The Last Real Record Store
A conversation with Todd Radict of Skele-tone Records: one of the last true record stores—punk-built, hand-run sanctuary where music still matters, and community still gathers.
Tattooed, sharp-eyed, and smiling like he’s halfway between sermon and story, Todd Radict built the kind of vinyl shop he grew up idolizing. One part museum, one part family hangout, all parts real. Skele-tone Records channels the ghosts of Bleecker Bob’s in Greenwich Village, Second Coming in Manhattan, and Tower Records at Broadway and East 4th. All gone now, of course. Swallowed by rising rents and a music industry reshaped by Napster, the shutdown of peer-to-peer file sharing, and the rise of Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and all the rest.
“I don’t want anybody to have to go all the way to Boston or New York City to find cool records,” he says.
The shop is split down the middle. On one side: cassette tapes and CDs, all meticulously categorized, a labyrinth of racks and impulse, watched over by old posters, Bernie stickers, handmade signs, and one jacket permanently posted like it’s still on duty. The counter is cluttered in the best way: Sharpies stuck to magnets because "I just lose shit so fast,” handwritten notes, flyers, gear, gear, old newspaper clippings, and more gear. It’s punk meets public utility.
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On the other side: vinyl. Bins upon bins, shelves stacked deep, a chaotic gospel of wax and cardboard, a beautiful hoard. The walls are smudged. The floor’s scuffed and stained. There’s dust in corners nobody’s gotten around to yet, and what you see isn’t even half. There’s more downstairs. Hidden stock. Backup gold. Thousands of records and none of it tracked by computer. “We write everything down by hand.” If you want a particular album, and you can’t find the artist, Todd says, “Just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you if I have it. Once I look at a [record sleeve], it stays in my brain. I might not remember my name, but I can remember what record is in what bin. I know every record, man. Every record. Seriously, it’s crazy.”
And every album brushed by hand with carbon fiber to chase static dust, wiped in slow circles with distilled water and isopropyl alcohol, worked along the grooves, then hand-dried with microfiber cloth and slipped into a fresh sleeve. Scattered among everything is the real-deal punk rock history: Johnny Thunders' boots, Stiv Bators' pants, Sid and Nancy's rings, Joey Ramone's t-shirt, relics from Todd’s days at CBGB.
Todd’s store is Todd’s mind turned inside out and let loose.
Originally from Portsmouth, Todd moved to New York City at 18 years old and grew up inside CBGB—Talking Heads, Patti Smith, all of them hauling gear in through the front door. Kids packed shoulder to shoulder, a sweatbox under a literal flophouse—the kind of music venue where the owner Hilly Kristal’s dog shit on the floor and beer soaked into the brick. Where The Ramones played twenty-minute-long sets, but mainly just argued with each other. And Todd lived that. Mopped it. Turned the lights on and off. You didn’t ever come out of CBGB unchanged.
Then Todd fronted The Radicts, think a pre-polish Rancid, and the Radicts’ 1991 record Rebel Sound turned underground classic. The torch of 1977 punk, just three chords and Todd’s snarl of a no-filler no pretense voice, carried into the shadowed chaos of a post-Reagan, hungover America. You didn’t hear The Radicts as much as feel them—loud, fast, and in your face.
He was living the punk rock ethos. CBGB, his band gaining traction, a couple records out, even touring overseas. By day, he worked construction to keep bills paid. “The hard life,” he said. Then one day, a scaffold fell on him, and the injury pushed him out. “You’ve got to walk everywhere in New York,” he said. “And here [in New Hampshire], it’s a lot easier.”
Todd moved back home to Portsmouth. He opened the original Skele-tone on Congress Street—vinyl, cassettes, studded bracelets, vintage shoes. People came to Portsmouth because it had unique stores, not national chains. And the rent was low enough that a punk record shop could survive. When you're in the business of non-essential retail, making your living off discretionary income, not food money or gas money, that margin is everything. The difference between open doors and a ‘for lease’ sign. Todd said in a Seacoast 2012 article, “There used to be shops like mine in Boston, but the rents got too high. I’m worried that this is happening in Portsmouth.”
So he began driving from town to town, Main Street to Main Street, not just looking for cheap rent—but for something real.
“Portsmouth had turned a little too ritzy… it wasn’t where I wanted to be.” Todd circled Rochester for three months. “Day, night, afternoon. Looked all over. Looked at stores. At that point, it was just Moe’s, Collectiques, and Jetpack on this block. It’s what Portsmouth used to look like when I was a kid.”
Whole blocks stood hollow—parking lots cracked with weeds, storefronts empty, dead trees leaning into old telephone poles. Locals still called it Rotten Rochester. Some complained about homelessness, needles in the grass. But Todd looked past the plywood and saw potential. “I realized the kids in this town needed a place to shop. They needed something like this [Skele-tone] so they don’t have to travel to get their music. I said, ‘yeah, let’s do it.’” He saw a stage, not a warning sign—a place where punk could pulse loud and unapologetic. And he didn’t just set up shop. He joined cleanups behind Jetpack, helped clear homeless encampments, and became something more than a record store owner. Todd became an unofficial urban steward—advocating for lights, for flowers, for beauty—building community by doing, not asking.
During COVID, Todd pivoted overnight—posting records to Facebook, fielding private messages, shipping boxes of vinyl to California, and hand-delivering records all up the coast when gas was cheap, with no website, no platform, no algorithm. Just music and word-of-mouth, built from the way certain albums feel in your hands. And the weight they carry that no Napster or Spotify playlist ever will.
Customers come from everywhere. Local families. Punk kids. Vinyl tourists. A guy just passing through who ends up staying for hours. A teenager looking for a specific pressing and leaving with five. A regular who brings coffee and lingers at the counter. There are no pop culture toys here. No licensed Funko rows. No generic band shirts that haven’t earned their place. Not a replica of the past, but a lived-in evolution—a space where kids thumb through records, parents introduce their teenagers to The Clash, and no one needs to leave town to find something that feels real.
And Todd knows—none of this lasts forever. But Skele-tone isn’t trying to be forever. It’s trying to be now. “I don’t know everything,” Todd says. “But I built this place with history and love. And people feel that when they walk in.”
“Music brings people together,” Todd says. “That’s what we’re missing. I think a lot of places have forgotten what they are. They lost the customer [because] they forgot how to connect.”
Skele-tone is one of those rare third spaces where kids, punks, families, loners can walk in, be seen, and hear something new, something old, and most importantly, belong, a private rebellion against isolation and the Amazon-ification of life.
And then, Todd shrugs, like the most obvious thing in the world: “I’d rather die in the shop than retire.”
Skele-tone Records
50L North Main St, Rochester, NH
(603) 948-1009
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Great piece Steve.