Yap Zone: We Went to the Alameda Record Swap!

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve struck up a really rad partnership with the Alameda Record Swap, a market featuring good ol’ analog music sold by vendors all around the Bay Area (and beyond). They approached us in January about running ads in our COYOTE Weekly newsletter after we published our scoop about Bottom of the Hill’s upcoming closure, and we’ve been happily doing that ever since. We’ve been meaning to attend one of them as COYOTE (and not just individuals hoping to score yet another Masayoshi Takanaka album), and we finally got the chance to set up a table this past weekend with our snazzy banner.

Tabling, as any band merch hawker will tell you, is a strange, anxious art. You feel a bit like a carnival barker, a hustler with your internal radar tuned to ping the moment you detect someone’s pupils pointing in your direction.

To attract the musicheads of Alameda, our table was covered in tote bags (we’re thinking about opening an online COYOTE shop soon, by the way!), sign-up sheets on neon paper, and some of Rahawa’s favorite music books, including The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll and Anthony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound. Our mission: To share more about COYOTE, but to also learn more about what this very specific slice of people care about for the sake of our culture section.