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Brad Hales - Peoples Record

The Agit Reader – Motor City’s Spinning DJ Brad Hales

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By now, we all know about those celebrity DJs who command thousands of dollars to get flown to Ibiza to plug in their iPad and go do lines for the next seven hours. But there are still DJs out there who do things like lug their vinyl discs to a bar and actually jockey them. Like Detroit’s Brad Hales. As a lifelong collector, owner of a record store (People’s Records), and even a band dude (he is currently the bassist in Detroit space-punk band Human Eye), he has slowly but surely built a following as one of the top ’60s soul and R&B steel wheelers in the world (though his ear canals go off on many sonic byways). People fly him around every once in a while too, only it’s usually in coach on Spirit Airlines. He was recently in New York for four throwdowns, pairing up with pals like Jonathan Toubin, Mick Collins, and your’s truly. Before that, I caught him on the phone behind the counter of his shop, no doubt interrupting the more important activity of deep cleaning a Bunker Hill single or something.
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People's Records Detroit

Model D – Power to the Peoples: Record Store Rises from the Ashes

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With a little help from his friends, Brad Hales is still unpacking. The shelves of his personalized, one-of-kind shop are filling up with shoeboxes with labels like “Early James Brown,” or ’60s Funk.” The walls are being painted in primary colors, covered with bright, cheerful murals. It looks like he hired the Jackson 5 as interior designers.
Peoples Records, one of Metro Detroit’s most eclectic vinyl shops, is starting a new life in a new location. And bursting with new life it is.
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Peoples-Records-Detroit

Detroit Sounds Like This – Peoples Records

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After the original location was destroyed in a fire in 2008, owner Brad Hales lost most of his inventory but was able to salvage several boxes of 45s from the wreckage. They join the now 100,000-strong used 45s available in the store’s new space, which carries only secondhand vinyl and features bright, cheery psychedelic décor.
Read the full article here.

Peoples Records Detroit

Visit Detroit – Record Store Day Plays to Detroit's Soul (2013)

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There’s something about vinyl that is intoxicating. Maybe it’s the sleeve art, big and beautiful. Or, it could be the warm sound from the speakers, or perchance it’s the physicality of the thing, where there are literal grooves that contain the sound, not just bits and bytes.
For me, it’s also the memories. We had one of those large console cabinets where you opened the top and there was the record player, as well as storage for the records, and the big speakers were built in. Dad would rifle through his collection that ranged from Hendrix to Haydn, and you’d hear the “Aha!” when he found what he was looking for.

“We get people in here every week from Japan, Germany… all over,” said Hales, who is about to embark on a trip to Germany to play the Detroit sound for a thousand people, where here in Detroit he’d pull about 30 for the Northern Soul Sound, which Hales says actually refers the to the north of England, as they were looking for new things to dance to, and Detroit’s lesser-known acts became a big deal.”

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Peoples Records Detroit

Huffington Post Record Store Day 2012: Detroit-area Shops Celebrate

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Record Store Day 2012: Detroit-area Shops Celebrate With Live Music Events, Limited Editions, Deals
This Saturday, as people across the country celebrate a national holiday for music lovers, Detroit’s record shops will get in the game with deals and events galore.
Record Store Day, now in its fifth year, is a time to honor — and shop at — local, independent record shops. While opened with more of a whimper than a bang in Detroit when it launched in 2007, several years later the event has gathered plenty of steam and supporters.
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People’s Records – 4100 Woodward Ave, Detroit

CBS 62’s Guide to Metro Detroit’s Record Stores

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People’s Records – 4100 Woodward Ave, Detroit
Jazz and R&B collectors should mark People’s Records as a must-visit as the store keeps in stock every obscure artist from the 1920s to the 1980s. Strictly selling only used, People’s Records is the place to go if you have an old LP or 45 to sell. The store also has no CDs or cassettes, but makes up for it with its impressive collection of over 80,000 45’s, most with an emphasis on Motown and Northern Soul music.
See full article here.

Peoples Records Detroit

Rolling Stone – The Best Record Stores in the USA

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Peoples Records

Detroit, MI
After the original location was destroyed in a fire in 2008, owner Brad Hales lost most of his inventory but was able to salvage several boxes of 45s from the wreckage. They join the now 100,000-strong used 45s available in the store’s new space, which carries only secondhand vinyl and features bright, cheery psychedelic décor. Jazz and R&B collectors come to Peoples in droves, as the stock spans every esoteric strain from the Twenties to the Eighties. The shop’s new neighborhood is impoverished and “dodgy,” Hales says bluntly, but it now it includes a triumphant story.
– S.A.

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