Record stores are more than places to buy music; they’re places to discover records. Shaped by the character of their owners, haunted by the collections that pass through them, they’re also where like-minded souls gather and kibbitz over a shared passion.
“The Supply Side” is Record Lung’s new series of conversations with the people behind the record store counters: how they got there, what they love, what they’ve learned, why record shops still matter, and what it’s like to run one in the digital age.
For our inaugural piece, we interview Pat McGrath, owner of Looney Tunes Records in Boston.
Two years ago, I was walking down Harvard Avenue in Allston and was surprised to find a basement-floor record shop open at 8 pm on a Tuesday. I peered inside and saw records piled up everywhere—stacked in boxes, piled on tables, leaning against walls, spilling into walkways. It looked less like a store than an archaeological dig. I wondered if the owner was a hoarder.
What I discovered was a magical order amidst the chaos. Along one wall was a beautifully organized jazz section full of serious records (including a well-stocked Jimmy Giuffre section, always an excellent sign). The unsorted stacks offered the thrill of discovery, the raison d’être of any true digger, but it was also clear that somebody with real knowledge and care had acquired these records. Salvation Army chud this was not.
Pat McGrath has been part of the Boston record scene since the 1970s. He’s an extraordinary storyteller with an opinion on just about everything having to do with records, but he’s also kind and exceedingly generous with his knowledge. You can walk in and ask “What’s new?” or “What should I be listening to?” and he’ll point you in a wise and often surprising direction. As you’ll read, when asked to recount his greatest acquisitions or help a brother spend $100 on some choice records, he’s more than game. (The latter challenge, which we’ve titled “Dealer’s Choice,” will be part of our new series.)
What follows is a conversation with Pat about how he got into records, how Looney Tunes came to be, and the many strange pathways connecting music, memory, and the people who care about both.
Where are we right now?
We are at Looney Tunes Records, currently located in the dingy basement of the old firehouse in Allston, 16 Harvard Avenue.
If you stand back across the street and look at it, you’ll go, “Oh yeah—it’s a firehouse.” You can see the whole front was where the engines would come in. Now it’s windows.
How did you get into this business?
Well, I’d always been interested in recorded sound, in sound etched on blobs of plastic, reproduced by dragging a rock through it.
I lived in a place where there wasn’t much going on, so records, television, books, and movies were the window to the world outside of West Virginia. I mean, there was stuff. We had two movie theaters in town and two drive-ins across the river. But still, records were a huge part of how you figured out what else was out there.
My mom would buy records—mostly folk records, Broadway shows, what you might call “mom records.” Maybe a bit too much Barbra Streisand. But then you’d hear other things. You’d see Fantasia. Or Bela Lugosi in Dracula, where they use Tchaikovsky for the credits, and you’d think: Boy, that’s haunting. That’s beautiful. Those things get lodged in your mind.
There weren’t nearly as many distractions then. No internet. Three TV stations. Maybe on a clear day you've got something from Columbus [Ohio]. So when something strange or beautiful came along, it really stuck with you.
Where was this in West Virginia?
Parkersburg. On the Ohio River, across from Belpre, Ohio.
Do you remember the first record you bought? Or the first record you really connected with?
The first record I bought with money I saved up was Yesterday and Today by the Beatles. I think I was nine.
I didn’t eat lunch at school for a week to save up the three dollars it cost. I just kept my thirty-five cents every day until I had enough. It just seemed chock full of hits. “Nowhere Man,” “Drive My Car”—I thought, I’ve got to get this thing.
People always ask, “Did you get the one with the butcher cover underneath?” No. It already had the RIAA seal on it, which pretty much rules that out. I remember that distinctly.
Before that, a lot of the records I had were Disney things on the Buena Vista label. I remember loving the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft before I knew who he was. Later I found out—oh, that’s the guy who sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” And later still, the Tony the Tiger guy.
That kind of thing fascinated me too—how the same voices keep popping up in totally different parts of culture.
How did you start working in record stores?
I went to college in Florida because colleges didn’t cost much then, and because John Cage was artist-in-residence there, so I thought, This could be interesting. It was Broward College. Tuition was $176 a semester.
And I got a job at a record store called Peaches, which is still the best record store I’ve ever been in. They’re long gone now, but it was great. Their method was to hire fanatical kids to run the place. People who were just completely obsessed. They made sure the people working there loved records, and knew records, and wanted to find out more about records.
So I could rent a house in Fort Lauderdale, work at the record store, and go to school, and all of it was affordable. This would have been around 1975. Then, in ’77, I gave a friend a ride to Boston and thought, I’ve got to get a sensible degree. I’ll pick a school with Boston in the name. That was about as much thought as I gave it. So I went to Boston University. And it was cheap then, too. You could get a nice one-bedroom apartment for two-hundred bucks in the late ’70s, early ’80s.
And that’s when you started working at Strawberries?
Right. I got a job at Strawberries in Kenmore Square, working for the notorious gangster Morris Levy. And that was interesting.
What was the connection? I don’t think of “mafia” and “record store” going together very often.
Well, you should. Morris Levy had started out in New York. He got involved in nightclubs and eventually opened Birdland with some partners. There were all kinds of shenanigans there. I think his brother got murdered there because somebody thought he was Morris. Morris himself had grown up with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, head of the Genovese crime family.
Now, Morris was Jewish, so he wasn’t a made guy, but he was in with that whole world. At some point he realized there was money in publishing and record labels, so he started Roulette Records and began buying up other labels. And a lot of the artists who ended up around him were people who could be manipulated: people with gambling problems, people with heroin problems, people who were vulnerable. Count Basie did a lot for Roulette. Sarah Vaughan. Frankie Lymon. Tommy James wrote an entire book about this world, called Me, the Mob, and the Music.
Tommy James had to figure out his royalties by going to the printers who made the labels, because nobody at the company would tell him the truth. And when he confronted Morris, Morris basically said: You don’t bring up the money, and I don’t cut your throat and throw you in the river. That was the atmosphere.
And the funny thing is, if you ever saw Morris Levy, you’d think nobody would cast him as a gangster because it would seem too on-the-nose. He talked exactly like a movie gangster. One time, George Russell was in the store talking to me and looked across the room and said, “Is that Morris Levy?” He’d played drums at Birdland with Charlie Parker back in the day and wanted to meet him. So I introduced them. I said, “Mr. Levy, this is George Russell. He teaches over at New England Conservatory, and back in the day he played drums at Birdland with Charlie Parker.”
Levy just said, “Yeah, kid. A lot of water under the bridge. Nice to meet you.” That was it. No sentiment. Nothing.
How did you get from Strawberries to Looney Tunes?
I got fired from Strawberries because a bunch of money went missing. Turned out one of the general managers had a cocaine problem. Then they tried to hire me back, but by then I’d gone down the street to Looney Tunes, which had just opened as a used record store. And I immediately thought: This is more interesting.
I’d worked in new record stores, but used records were different. There were out-of-print things, obscure things, strange things—stuff you’d never see otherwise. It felt like a world you could keep discovering forever.
Jerry and Seth were the original owners. They started in ’78. By the early ’80s I was there, and at some point Jerry wanted out, and I asked Seth if I could buy in. I told him, “If I own it, I’ll work harder.” He said, “That’s a good reason.”
So for the next twenty years I was partners with Seth. He was a lovely man. So lovely, in fact, that once he was gone, I wasn’t prepared for how many not-lovely people there are in the world.
Where was the store at that time?
We were right by Berklee College of Music, over on Newbury Street. That was home base for decades. We were there for about thirty years. And for a lot of that time we also had another location in Cambridge, in what people call the Orson Welles building. That store ran for twenty-something years.
So Looney Tunes was really a fixture. If you were around Boston and into records, you knew the place.
What was that Berklee-era store like?
It was bigger than this. Busier. You had a lot of Berklee students coming through, a lot of musicians, a lot of people who really cared about music. And because it was a used store, it was always changing. You never knew what was going to walk in the door.
How did you lose that location?
Berklee got a new landlord situation, and things changed. When we first got there, it was musicians and educators running things. Over time it became much more… corporate. More like a real estate operation than a music institution. They wanted something that looked more like a mall—clean, predictable, higher rent, that kind of thing. And we didn’t fit into that vision.
There were some pretty ugly tactics too. At one point they sent in Teamsters to empty out the store—said it was a “clerical error.” And then, when I didn’t have the money to keep up with everything they were doing, they basically said, “We’ve got someone else who wants this space.”
So it became clear: they wanted me gone. And I’m not going to fight people who care more about money than music. That’s not a fight you win.
Did you try to reopen somewhere else right away?
Yeah. I found another space and moved the store there—but it only lasted about two and a half months. It was supposed to be a shared situation with another guy. Then he got a new girlfriend who didn’t want us there, and that was the end of that. So after thirty years in one place, suddenly—nothing.
There was a period when Looney Tunes didn’t exist.
After we got pushed out of the Berklee location, and then out of the next space, I didn’t have a store for four or five years. That brings us up to maybe six or seven years ago. So I was just doing whatever I could. I’d assess record collections for people—sometimes for tax purposes, sometimes for divorces. I’d help other record stores. I’d do odd jobs. I did some lecturing work at Harvard Medical School to pay the bills. Just patching it together. And during that time I got involved in making a documentary. It’s called The Road to Ruane. I produced it and wrote it.
It’s about Billy Ruane, who was a really important figure in the Boston music scene. Billy was… a character. His father had gotten into investment banking—he’d studied with Benjamin Graham at Columbia, along with Warren Buffett. So there was money in the family. Billy lived on a trust.
But he also had pretty serious mental illness—bipolar—and instead of doing anything sensible with the money, he poured it into music. He basically helped create the modern Boston music scene. He was instrumental in building the Middle East as a venue. He’d put on shows for all kinds of artists—rock, jazz, everything. He’d scrape together whatever money he could and just make it happen. A lot of musicians in Boston got their first real shows because of Billy. He’d say, “Marvelous, marvelous—we’ll have you!” and then figure out how to actually do it afterward.
How did you get involved in the film?
A friend of mine, Mike Gill, started working on it. I came on to help produce and shape it. And then Mike died. Just suddenly. Congenital heart issue. Two days after saying, “Okay, let’s finish this.” So it became this thing we had to carry across the finish line for him.
We’ve shown it at some film festivals, but it’s still not fully out yet. There are still rights to clear, animation to pay for—it’s one of those projects where you’re always a little bit short of the finish line. But it’s close.
Did Looney Tunes ever have a niche trade? Or was it always selling everything?
It was always everything, and that’s one reason it survived. I’ve never known a specialty record store to stay in business very long. Punk-only, dance-only, whatever—it may be fun for a while, but it’s too narrow. You need lots of different kinds of people coming through the door. Collectors, audiophiles, people who are curious, people who just want to browse, people who come in because they heard about one thing and leave with another. That’s the point of a record store, really.
What kinds of customers do you get now?
You get people who collect records almost like baseball cards. The collector mentality. You get people who think of records as investments, which is goofy. Buy what you love, and if it becomes valuable, fine.
Then you get people who really do find records to be the most engaging home listening experience. And those are my people. Analog sound, vinyl, tube amp, good setup—you can get a very palpable, three-dimensional experience that way.
But then you also get people who come in wanting whatever the internet told them to want this week. And sometimes the internet tells them to want good stuff. I’m not saying it’s always bad. But it’s very strange when everybody wants the same thing all at once. A Dylan biopic comes out and suddenly there’s an uptick in Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger. There must have been some documentary about Nina Simone at one point because all of a sudden, everybody wanted Nina Simone. Or Etta James. Why do you all want Etta James now? She was always good. Why is everybody suddenly on the same wavelength?
You can’t sit there constantly monitoring social media trying to figure out why everybody walked in wanting the same title on the same day.
What’s your favorite thing about owning a record store?
Being able to share a passion with the people who walk through the door. What could be better than that? And I love finding a good collection. I love that this stuff doesn’t end up in a landfill. I love being able to turn somebody on to somebody who might otherwise be forgotten.
There’s a photo of Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the wall because nobody can copy him. He’s a one-off. Extraordinary. I saw him play once. If I put on one of his records and somebody says, “Who’s that guy with three saxophones in his mouth?”—that’s a good day.
Sharing enthusiasm. Sharing sound quality, too. That’s the best part.
And the least favorite part?
People being manipulated into liking inferior things.
Those Crosley suitcase turntables are awful. They look cute. They are cute. But they’re junk. They’re made by cynical companies and sold by cynical retailers to people who don’t know any better. I’ve never sold one. I’ve given them away, but only with a warning: this is a gateway drug. This is not the real thing. Use it as a stand to put a real record player on.
Same with cassettes. People come in wanting cassettes because they’ve been convinced that lo-fi is cool. If you’ve got a great Nakamichi deck, sure, cassettes can sound unbelievably good. But that’s not what they’ve got. They’ve got some little plastic thing and a vague idea that bad sound is somehow authentic. No. People used lo-fi gear because they couldn’t afford better gear.
What’s the most expensive record you ever sold?
Right before the pandemic lockdown, I bought a box of records at an estate sale for fifty bucks. Just a whole box. I got it home and pulled one out and thought, well, somebody finally made a nice reproduction of the Beatles butcher cover. Then I looked closer and thought, Oh my God, this thing is real.
It was a first-state butcher cover. Never pasted over. I’d had plenty of paste-overs over the years, and plenty of bad peel jobs, but I’d never seen one untouched. I had a friend sell it for me on eBay. I think we got seven or eight thousand dollars for it, which is probably less than we could have, but it got me through a couple months when there was no business at all.
That felt like the vinyl gods saying: Spare this poor man.
What was the best overall haul you ever got? Not just one record, but a whole collection where you thought: thank you, God, for leading me here.
To tell this story effectively, I’m going to have to use a hateful racial term that starts with an N. But I’m going to tell it.
This was early on, right after I bought into the store. I knew exactly how much money we had in the bank: $600. That was it. Six hundred dollars. I got a call from a woman in South Boston. She said her brother had died and left a lot of records, and they wanted to get rid of them.
So me and my friend Rich Gilbert—the legendary Rich Gilbert, who’s in that picture over there—we went over to South Boston. The records were in the basement. And I went downstairs and it was, without question, the greatest jazz and blues collection I have ever been offered. Ever. To this day. Rare LPs. Rare jazz 78s. Deep, serious, unbelievable stuff. I’m a Duke Ellington lover and am always looking for records from his sidemen; there were Lawrence Browns and Harry Carneys I hadn’t seen, and just so much more. And my heart just sank, because I knew I did not have nearly enough money to make a respectable offer. Not even close. I’m standing there thinking: This is the collection of a lifetime, and I cannot buy it.
So Rich and I are down there looking through everything, just trying to take it in, knowing we’re probably about to walk away from it. After a while, the two sisters come downstairs. Thick Boston accents. And they say, “I know, they’re all “n----- records.”
I’ve never had heroin, but I started to feel like this warmth go through my body as I realized: You do not value these records. You actively hate them. You hate what they represent. And because of that, I do not have to feel bad about giving you an absurdly lowball offer.
So I asked them for a piece of paper. And on that paper I made 600 hash marks. Because I knew that was literally all the money we had in the bank. I sat there for a while making all these marks, then I went upstairs and said, “Well, I can offer you six hundred dollars.”
They said, “Let me see the paper.” And they counted the hash marks. Then they said, “That’s 600, all right.” I thought: My God. This is happening.
Then, just when I thought the deal was done, one of them said, “Wait a minute. Besides the $600, you gotta go to Burger King and get me and my sister each a Whopper.” And I said, “You girls drive a hard bargain.”
So yes: six hundred dollars and two Whoppers. And I left with the greatest jazz and blues collection I’ve ever bought in my life.
A lot of business is about being competitive with your offers, being fair, reading the room. This was different. This was like the universe saying: These people are vile, you need these records, and you are getting this collection.
So yes, to this day, that was the best haul I ever got.
Dealer’s Choice
Before we finished, we asked Pat to take part in a new Record Lung segment we’re calling “Dealer’s Choice,” a loose riff on Amoeba’s “What’s in My Bag?” series.
The idea is simple: I gave Pat a hundred bucks and asked him to spend it for me. He could pick a single hundred-dollar record, or 100 one-dollar records, or anything in between.
Here’s what Pat came up with:
Cootie Williams – The Cootie Williams Sextet and Orchestra
“This is the kind of band where bebop is basically incubating—you’ve got all these players who are about to change everything, and you can hear it happening in real time.”Duke Ellington – The World of Duke Ellington, Vol. 2
“You think you know what Ellington sounds like—then this comes on and it’s like, oh… this is kind of out there.” (He refers here to “The Clothed Woman.”)Ferrante & Teicher – Soundproof
“They’re basically preparing the piano—messing with the strings—and applying it to pop music. All those wild sounds? That’s the piano. That’s the whole trick.”Sonny Boy Williamson – Bummer Road
“Sonny Boy’s going back and forth with Leonard Chess the whole time—he doesn’t want to leave Little Village, and Chess is basically trying to drag him into the modern record business.” (Here he’s referencing “Little Village.”)Herbie Mann – Live at the Whisky a Go Go
“Everyone’s taking great solos—Herbie, the sax, Roy Ayers—and then the guitar comes in and it’s like, What the fuck is that? It sounds like it’s from another band. Another planet.” (Pat is referring to “Philly Dog,” featuring guitarist Sonny Sharrock.)The Golden Gate Quartet – The Golden Chariot
“I don’t believe in god, and I’m glad, because he sounds terrifying.” (Pat referring to “Jezebel,” which he played and sang along to.)The Spencer Davis Group – I’m a Man
“Want to hear a 16-year-old British boy who the record execs tried to make sound like a 50-year-old black man?”Various Artists – Rural Blues, Vol. 2: Saturday Night Function
“The guitar’s completely out of tune—just wildly wrong.” (He refers here to Boozoo Chavis’s “Paper in My Shoe.”)Marvin Hamlisch – The Spy Who Loved Me (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Various Artists – Copulatin’ Blues
“People think the old blues is polite—it’s not. The lyrics are dirty. Everybody talked dirty. And here’s the proof.”
this segment rawks the effin house!!!!
Great piece. Nostalgic for me, spent several years working in The Record Gallery, record store in a west of Chicago suburb before becoming a full-time roadie for a little Bay Area band that became huge. I wouldn't trade those days and nights in the store (which also had the first head shop in the town...) for love or money.