What are you supposed to do in a record store if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for? It’s a fair question, and the answer at Reckless Records on Broadway in Lakeview is: you wander, you flip, and you get interrupted by someone who works there who has a strong opinion about whatever you’re holding.
That’s not a complaint. It’s the whole point.
Dave Doig has been part of the Reckless operation for decades — the store opened its first location in 1987, and the Broadway shop, which replaced an earlier Wicker Park outpost as the flagship, has been running long enough that Doig and his colleagues have outlasted several waves of music retail apocalypse. When you ask him how, he shrugs and says something about the customers, then steers you toward a used jazz bin like that’s the only answer worth giving.
The store runs about three floors of usable space if you count the racks spilling toward the back, and the inventory is genuinely broad — new releases up front, deep used sections for rock, jazz, soul, hip-hop, electronic, classical, and a whole wall of 45s that draws a specific kind of obsessive on weekend mornings. Prices on used vinyl are honest: you’ll find plenty of LPs under $5, solid finds in the $8-15 range, and the occasional rarity priced accordingly, which is to say high but not insane.
The staff are the variable that makes or breaks a record store, and here they’re people who actually disagree with each other about music. That’s rarer than it sounds. One person at the counter will talk you into a reissue of something you’d never have considered; the person next to them will roll their eyes and suggest you go look at the Japanese pressing instead. You’re not getting consensus recommendations. You’re getting opinions, which is what you came for even if you didn’t know it.
Saturday afternoons are busy — busy in a way that still leaves room to stand at a bin for fifteen minutes without anyone making you feel like you should be moving faster. The Broadway neighborhood around it has changed considerably since the store landed there, but Reckless has kept its specific gravitational pull. People drive in from the suburbs. People walk over from Wrigleyville with no particular plan. College students come in hoping to look cool and sometimes leave actually educated.
The used CD section is larger than you’d expect and cheaper than it has any right to be. If you still own a player, you can walk out with a stack of fifteen albums for what you’d spend on two drinks down the street. Nobody’s going to judge you for buying CDs. Well. One person might. But they’ll still ring you up.
Reckless also buys collections, which means the inventory turns constantly. Coming back two weeks later, you will find different things. This is not an accident — it’s what sustains a place like this when streaming should have killed it by now.
If you show up without a list, start at the staff picks near the front, then drift left toward soul and R&B, then see what happens. Budget at least an hour. Budget more if you’re the kind of person who reads liner notes in the store and then buys the record anyway. The staff are used to that. They do it themselves.
