Put Your Records On: Silver Spring 'Paradise' Keeps Tradition Alive

At a time when most any popular song can be made available to any number of portable devices with a few taps to a touch screen, it's wondrous that a shop specializing in used records and CDs is thriving in downtown Silver Spring. 

Joe's Record Paradise, located at 8216 Georgia Ave., is stuffed to the gills with crates of vinyl records from the most predictable artists to the most obscure. (Ever heard of Col. Bruce Hampton & Aquarium Rescue Unit?) Owner Johnson Lee, who inherited the business five years ago from his father, Joe Lee, said there's a burgeoning market for records of all kinds. 

"It’s sort of a mixed bag," said Lee. "We’ve got the most common stuff you’d ever think of, we’ve got things that no one has heard of. It’s just with enough space, we show it all."

The elder Lee opened Joe's in 1974 in Takoma Park, eventually moving the store five times, including stints in Aspen Hill, Baltimore and Rockville, before settling in Silver Spring three years ago. 

"It’s nice to be in Silver Spring," Lee, who grew up in Takoma Park and Silver Spring, told Patch. "Our family has a lot of history in Silver Spring...it's a good location."

Customers have also flocked to the new location, with some trekking across the county to keep up with the record store and others wandering in from Washington, DC to discover the goods.

"We’ve semi-tapped into a newer market when we moved down here, we had a lot of people come in from DC," Lee explained. "We had a lot of people selling us jazz and soul albums—it was great. The first two years we would get so many collections."

Everything in the store was traded or sold or given to Joe's, Lee said. Sometimes, music lovers will bring in two or three boxes of records and just give them to the store, he said. 

"Half of the stuff will be recyclable, most of it will be the kind of common stuff and couple of things will be the more nice stuff," Lee explained. "Even some of the more common stuff, like The Beatles or Pink Floyd, there’s always going to be teenagers, so we’re going to always need that stuff."

But there's a lot for the junkies and lovers of rare music, like Steven Majors, of Washington, DC, who scours Joe's for limited releases and then uploads the sounds to his YouTube channel.

“They live up to their name, trust me," Majors said. "I’m in heaven right now. This is incredible, what I’m finding right now.”

"There’s actually a lot of music—funk and soul, even some of the rock —it either didn’t make it to CD or it's just now being reissued," Lee said. "People are just now starting to find out about it. Some of these guys that didn’t sell any back then, now they’re on a reissued label and people are looking for those albums."

If you're one of those people, you may find them at Joe's.

The store is open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 12 p.m to 6 p.m. on Sunday. Call 301-JUKEBOX for more information.