Bergloff digs Spokane’s thrift scene one last time
Last week, local emcee/deejay/ producer Erick Bergloff hosted his farewell show, and he is now a resident of Portland.
But before he had a chance to split, I shadowed Bergloff on a record shopping spree, one of his deepest passions. In deejay speak it’s called “diggin’,” short for “diggin’ in the crates” or D.I.T.C.
During the trip, Bergloff uncovered trade secrets on the best spots to dig, Christian music gems and the omnipresence of Leo Sayer in thrift stores around Spokane.
We started at a place you wouldn’t expect to have rare groove vinyl, Classy Rack – Union Gospel, 301 W. Boone.
It’s a classic thrift shop: Most of the clientele had gray hair, and the clothes brought up images of Donny and Marie Osmond.
The first record Bergloff pulled off the shelf was an old “Puff the Magic Dragon” story album.
“Kids’ records have the weirdest tones because the orchestras are playing to the kids’ crazy imagination and total lack of attention span,” Bergloff said with a devilish smile.
He picked through a couple of classical albums, stuff his cohort and ex-Spokane producer Jeremy Hughes might dig.
Next, he flipped through a bin of Christian albums, raising his brow at a Mahalia Jackson record.
“Gospel music has the illest drum breaks and the beats always have a lot of flavor; ask (Spokane DJ) Cheddar Chad about that,” Bergloff said.
Then he pulled out the corniest looking album cover I have ever seen. It was an album by Leo Sayer, and Bergloff said Spokane thrift shops all have it in their inventory.
“There are endless copies of this floating around, I bet we see it at every shop we hit today,” Bergloff said.
The best thing about Classy Rack, if not the quirky selection, is the unreal prices. Most of the records Bergloff scanned through cost a quarter, others 75 cents.
“You can’t really front on 25 cent records,” he said.
Still, he didn’t quite find that little piece of gold-left-for-garbage, so we continued on, pumping beats in the car from Bergloff’s latest stock of creations on his MPC. One of the tracks he’s most proud of is a banger composed of samples from a pinball machine and a truck backing into a loading dock.
The next stop was a Volunteers of America thrift store, located at 1010 N. Atlantic.
As we entered, Bergloff reminded me to lock the car because the Volunteers won’t let him bring in the portable turntable and headphones he uses to test the condition of records.
Again, Bergloff went for the oddest albums: a soundtrack to the old school “Dr. Doolittle” movie, a couple of orchestral Christmas albums and two prospects he was most amped about, “Around the World With a Magic Organ” and an album by the Central Washington University Jazz Band.
“You can’t find this stuff in New York,” he said.
Would he be able to make these kinds of archeological breakthroughs in Portland? Yep, and then some. P.O. is one of Bergloff’s favorite places to shop out of town for records.
“Portland is untapped. It kills it for records. That’s one of the reasons I’m moving there,” he said.
Our last stop was at Drop Yer Drawers, near Gonzaga University where Bergloff found a Modern Jazz Quartet album. He promised to take me to a porn shop he swore he frequented because it has great used vinyl (wonder how he discovered that), but we never made it there. Guess I’ll have to hit that one on my next record-shopping excursion.