Finding Connection at a Record Store 2500 Miles From Home

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

As I told you two weeks ago, I spent some days on a beach in Puerto Rico earlier this month. It was a much-needed escape, for a myriad of reasons, and I got to eat my weight in fresh lobster and watch a guy swim out into the surf with a harpoon gun and catch a couple octopi for dinner. It’s one of those trips that will stick with me for a long time, the best kind of vacation.

But the thing I’ll probably remember most isn’t the beach, the crustaceans or the sunburn. I’ll remember the 35 minutes I spent inside of Alba’s Music in Aguadilla. It was one of our first days on the northwestern coast, and my wife was still tired from our marathon of travelling, while I was bouncing off the walls at the sights and smells of everything. She decided to take an afternoon nap, and I decided to drive the 35 minutes in Aguadilla to the main record store in that half of Puerto Rico.

Calling Alba’s Music a record store is both perfect and woefully incomplete. They sell records, CDs, and tapes, sure, but they also sell a myriad of musical instruments—congas, that signature instrument of Tito Puente, chief among them—drinks and snacks, and multiple generations of electronic gizmos. There were solar panels for powering small rooms, telephones, cellphones, tape decks, and more electronics I recognized but I couldn’t place on a continuum between now and 1974. It was like being inside the mainframe.

There were multiple racks of records, arranged loosely between salsa, and everything else. I did some preliminary digging, finding some records and names I recognized—Fania! Willie Colon! Hector Lavoe! —but was mostly running into stuff I had never heard of. That’s what I was after; some people go to record stores with a list of white whales and grails; I try to go and find something I’ve never heard of. I pulled a few things out of the stacks—a Santos Colon record, and a record of what looked to be native Jibaro music, the name for music played by the men who worked in the sugar cane fields in Puerto Rico in the early 1900s.

It was at that point that the older man working the counter stepped from behind and introduced himself. In this part of Puerto Rico, English is a second language for most citizens, and despite the valiant efforts of Senora Wisnefski (RIP) in high school, Spanish could only be considered my second language if I was an infant.

“Yo hablo solo uno poquito de Espanol,” I said, a sentence I’d say a lot that week, meaning I only spoke a little Spanish.

“Si, un poquito de ingles,” he said back.

“Si, si, busco las bandas mas popular in Puerto Rico,” I said, asking for records by popular bands of Puerto Rico.

“Bad Bunny?” he asked.

“No, las bandas de salsa?” I asked.

“Ah, si, si,” he said, standing next to me.

The next 15 minutes, me and this man, perhaps the titular Alba, spent time going through about 250 records, him telling me in Spanish with a little English mixed in about each record he thought I should consider. Me, asking questions in English with broken Spanish mixed in, about the records he wanted me to consider. He pulled a Colombian salsa record out that I rejected saying only Puerto Rican music, which he fist-bumped me for. He told me about Moliendo Viedrio, a band he said was very, very popular in the ‘80s, and I’d later learn from Google are one of the most enduring bands from that period of Puerto Rican music.

We both agreed that Willie Colon was the best salsa musician ever, and both like Ray Barretto. For those 15 minutes, our ages, creeds, geographic birthrights, and everything else fell away, until we were just two people excitedly talking about music. I bought $90 worth of records. And while some of what I bought is not anything I’ll listen to again, the ones I liked are going to be records I have a story for for the rest of my life. It’s what record collecting is all about.

I don’t need to tell you that we live in tough, divisive times. It’s easy to let yourself be sucked into your phone, to wage battles both literal and figurative, to despair, to be sure that everything, for the first time in living memory, is getting worse. But life needs to be lived to be worth anything, and getting out there and finding connection with another person is all we really have. It took going 2500 miles from home for me to remember that. Here’s hoping you don’t have to travel as far.