Sweet Peanut Records Brings Vinyl Reckoning to Upper West Side

Shout it loud, proud and un-kowtowed vinyl fiends: there’s a new wax shack in town! Though it’s been open just a few weeks, in that time, Sweet Peanut Records, at 463 Amsterdam Ave. near West 82nd Street, has already impressed both record store obsessives and passersby who keep an eye out for changes in the local retail landscape. This reporter, whose musical tastes range from Brahms symhonies to Sir Richard Bishop’s astonishing new solo acoustic guitar album on Drag City, “Hillbilly Erotica,” recently spent an hour with Sweet Peanut’s affable owner, Hunter Brammer. Why sell records? Why Amsterdam Avenue?

Brammer, a native North Carolinian turned Upper West Sider, began a career as a financial planner after graduating college in the mid-2010s. Living in the Washington DC area, the road ahead for both he and his wife, who was then getting her law degree, couldn’t have been better.

Starting in 2018, when one their friends moved up to the UWS; the Brammers came up ti visit, and soon fell in love with the nabe. This affection was sealed by a visit to The Dead Poet, at 450 Amsterdam Ave., near their friend’s apartment.

Brammer’s wife, meanwhile, graduated law school and accepting a position with a law firm in 2021, the couple moved to the city. This was just one change. During COVID times, Brammer had an epiphany about his life. Though he worked remotely with his finance group, he missed the office community. Even when Brammer returned to the office to see other people, he found himself bored with working in a cubicle.

In 2022, Brammer’s sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor from which she passed away four years later. This ordeal, combined with ongoing self-doubt about his financial career, forced Brammer into thinking about another path. His decision was sealed by a two-month cross-country road trip with Brammer, his wife and their chocolate Labrador, Sweet Peanut. Clearing his mind, Brammer decided to open a record store, a vocational 180. Or call it the flip side of a life reconsidered.

Already an audiophile, having collected and sold records on-line for years, Brammer’s original plan was to open up a retail space in his fifties.

Living nearby, he would often pass a retail space at 463 Amsterdam Ave. that was for rent. “It had good bones!” he exclaims. After looking at spaces in the outer boroughs, he zeroed in on a location close to home.

The landlord was delighted to rent the space, which was an eyeglass store. Brammer’s tasks were myriad; dealing with his personal inventory, obtaining collections to sell, furnishings (the wooden bins were built and stained in North Carolina by his father, friends, and Hunter himself) and setting up the space for retail.

The interior came together with the bins arriving via a U-Haul trailer, and, an Aireon chair, a remembrance of Brammer’s days in the financial world. The bins are on casters and can be moved for various events, like Sweet Peanuts July 17th opening day, when two DJs performed.

Small Talk at 82nd & Amsterdam

And who would be the market for new and vinyl LPs, cassette tapes, CD’s and books, bought and sold there? He pointed out that last year over $1 billion of LPs were sold, more than any other year. High schoolers and college students were the main focus for albums ranging from $25 to $100, favorite artists in mind. Music media is bought there as well as sold. We spied an album by Broadway legend Barbara Cook, lead co-star of “Candide” and “The Music Man” in the used section with a plastic sleeve over it for only $2.99, a price to charm anyone in Manhattan and the best of all possible worlds!

At this time,there are still over 2,000 LPs in storage that need to be inventoried and racked.

Brammer said that he often looks to buy collections out of the city. While his slight drawl may be disarming, after selling their car a week after moving to the city, the man from the land of Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” might be the person behind you in the rental car line, or sitting on a commuter train to the ‘burbs, looking for plastic gold in the region. Have cart, will travel.

Asked if he was worried about competition, Brammer said not in the least. He’s been a customer of 72nd Street’s Westsider Records since he moved to the West 80s. Local collections are a trove as well, with the neighborhood’s proximity to Lincoln Center, although he said the collectors and their progeny selling the albums lean towards the era of Sinatra and Streisand, not the classic and indie rock, pop, punk, funk, soul, reggae, metal techno, folk, old blues and Blue Note and other jazz from Albert Ayler to Joe Zawinul that gets the younger vinyl set and their hipper parents doing the boogaloo and shimmy-she-wobble flipping through the bins.

Or, as Charley Patton sang, “Just shake it, you can break it, you can hang it on the wall.” Indeed, Among the jewels on Sweet Peanut’s wall this day were John Lewis and Sascha Distel “Afternoon in Paris”; the Fall “Live a the Witch Trials” and the Velvet Underground’s all-time subway cover classic, “Loaded.”

Besides his own store, Straus News asked Brammer about his favorite neighborhood destinations. His answers included The Dead Poet and other Amsterdam Avenue bistros, Mermaid Tavern, Jacobs and Maison Pickle, Runaway Coffee, Pig and Khao, and Magpie. “Between West 72nd and 86th Streets,” he explained, “you can’t go wrong.”