On a Saturday morning around eleven, before the lunch crowd has any reason to wander downtown, Dave Bauer is already behind the counter at Penny Lane Records sorting a crate of LPs someone dropped off the night before. He holds up a warped copy of a Foreigner album, considers it for a moment, and sets it in a box labeled “not today.” This is how most of his mornings go.
Dave has run Penny Lane on South Sixth Street for going on two decades now, which makes him something of a civic institution in Springfield whether he’d use that word or not. He wouldn’t. He’d say he just likes records and figured out how to pay rent doing it. That’s underselling it, but it’s also not entirely wrong.
The shop occupies a long, narrow space that feels like it was designed specifically to give you the sensation of being pleasantly lost. Bins run floor to ceiling along both walls — rock, soul, country, jazz, classical, a section Dave calls “miscellaneous” that is a chaos of surprising depth. There are stacks of 45s near the door, a wall of concert posters in various states of framing, and a turntable up front that plays whatever Dave feels like playing, which on the morning I stopped in was an obscure 1970s Italian prog record he’d acquired from an estate sale in Decatur. He did not explain this. He simply let it play.
The inventory leans toward used, which is where the value is. New releases show up — Dave keeps a rack near the register — but the used bins are the whole point. Prices are fair without being aggressive. You’ll find beat-up dollar records in one bin and clean original pressings priced accordingly in another. Dave knows what he has. He also knows what he doesn’t have, and if you ask about something specific, he’s likely to either pull it from somewhere in the back or tell you honestly he hasn’t seen one in years and not to hold your breath.
Springfield has had record stores come and go. Penny Lane has stayed, and the reason isn’t magic — it’s that Dave has built something closer to a community gathering point than a retail operation. On Record Store Day each April, the line out front starts forming before the shop opens and the place stays packed until close. Regular customers come in weekly and spend an hour flipping through bins they’ve already flipped through, which is exactly the point. There’s a certain kind of person who needs a place like this the way they need a good bar: not for any single transaction but for the cumulative effect of showing up regularly in a room with people who care about the same things.
Dave is not a talker by nature, but he’ll talk records. Ask him about something and you’ll get an actual opinion, not a sales pitch. He once spent fifteen minutes explaining to me why a particular reissue of a classic album was inferior to the original pressing and I should wait for a better copy. He was right, and I did wait, and he found me one three months later.
Parking on South Sixth isn’t always easy on weekends, but it’s worth the lap around the block. If you’re new to vinyl, Dave will not make you feel stupid about it. If you’ve been collecting for years, he will treat you as a peer. Either way, budget more time than you think you need. That’s not a warning. That’s the whole idea.
