"I'm curious what draws people down here, because I purposely don't have big signage up front," he said. "That's because I'm not looking for the average person off the street."
Rock Groove is a specialty store - an oasis for the discriminating music junkie.
The stock is heavy on offbeat reissues and hard-to-find imports, with plenty of progressive rock, 1960s pop and vintage blues. The north and south walls are given over to boxes of vinyl records.
Fonoroff acknowledges that it was risky to open a record store while digital downloads and online retail are revolutionizing the industry.
If the gamble pays off, it could signal that there's still room in the marketplace for a guy like Fonoroff, who believes in "the visceral thing of going to a record store, hearing music and getting turned on to stuff," rather than simply downloading it to an iPod.
"What I'm doing here is like an experiment," Fonoroff, 52, said between sips from a paper coffee cup. "I've noticed a few stores relocating behind buildings and in basements, wherever they can get low rent, because this is becoming a niche business now.
"
Independent music retailers are feeling the squeeze as consumers migrate to the Internet. About 900 independent stores have closed since 2003, leaving 2,700 or so nationwide, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a market research company in Studio City, Calif.
"Whether the store survives or not, I want to do it on my own terms at this point," Fonoroff said.
"I want the kind of store that I wanted in the first place. Most of the hit stuff people are downloading anyway, and I don't think the average person walking by is going to be looking for a Magma CD or a lot of the stuff I carry - Van Der Graaf Generator or something."
Fonoroff's untamed locks tumble over his ears, framing a pair of gold wire-rim glasses and a salt-and-pepper goatee.
He presides over his store like a rock-'n'-roll pharmacist, recommending albums to customers after sizing up their musical tastes. Like "Sgt. Pepper"?
Check out "Forever Changes" by Love. Dig the Zombies? Try the new Scritti Politti album on for size.
"A lot of people rely on me to varying degrees to turn them on to stuff," he said.
Fonoroff's initiation into the music business came behind a drum kit. He spent most of 1977 keeping time behind Alex Chilton (the former Box Tops and Big Star frontman), sharing bills at CBGB's with bands like the Talking Heads.
Later, Fonoroff helped form Paranoise - a "jazz-punk-funk" group, as he puts it - that released its debut album on Island Records in 1988. After Island rejected the second Paranoise album, Fonoroff rode out the 1990s selling records at a succession of Greenwich Village music shops.
By 2000, he had tired of living in Manhattan and working for other people.
When he heard that Flipside, a record store in Closter, N.J., was closing, Fonoroff took over the space.
He called the store Rock Groove, lifting the name from an old Bunny Wailer reggae album.
"Even then - and this was the days before the iPod - everybody was going, 'Oh, people are only going to buy online. Why are you opening up a record store?
' " said Fonoroff, who settled in Westwood, N.J. "I said, 'It's like "Field of Dreams.
" If you build it, they will come.' People will always want to shop at a good store."
And for a long time, they did.
By 2004, Fonoroff had scraped together enough money to start his own reissue label. Harvey Leeds, a loyal customer who happened to be the senior vice president for artist development at the Sony Music Label Group, helped Fonoroff wrangle the rights to release four out-of-print titles. One of them, a 1974 live album by West, Bruce Laing, has sold more than 3,000 copies, Fonoroff said.
By 2005, though, Fonoroff's numbers were down 30 percent. Rock Groove closed that August. Fonoroff thought he was done selling records until he heard that some independent music stores had downsized into unorthodox spaces, including basements.
He signed a lease on his current location in the spring. By May, Rock Groove Records was back in business.
News of the reopening was music to the ears of loyal customers, such as George Kapitanellis.
He credits Fonoroff with expanding his musical outlook.
"He turned me onto Terry Reid and Leaf Hound and Rory Gallagher and the Pentangle," said Kapitanellis, of Bergenfield. "He's good, you know, because if there's something I want, I can call him and say, 'Can you get this for me?
' Or if I have a tune in my head that I can't figure out, he can tell me what it is. He's a guru." Published on Sunday, December 24, 2006.
Last modified on 12/24/2006 at 12:06 am
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