Miami’s oldest indie record store on music history and how to snag an Olivia Rodrigo rarity

The most coveted Record Store Day exclusives in the country may be culled from inside a cramped music shop accessed by a narrow cement stairway sandwiched between an Asian Spa and a storefront travel agency and perched above a pharmacy.

The pounding heartbeat of South Florida’s oldest independent record store, Yesterday & Today Records, the one that has been the lifeblood for serious record collectors since 1981, is tucked here on the second-floor of a 1960s-era strip shopping plaza at 9274 SW 40th St. on Bird Road. The cluttered front window is plastered with vintage LP jackets like The Beatles’ “Something New,” Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots” and cumbias collections. The store draws customers from its West Miami-Dade neighborhood and beyond. Some come here for the hits. Some for nostalgia.

On Saturday, music lovers are expected to pack the shop in search of exclusive releases for Record Store Day (RSD), an annual event to celebrate independently owned record stores.

Music expertise

“People relate back to the Blockbuster days where you would go in and ask the sales rep, ‘What kind of movie should I watch?’ and they would give you suggestions. Same kind of thing here,” said Yesterday & Today Records customer Colton Randell as he chatted recently at the front counter with store owner Evan Chern, 69, about his purchases. The two, owner and customer, share an interest in 1960s’ psychedelic rock music so Randell keeps coming back to the store near his home.

Longtime customers know the store interchangeably by its full name or its nickname, Y&T. The handle was inspired by the title of a 1966 Beatles album but it also describes the makeup of the inventory the retailer carries: new sealed releases by contemporary acts and used vinyl LPs of vintage titles.

Chern can talk with ease and expertise about contemporaries like Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift as well as detail the four albums released between 1965 and 1969 by The 13th Floor Elevators, a Texan psychedelic rock band.

“You go to any other indie record stores down here, same thing,” Randell, 24, said. “All these owners have this vast library in their heads and they want to bestow it on their customers. Whoever you talk to in the store, they give you music and then you pass it on to other people so it’s kind of like a domino effect.”

RSD and Black Friday

The yellow brick road twists its way upstairs here where, on Saturday, some customers may find a copy of Elton John’s “Caribou: 50th Anniversary Edition” that has pressed only 3,000 copies on sky-blue vinyl for this 2024 Record Store Day occasion.

That strip mall and its rectangular Yesterday & Today store, framed by faded mustard-colored paint and black metal storefront railings, is about to get quite a pounding.

For Record Store Day, on the third Saturday of every April, hundreds of vinyl record fans will snake their way upstairs to get through Y&T’s front door in search of collectibles. The scene will play out at other participating indie record stores locally and internationally.

The throngs will come out once again in November for the related RSD Black Friday on a post-Thansgiving pilgrimage to find something other than a mass market “Taylor’s Edition” of one of Taylor’s Swift’s albums — though those are here, too.

Every other day of the year many more may come to Yesterday & Today to flip through stacks of the other thousands of used LPs and leftover RSD titles that are regularly on sale from the likes of hometown pop music favorites such as the Bee Gees and Jimmy Buffett to jazz icons like John Coltrane and Billie Holiday.

Preparing for Swift fans

Chern, a former DJ who once hosted an informative alternative music program, “Notes From the Underground,” on Miami community radio station WDNA, says he is prepared. Along with free soda and a drawing, he’ll keep a steady flow of five customers coming into the store for roughly 15-minute intervals to make their purchases and then let the next batch in and so forth given the tight quarters.

When a really “huge” title is a featured RSD exclusive, like an Olivia Rodrigo 45-rpm single this year or Swift’s “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions” 12-inch vinyl from RSD 2023, Chern may try another strategy to keep customers satisfied.

One concern with Record Store Day, he says, is that people may swoop in and gobble up hot titles and then sell them online for a big profit given the limited run of these titles. But then the true Taylor or Olivia fan, for instance, can come up short on Record Store Day.

So here’s what the soft-spoken Chern, who enunciates with the quiet grace of a lost Paul Simon brother, has tried in the past when he only has about 20 or 25 copies of a hot commodity like last year’s “The Long Pond Studio Sessions.”

“What I do, no big deal, is I go down the line of people and I say ‘Listen, here’s a paper, write down one thing that you really, really want and we’ll try to pull it for you.’ So at least we’re weeding them out and they were able to get what they really want,” Chern said from his perch on a stool inside the store near a window that spills in whatever available light is possible through the walls of inventory, posters, memorabilia and the vintage turntables placed against the glass.

Miami music memories

Chern is almost dwarfed by a stack of new arrivals on LPs and 45s in protective clear plastic sleeves to his left on the counter. These are yet to be organized into the sales bins. There’s a “Love and Mercy” Brian Wilson movie poster on the wall behind him, old stereo equipment to his right, and various rare previous RSD CD collectibles from the likes of late Kiss drummer Eric Carr starting down from a shelf above his head.

The store is stocked floor to ceiling with so many thousands of records Chern can’t even fathom a guess as to his exact on-hand inventory — an off-site mini storage warehouse holds his overflow. If the musty smell of vintage cardboard record jackets and paper inner sleeves is an intoxicant, Chern, who writes out your purchase by hand on a receipt pad like a record store clerk did at the defunct Spec’s Music in 1978, must be perpetually high.

No worries of writer’s cramp or foggy memories. The practiced Chern’s been a customer of Yesterday & Today from day one.

Chern says he helped his pal and Yesterday & Today founder Rich Ulloa unload records on the first day Ulloa opened his premier Y&T store that had been at 6344 Bird Road. Chern later worked at the former Y&T at Red Bird Shopping Center. Chern graduated to business partner of Ulloa’s in the record store in the mid-1990s, has been an owner of Y&T for 26 years and, after a couple moves, he’s housed the sole-remaining Y&T at this location in this Bird Road space for 20 or so years.

Ulloa ran several Yesterday & Today stores locally through the 1980s and 1990s from Miami to a dance music outlet on South Beach. The chain is now the one existing store Chern runs.

In 1991, Ulloa founded the separate Y&T Music label and management company that signed and promoted acts like the Mavericks and Mary Karlzen. Last fall Ulloa released a well-received tribute album to Badfinger’s Pete Ham and, in February, a compilation of Ham’s demos, “Gwent Gardens.”

Ulloa and Chern have been buddies since bonding in a joint eighth- and ninth-grade Spanish class at Miami’s Kinloch Middle School in the 1960s. Chern bought Yesterday & Today from Ulloa in 1998.

The annual Record Store Day event was conceived in 2007 to boost indie shops like Y&T through the release of limited and exclusive editions of vinyl records by names both mega like Rodrigo’s and obscure like 1960’s Greenwich Village folk trio Richard, Cam & Bert whose “Somewhere in Stars” album will be pressed onto transparent cherry vinyl on 1,200 copies for RSD 2024.

The first RSD was held in April 2008 and about 300 stores participated nationwide. Metallica opened that inaugural RSD with a performance at a California indie store.

“What Record Store Day means to the stores like Y&T? It means everything. It’s the biggest day of the year for all the independent music stores. It brings regular customers and new customers and creates just a tremendous buzz for all the individual stores that are involved in Record Store Day,” said Ulloa, who can immediately rattle off the date he founded Yesterday & Today Records — June 20, 1981. He opened its original location a little over three miles to the east on Bird Road.

Ulloa was inspired by independent ‘70s record stores in the Miami area like The Magic Minstrel that was distinguished by its King Crimson “In the Court of the Crimson King” mural on its front wall on South Dixie Highway, Twin Sounds a mile away across the street from the University of Miami — both reeking of incense — and two Miracle Mile stores, The Bookworm and The Sound of Music.

Chern keeps the vibe of those indie stories alive. He recalls these stores, too, like The Magic Minstrel and the pervasive incense. In the back of the record store “there was a parrot that was the most screwed up, it would cuss,” Chern says between chuckles.

And, at barely 13, there was that time Chern astonished the out-there staffer at the Gables’ The Bookworm when he gravitated to one of the most extremely psychedelic records on the market in the late fall of 1967.

“There was this guy from Boston and I’ll never forget walking in there and I picked up Jefferson Airplane’s ‘After Bathing at Baxter’s’ and he goes, ‘What’s a kid like you know about this stuff?’ and I said, ‘Yeah man, I’m into it!’”

You’ll find those King Crimson and Jefferson Airplane records and music for Parrotheads at Yesterday & Today, for certain. The heady aroma of incense? Perhaps not so much.

Where is RSD?

For this Saturday’s Record Store Day, customers will gather at Yesterday & Today or at one of South Florida’s next generation indie record stores. Among them:

▪ Sweat Records in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood that drew rocker Iggy Pop to its store for RSD 2017.

▪ Technique Records in Miami’s Upper East Side.

▪ Wynwood’s Lucky Records.

▪ Fort Lauderdale’s Radio-Active Records.

▪ The two We Got the Beats locations in Lauderhill or Oakland Park.

Hot titles for 2024

Many may be at these stores to snag the Olivia Rodrigo/Noah Kahan collaboration on a 7-inch 45, “Stick Season”/“Lacy” from the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge. That Rodrigo release as an exclusive vinyl single limited to 15,000 copies nationwide comes on the heels of her ongoing Guts World Tour that played a sold-out Kaseya Center in downtown Miami in March and a concurrent expanded deluxe digital release of her “Guts” album featuring bonus content initially released on vinyl as a RSD Black Friday exclusive last November. The Rodrigo/Kahan exclusive is the hot RSD title for young fans this year, according to Chern.

Collectors may also descend on Y&T, or the other indie stores, for one or more of these exclusives: A “Rumours” picture disc that hasn’t existed until now, which seems surprising given the album’s ubiquity. But that 1977 Fleetwood Mac blockbuster with its cover image of Stevie Nicks’ ballet-shoe clad leg straddling Mick Fleetwood’s thigh has a 7,500 copy-run for RSD 2024. A Mark Knopfler EP, “The Boy,” has a 3,000-copy run and features four new songs about boxing. The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die: The Instrumentals” also has 7,500 copies up for grabs at about 1,400 independent record stores like Y&T, Sweat, Technique and others in the United States and internationally.

Vinyl surges

Record Store Day aside, what keeps Yesterday & Today solvent from the 1990s, when the compact disc physical format sold in massive quantities, to today’s streaming era, is personalized service paired with the resurgence of vinyl, particularly among young buyers who re-bought albums their parents originally purchased such as Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.” Both of those oldies from the 1970s ranked among 2023’s 10 best-selling vinyl titles. And, of course, music on vinyl from an inescapable star of stage, screen and Spotify born in 1989.

Vinyl sales surged 14% in 2023 to 49.6 million vinyl albums sold, compared to 43.6 million in 2022, according to Statista. Sales were paced by Taylor Swift who was responsible for 7% of all vinyl albums sold in the U.S. — or nearly 3.5 million in 2023, according to Billboard.

On her own, Swift sold 3.484 million vinyl albums across several of her titles, led by 2023’s best-selling title and only million seller, “1989 (Taylor’s Version).“ One of every 15 vinyl albums sold in the U.S. in 2023 was a Swift title. Her RSD release, “The Long Pond Studio Sessions” was the first RSD title ever to debut among the Top 10 on Billboard’s all-genre album chart.

Vinyl sales have grown every year since 2006 and topped a million right around the first Record Store Day.

“The boon in vinyl sales could be attributed to the launch of Record Store Day,” Ulloa said. “I really believe that because when people see lines, blocks around the corner, to buy records, it creates a real buzz, and I just think the whole industry is built on that.”

Swift’s new studio album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” releases on Friday, April 19 — not part of RSD but assuredly stocked alongside those exclusives in indie stores and mass retailers that sell physical product.

KNOW MORE: Taylor Swift is now a class at the University of Miami. What will the students learn?

Personalized service

But at an independent store like Yesterday & Today the person you encounter at the cash register can tell you what Swift’s new music sounds like and where the inspiration for it came from.

Chern will point out “really cool” tidbits about a record a customer places atop his counter as he preps the old-fashioned sales receipt.

“It’s an original first-pressing,” Chern might tell them. “I just point out things about the music and the artists and recommend other things that they might like. So that’s somewhat of a personalized service they may not get at some other place. I think some people really like that.”

Chern may recommend businesses that fix or repair older turntables or help customers get new needles for the record players. He offers advice.

“I guess it’s personalized service somewhat across the board that we do that I think people appreciate, and that’s why maybe they’ll spend a little bit more here than ordering something on Amazon,” he said.

Along with the advice, Chern offers free protective clear plastic record sleeves to help customers preserve their purchase of a 12-inch vinyl record and its cardboard jacket.

“When people come in my store, let’s say that they purchase a bunch of records here, what I do as I’m writing them up is I kind of show them some things; I show them that we give them sleeves. I show them how to take care of the record. This is why we’re giving you a free plastic sleeve,” Chern says, gesturing toward a pile near his stool.

Key to success

Alex Hernandez, a 48-year-old customer who walked around the store recently in a 1975 “Kiss Alive!” concert T-shirt and who placed several hard rock albums by Mötley Crüe and Peter Criss’ obscure 1980 post-Kiss solo record, “Out of Control,” at the counter concurs.

“I’ve known Evan for 25 years so he always keeps me up to date on what’s special coming in. My specialty in music is I like a lot of vintage stuff whether it be Kiss, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Evan has a lot of stuff that’s super hard to find. Evan describes everything to a T and that’s what I like and his prices are reasonable,” Hernandez said.

“Evan keeps a high standard,” his pal, Ulloa, adds. “I think the key to Y&T’s success with Evan is a couple things: One, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all genres of music, especially rock music, but it’s more than that though. Evan also is really smart. He has a high standard of what he carries. In other words when you go to Y&T today, you know that when you’re buying records they are in great condition, they’re inspected, and they are priced very fairly. Evan’s very experienced. He’s been doing this for many years and people trust him and he’s carried on the Y&T name and it’s a tribute to him.”

Herald Staff Writer Howard Cohen has been a customer off and on at Yesterday & Today since the mid-1980s. Chern remembers the first item he ordered for Cohen from Y&T: an import copy on CD of Grace Slick’s 1980 solo album, “Dreams,” circa 1988. Perhaps not so surprising: Slick, who briefly attended the University of Miami, was a member of Chern’s beloved Jefferson Airplane.