"I went down to the sacred store / Where I'd heard the music years before ... " RIP Melody Record Shop

I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play
- American Pie, Don McLean (1971)

When I came to Washington in 1979, I had to find new places to buy music. Luckily, there were a number of good record shops in DC at the time. High up on the list was the Melody Record Shop at Dupont Circle. At the time, Melody was on the corner of Q St. and Connecticut Ave. (a few years later it moved further up Connecticut). In the September of 1979, one of the first albums I bought there was Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming. That same month, I picked up Dylan's Self-Portrait and Jethro Tull's Stormwatch. 

Over the years in Washington, I was a regular at the main record shops:

• Kemp Mill (good for recent releases)
• Second Story Books and Records (always a great selection of used records, I think the first record I bought there was John Lee Hooker's Endless Boogie)
• Olssons Books and Records (which was later my main source of CDs)
• Orpheus Records (in it's original Georgetown location; it later moved to Arlington before it quietly went out of business)
• There was also a weird shop in the Dupont area that later turned into the National Bank of Pakistan
• Tower Records (again, that was only a CD shop for me)

I bought my very last, new LP, vinyl, album on on June 1, 1988. Not sure where it was, but the album was U2's Under a Blood Red Sky.