Unlike so many successful small businesses, there was no business plan or clearly articulated vision for Revilla Grooves ‘n’ Gear. But record buyers from around the state, Staten Island and other parts of New York City and eastern Pennsylvania flock to the store.
Given that big chains like Best Buy are no longer selling compact discs, or much vinyl, and places like Princeton Record Exchange draw customers from hundreds of miles away, there is demand for new and used compact discs and new and used vinyl albums. Revilla Grooves ‘n’ Gear is situated at 126 North Main Street, Milltown, minutes from Routes 1 and 130 in North and New Brunswick.
Darren Revilla has tapped into this market through a combination of luck, good timing, and skills. Raised in Manalapan Township, near Freehold, Revilla got into music at a young age through one of his uncles. As a teen he frequented the old Record Setter on Route 18 in East Brunswick, which stocked thousands of new and used CDs and vinyl albums, some rare and collectible, and others next week’s haircut.
“I was influenced by the tastes of my uncle, who is 12 years older. He was listening to garage rock and other classic rock, and out of that I developed a serious taste for hard rock and heavy metal in my early teen years,” he said.
“In my college years at Rutgers, I was into soul and alternative rock, and I would dive back periodically into classic punk like the Ramones and classic rock like Led Zeppelin.” At Rutgers, the late folk-blues turned punk rock singer and actor David Johansen and his New York Dolls led him to other bands like Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden.
Revilla earned his bachelor’s in journalism and mass media in 1994. During his senior year, he had an off-campus apartment in New Brunswick with some friends and his girlfriend, Eileen, who would later become his wife. One day, he went back to his mother Patricia’s house in Manalapan — she worked in insurance in New York City for years, while his father, Nelson, held a variety of local jobs around Manalapan — and picked up a collection of 45 singles gathered over the years by his mother and her sister.
“We didn’t go anywhere for weeks! I fell in love with Archie Bell and The Drells, Kool and the Gang, early Marvin Gaye, and a whole bunch of other classic soul. As I’m finishing up at Rutgers I am shopping at Princeton Record Exchange every other weekend, spending my paycheck over there.”
He began hanging out and buying more records at the legendary store and applied twice for jobs there. Finally, one day in 1997, an alert staffer suggested to him he should be working there. Revilla explained he’d already applied twice and was quickly hired. There, he learned more about what makes a record rare and collectible and he had access to large collections that came from estate sales. While working at Legends Catering on Somerset Street and Easton Avenue, he began DJing in clubs in and around New Brunswick in 1995, and all of his DJing money went back into — what else? — buying more records.
When Revilla started at Princeton Record Exchange in November, 1997, the legendary store had already been sold by Barry Weisfeld to Jon Lambert.
“By the late 1990s, my entire world, except for my girlfriend, was records,” he explained. After two years of burning the candle at both ends, DJing in bars at night and working at PRX by day, he decided he might be better off with some kind of information tech job, so he attended DeVry Institute in North Brunswick, which led him to an apartment in nearby Milltown.
After three years at PRX, he went back to Legends Catering and worked as their IT guy with newfound computer skills. He and Eileen found an apartment at 128 North Main Street, next to the store he now rents, and he hung on to his Legends Catering job so he could work from home much of the time and look after their newborn son. He estimates he acquired about 7,000 records from 1994 to 2000.
“I needed to start selling some things off. eBay at the time was easy to navigate, so somewhere in early 2001 I started selling records on eBay using knowledge I had acquired at Princeton Record Exchange. There were some vinyl titles that I acquired there for $5 that I was now selling for $80 to $100. I began doing this on the side and thought I was going to get out of that and leave records, but instead I started dealing them because the DJing eventually dried up. Meantime, we had a second child and we bought a house.”
At his son’s ninth birthday party, a number of parents came over and were invited to hang around afterwards, he recalled.
“One of the fathers looks at a poster of Charlie Patton I have on the wall and says ‘Oh Charlie Patton, my Dad has records like that, he was a big 78 blues and jazz collector.’ His Dad had passed about 10 years prior to that, so I said, ‘Yes, I would like to see your dad’s old record collection.’ Months later, Revilla finally had a chance to look around the basement of his friend’s father’s house in Old Bridge. There, in the dark, he found Vocalion 78 rpm blues records and a Muddy Waters 78, before the influential guitarist and singer began his long relationship with Chess Records in Chicago. He also found a 78 rpm promotional record from BlueNote Records by boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons.
“I said, ‘Steve, let me take these two records home and do some research, see what they’re worth, and see if I can make you an offer on these and the rest of the collection.’” Revilla was able to sell the rare Ammons recording for $1,300 and got $50 for the Muddy Waters disc on eBay. He offered his friend Steve’s mother $10,000 for the collection from the basement in Old Bridge.
“At that point, $10,000 was every penny I had. I had to take out a home equity line of credit. I didn’t have that kind of money, but his mother agreed to it, and I bought a 20,000 piece 78 collection. I went from being a part-time dealer to having this incredible record collection. I started listing more on eBay and making more money with it, so I learned how to describe 78s and how to grade them [condition-wise]. I remember there were some clean Louis Armstrong discs on the Okeh label and a bunch of blues things.”
His friend Steve then told him about his late father’s best friend, who had another massive collection of 78s, which he also picked up.
“By 2010, I’m making enough money that I can probably leave my day job.” He sold the first $10,000 collection at a nifty profit via eBay in about six months.
“By this point, I’m surprised how well it’s all going, and I get an article written up about my business in The Star-Ledger, he says. “And, by this point, I have two storage units, and my basement is full of records.”
By the time he got halfway through selling that second collection online and at various record fairs, he decided to leave his day job at Legends Catering.
He opened a small store on North Main Street and began coming across used turntables that could play all these 78s, so he decided to register his business name in 2011 as Revilla Grooves ‘n’ Gear. He explained his initial idea was to remain an online-only store, but another friend alerted him over dinner one night to a former stamp collector’s store up the street that was going out of business.
“I said to my wife Eileen, ‘I should probably try to rent that place,’” he said, recalling that night in 2015. He and his wife rented the store’s current location at 126 North Main Street shortly after Eileen’s father was diagnosed with cancer. They began retrofitting it to keep their minds off his illness.
“Sadly, he never got to see us open the shop, and he was a very big supporter of what I was trying to do on eBay. We opened the shop on July 4, 2015.”
Since then, Revilla Grooves ‘n’ Gear has hosted a number of special events, including book and record signings and performances by area musicians. Revilla credits his brother Brendan and another Brendan, an experienced retail record man from the now-closed Vintage Vinyl store on Route 1 in Edison, with helping to keep the store profitable. The back room at Revilla Grooves has a small stage, and the store has hosted performances including members of the Dead Milkmen, Kuf Knotz and Christine Elise, The Wag, and Bobby Mahoney. Earlier this year, Patti Smith’s longtime guitarist-collaborator Lenny Kaye — another Rutgers College alum from the Class of 1967 — performed a laid-back acoustic-electric set at the store with bassist-keyboardist Tony Shanahan, who was raised in Milltown and whose family still runs Shanahan’s Bakery, famous for their Irish soda bread.
“I had no problem selling records over the years when I first started out, but I always had problems getting new stuff. I figured if I rented a space cheaply enough and put a big sign out front saying ‘We Buy Records’ I would come across a lot more, and people would start selling me records.”
While the store was focused on collectors and hard-to-find vinyl albums initially, Revilla and his crew have since expanded their offerings to include new and used compact discs and new and used stereo equipment from some very affordable CD players and stereo receivers to top-of-the-line turntable and sound systems.
“We run the gamut from beginner stuff to very high end equipment, but you can find a CD player here for less than $100,” he said, “and what we’ve found is a lot of young people driving around in their parents’ older cars want CDs for their vehicles. Used CD’s are cheaper now.”
Revilla Grooves & Gear, 126 North Main Street, Milltown. Record Store Day, a biannual event celebrating the spirit of the independent record store, is on Saturday, April 12. Stone Skipper & Ian Wolsten perform at the store on Saturday, April 19, at 6 p.m. Open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 732-447-3149 or www.revillagroovesngear.com.
