From 2023
Like many babies of the family, Luke Sardello’s youth was set to the soundtrack of his older sibling’s albums. For him, that meant classic rock, Journey, and the like. It all changed in junior high when a friend played for him Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
“The way it sounded was like nothing I’d ever heard,” says Sardello, who now co-owns the Josey Records retail shops, record label Skylark Soul Co., and the recently launched Tuned In Grading, a biz that grades vinyl records and encapsulates them in tamper-proof packaging. “That record was one of the first that really threw a bunch of stuff at the wall with sampling. It almost had some punk elements to it. It was very loud. And it changed the way rap sounded.”
He got a job at Bill’s Records and Tapes while in high school. “That’s when the bug really caught me,” Sardello says. The “bug” being record collecting. Sardello was getting his hands on European imports—The Cure, The Smiths—that weren’t as easy to find at chain stores like Sound Warehouse. He also began falling into musical rabbit holes by reading the liner notes of house music and hip-hop albums to find the songs’ musical origins. “At the time, hip-hop was based a lot on jazz and soul of the ’60s and ’70s,” Sardello says, “and house music was very much based on disco from the ’70s and early ’80s.”
He started spinning at places like Deep Ellum’s Club Clearview, where a buddy worked, and he did sets at the Hazy Daze underground parties. “That was kind of a renegade, probably illegal, thing,” Sardello says of the latter. “They would basically set up a large sound system on a farm 30 or 45 minutes out of town. Nobody would know where it was until the day.” This was, of course, before cellphones. People called a number via landline to hear a recorded message with directions. “You’d have a couple thousand people come out, and some of them would camp and stay the night. It was a different time. Now, you know, they’re called festivals.”
The records are “vaguely organized” by genre and era.
Around 2005, Sardello’s record collection was rendered obsolete, at least in terms of live sets, as software programs such as Serato took over the DJ booth. At a recent gig at It’ll Do Club, he took USB drives. A week later, though, he carted a selection of LPs over to Oak Cliff’s LadyLove Lounge & Sound, which is specifically billed as a “vinyl record listening lounge.”
Sardello’s dedication to vinyl has never wavered. Through 25 years working in corporate America, and certainly after opening Josey in 2014, he has dug through enough crates to amass an estimated 50,000 records. The collection is “vaguely organized” by genre and time period, but it’s not unusual for him to lose hours looking for a specific album.
Yet while he doesn’t always know where the records have ended up, he seems to have a story behind each acquisition. Is it possible that Sardello can pull a memory for all 50,000? He looks up to the ceiling for a moment, as if mentally flicking through a mile-high filing cabinet.
“I do have a pretty good recollection of where stuff came from,” Sardello finally says. “That’s probably why I can’t remember anything else.”
Luke Sardello’s Greatest Hits
1. Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth for Christ Choir, Like a Ship … (Without a Sail) (1971)
“I came across this at a record show about 15 years ago. I didn’t know what it was, but something about it looked interesting. The guy wanted $35, which at the time I thought was expensive for a gospel record, but I bought it anyway. Now it’s like an $800 or $900 record. There’s a song on there called ‘Like a Ship.’ Two years ago, we made a compilation record for Record Store Day called The Truth to Power Project, and Leon Bridges did a cover. He grew up in the church singing gospel songs, so it made sense. He really raised the profile of the record overall, and we were able to donate almost $100,000 to four nonprofits.”
2. Jim Sullivan, U.F.O. (1969)
“Jim Sullivan was an L.A. singer-songwriter who recorded this album then [years later] decided he was going to drive to Nashville. Somewhere in New Mexico, he disappeared. There’s a whole conspiracy theory that he was abducted by aliens. I got this record with a friend. We had gone to Seven Points, about an hour southeast, and we stumbled across a guy who had a barbershop in the front and collectibles in the back. My friend found this but gave it to me because he knew I was looking for it. It’s been reissued, but this is an original copy from when it was made in the late ’60s. [Sullivan] made maybe 300 or 500 of them. I haven’t seen a copy sell in over 10 years.”
3. The Equatics, Doin It!!!! (1972)
“I’m not a real big fan of flying, but I had to go to New York quite a bit for work. So I would drive to Mississippi then catch a train from Mississippi to New York. But that allowed me to make stops along the way, and I found this at a record store in southern Virginia. It was this group of kids who won a Pepsi battle of the bands contest and got to record an album that’s a mix of cover songs and originals. They only pressed 100 of these. The last copy I saw sell was about $3,000.”
4. Timothy McNealy, Funky Movement No. 2 / Sagittarius Black (1972)
“This was a local guy who was a keyboard player. I think he made 300 copies of each and just passed them out at local stores, maybe played a couple shows, but ended up becoming a reverend. In the early 2000s, a couple friends of mine found him, and we were able to do an interview and talk him into doing a live show. It kind of turned people on to him who had never heard of him. So probably half of my collection is these 45s. They were just recorded as one song on each side, and they would release it this way and then never do an album.” [Ed note: Timothy McNealy died in 2017, 11 days after releasing his first full album at the age of 72, a compilation of previously released singles.]
5. Bastards of Soul, Give it Right Back (November 2023)
“The Bastards of Soul record will be out in November, and there’s a documentary that is coming out with it. That band includes Danny Balis, who was on The Ticket. He’s now at The Freak. But their lead singer, Chadwick Murray, during the pandemic, tragically died. So this is their last album, of all the music that was left over, or that they had started to record that he wasn’t able to finish, and the documentary will tie in to that. The summer before he passed, we did a session where we ended up recording a lot of video at the studio.”
6. Shabazz 3, Late Nite with Shabazz 3 (November 2023)
“This came out in 2000 originally, but they didn’t promote it very much. It made a little bit of noise locally but not a whole lot, and then it became a big collector’s item in Japan. The original copies were selling for $200 or $300. Skin [Jeff “Skin” Wade, Sardello’s record label co-owner] is a friend of one of those guys, so we reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, do you mind if we put that back out?’”
This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine with the headline, “In the Groove.” Write to [email protected].
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