A week ago my girlfriend and I went to Gothenburg with a friend. The purpose was to hang out but also to check out if there were some great places to find vinyl at. After all, Gothenburg is the unofficial "capitol of metal". Said and done, we ventured out into the city.
In Gothenburg there's this great place called Bengans, a big as well as one of the few still standing record stores in Sweden. There's always some good vinyl to be found there, although it's mostly new stuff and/or re-pressings of old classics. On the way over there I had actually seen that there was another record store.
We headed over there, towards this other place, somewhat confused (like lost tourists) even though I know the city very well. All of a sudden my girlfriend burts out, "there it is!", and in we went. Now this place looked a lot smaller than I had seen in the photos. We went straight towards the metal section and while it was not very big, it certainly was a very rich one.
Inside this place, I found all kinds of old school 80's heavy, thrash, speed and whatnot metal. I'm talking some real underground and/or obscure metal records, like the shit you find on forums on the web that are only available on vinyl. Now the best thing about it all was: they were very cheap. I mean, there we were standing, and me seeing all these old stuff which I listened to a lot ten years ago. Talk about a trip down memory lain, what nostalgia!
Boring as I am though, I decided to spend my share of money on some more common, yet awesome stuff. My girlfriend and I didn't have too much to spend, so we kept it relatively cheap. The big cake I decided to go for was an original pressing of Black Sabbath's first album in great condition. A gatefold, too. I mean, how awesome isn't that?! I went for another cheap one; an original pressing of Van Halen's debut. It was cheaper than I've seen it go for before, and in great condition as well. My girlfriend bought Twisted Sister's "Stay Hungry" and an original pressing of Iron Maiden's debut. Not too shabby, huh?
After our great bargains we headed back towards the inner city, just to realize we had entered the wrong record store. The store we had been heading towards before was a bit further down the street, but we didn't care since we had gotten such good records for great prices. Turned out, there was also a third record store on the very same street. The lesson of the day: don't always trust GPS:es, or perhaps mor correctly; don't trust yourself reading a GPS. Although it turned out probably for the better this time, it could possibly turn out towards the opposite next time around.
