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Record Store Day Recap: Creepoid at Main Street Music

"I shop here three times a month because I'm on a budget," Pat Troxell, who plays the drums for Philadelphia rock band Creepoid, said at Main Street Music in Manayunk during his band's hard driving mid-afternoon Record Store Day set on Saturday. "I pay for my art. Those who don't make art should buy more f--in records!"

On Saturday at Main Street, people were doing just that, despite the epic rain that one might have expected to be a crowd killer. By the time I showed up early in the afternoon, almost all of the specialty Record Store Day exclusives had been snapped up by music heads who waited on line outside for the store to open. (Forty copies of the Foo Fighters vinyl only covers album, Medium Rare, were all gone before lunch.)

I did get there in time, however, to grab a vinyl copy of the self-titled debut album by Amerindie obsessed Brit baby band Yuck (who play the First Unitarian Church on April 27), plus a limited edition single of "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive," the Hank Williams cover title track of Steve Earle's new T-Bone Burnett-produced album (which, by the way, is not on the album, if that makes any sense), as well as new discs by Anthony D'Amato and the Civil Wars. You could say that I made off with quite a haul.

All the boffo business done by independent music outlets on Record Store Day is enough to make you momentarily suspend disbelief and imagine things aren't so dire after all in the recording industry.

That's delusional thinking, of course. But I'd like to believe that indie operations like Main Street and a.k.a. in Old City and Hideaway in Chestnut Hill can and will find a way to survive, because music fans still have an urge to congregate and, it seems, a willingness to plunk down cash for bright and shiny objects they can hold in their hands. It's pretty to think so, anyway. And this story about the releative success of indie stores vis-a-vis music chains in the UK from The Guardian is further cause for guarded optimism. (Read it here.)

You can find streams of various Record Store Day exclusive songs, including ones by the Foos, Beastie Boys, Blitzen Trapper and Bad Brains at Antiquiet here. Below, Creepoid, who are pictured above, rock out in extremely close quarters on "Staircase," from their album Horse Heaven which I was unable to buy, because it was sold out.

Previously: ?uestlove on Stravinsky, Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Things His Father Taught Him