Before Cleveland can rock, first it has Gotta Groove!

Ok, nominate me for the lamest blog post of the year. Fine. I'll own up to it. But let's get past that. Cause I have something truly cool you'll want to know about (assume you don't already).

You know all those industrial lofts downtown that we are always wringing are hands about, wishing something, anything, could go in there? Well, guess what? Things are going in there.

From art galleries to recording studios to artisan bicycle shops to micro-breweries, there are all sorts of new, small-scale operations at work in these buildings, and one of the most exciting new ones is both cool AND light manufacturing. Enter Gotta Groove Records, Cleveland's new record pressing plant. That's right, those kind of records. How apropos for the home of the Rock Hall, right?

Recently, Gotta Groove opened its doors to the folks like me (and many much cooler and important individuals) and between snagging the awesome wings and Indigo Imp beer, I managed to get a tour of what exactly happens when a record is made. Appropriately enough, my tour guide was none other than Tim Thornton, of Muttering Retreats fame.

Long story short, it starts out like a bunch of vinyl chips as you see in the first picture below and ends up like the kind of thing you can buy in cool record stores like Music Saves and Blue Arrow. (Check out I Rock Bill's much better post here, and be sure to check out the youtube clips at the bottom - you'll learn all you want and more about how vinyl pressing works.)

Below you'll find some of my favorite photos I snapped with my handy dandy iphone (I really need to get a big boy camera one of these days). Check them out. And if you ever have a need for some vinyl pressing, now you know you can stay local. Hey, if it is good enough for a band like Drummer (one of Gotta Groove's first customers), it's good enough for your band. Right?