From Flat Rock to Missouri and Back Again

A Conversation with Tony DeLucca, Future Proprietor of B-Sharp Vintage Records, as taken from the Flat Rock Gazette.

 

The Monroe Street storefront that had been the subject of quiet speculation around town for the better part of a month looked, on the afternoon of our visit, like the inside of a very organized fever dream. Cardboard boxes lined the walls, sorted and labeled in what appeared to be a careful system. Milk crates held stacks of vinyl, sorted by genre and era. A folding table near the window held a turntable and a small stack of albums someone had apparently been working through. The space smelled like cardboard and possibility.

Tony DeLucca, the man responsible for all of it, was standing next to the sales counter, left behind by the previous tenant, Candles and Things, sorting through a crate of what appeared to be classic rock records when we arrived.

"Come on in," he said, without looking up. "Watch the boxes by the door."

We watched the boxes by the door.

In the corner, a man we didn't recognize was methodically working through another crate, pulling records out one at a time, examining them, and placing them into one of two piles. He did not look up or introduce himself.

We asked if he was an employee.

"No," said the man in the corner, “I’m helping, and you’re distracting me.”

We left it there.

Tony DeLucca is, depending on who you ask, either a Flat Rock native who left and came back or a man who had a perfectly good career elsewhere and gave it up for a box of records. He'd probably say both are true.

He grew up here. Graduated from Flat Rock High, left for the Army at eighteen, and spent the next ten years in service to his country. He finished his military career as an investigator at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

"Flat Rock wasn't somewhere I planned to come back to, other than to visit," he said, sliding a Fleetwood Mac record carefully into the crate. "It just sort of happened."

We asked what brought him back.

"Family," he said. "And then other things."

He didn't elaborate, and we didn't press.

The record shop was not, by his own admission, part of any plan. The whole thing started at an estate auction on the outskirts of town earlier this spring. A box of vinyl, one lot, five dollars. He wasn't even going to bid.

"Someone talked me into it," he said, and smiled at something he didn't share with us.

What arrived at his Monroe Street apartment several evenings later was considerably more than one box. The estate had found additional records in the property's basement, a full collection built over a lifetime, and delivered them along with the original lot. Tony DeLucca, who had not looked at a record player since high school, found himself suddenly in possession of several hundred albums and nowhere to put them.

"I called a guy," he said. “And it was either the best or worst mistake of my life.”

The man in the corner looked up briefly at this, then went back to his work.

We asked what he hoped B-Sharp would be for Flat Rock.

Tony thought about it for a moment, in the way of someone who has been thinking about it for a while but hasn't quite put it into words yet.

"A place," he said finally. "Just — a place. Somewhere you can come in and stay for a while. Find something you weren't looking for. Listen to something you forgot you loved." He paused. "There aren't enough places like that."

An opening date has not yet been announced. The Gazette will continue to follow developments as they unfold.

 

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B-Sharp Vintage Records will be located on Monroe Street, between the Flat Rock Post Office and Krensky's Antiques.