hi guys *collapses face first on the ground*

[DO NOT LIKE IF YOU ARENT GOING TO REBLOG]

[spamtons]

[hauntingrabbits]

I do wonder what this lineup says about me

[sumbier0]

Dont you want to come to this beautiful peaceful town

[gmod]

i think this is the most haunted looking ralph ive drawn.

[wizardbubs]

plainview part 1 ending/part 2 beginning moodboard

[kkkkkkkitty]

[courtofthecorpseking]

YOU ONLY KNOW THAT YOU'RE ALONE NOW / YOU ONLY KNOW THAT YOU'RE AFRAID.

+outtakes under the cut!