Record Store Day: From a Pink Dave Matthews Reissue to Eazy-E’s Xmas Red, It’s the Most Colorful Black Friday Ever

For LP enthusiasts, the semi-annual Record Store Day is like being a kid in a candy store. Almost literally, because so many of these exclusive releases sport colored vinyl, it’s hard to know whether to spin them or chew them. When you pick up a “blue/purple/yellow splatter” record, you may reasonably wonder — is it a Gang of Four reissue, or a Gummi Bear?

It’s best to have eaten a full breakfast, then, before you head out to the Black Friday edition of Record Store Day. (It’s the slightly smaller cousin to the more publicized RSD that occurs every April.) While other shoppers are invading big-box stores, rock hounds will be lining up early Friday morning outside mom-and-pop music retailers to hunt among roughly 125 exclusive releases being unveiled.

Most of these have been pressed in quantities ranging from 1,500 to 5,000 copies, although you’ll find some runs of as many as 7,465 discs, which is how many were pressed of a 12-inch of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” (That one, you’ll probably still be able to find Saturday.) At the opposite end of the scale, only 250 copies have been pressed of the debut 7-inch single by California, a new band that’s the side project of Green Day member Jason White. It’s not always easy to know which titles will go immediately and which will still be sitting around by the next RSD, but there are certain perennials whose archival releases always go fast, like the Dave Matthews Band and Nine Inch Nails.

Yes, haters, we know how silly and ephemeral most of this sounds. Will Beatles fans snatch up a 12-inch single of Paul McCartney’s “Say Say Say” just because there’s a rare Jellybean Benitez remix on the flipside? Will all 7,000 copies of Beck’s “Dreams” fly out the door just because it comes on 180-gram blue vinyl in a shelf-defying “puffy sleeve”? If you have to ask why, stick with the deals on Adele at Target. But for the few, the proud — or maybe the truly shameless — here are 15 of the items worth hunting for this Friday. In a lot of cases, it’s even what’s in the grooves, not what tint they are, that has us excited.

But maybe it’s an EP-length expansion of Big Star’s “Jesus Christ” you want for Christmas. Or Andrew WK’s remixes of vintage Dictators tracks. Or a picture disc of Earth, Wind & Fire’s greatest hits. Or a historic summit between cult heroes the Mekons and Robbie Fulks. For all these and more, you can check out the list of Record Store Day’s releases in two formats: a downloadable PDF list, complete with quantities pressed, or a searchable database with more information on the content (or colors) of the individual titles.

Need to find out where the last record store is in your neighborhood? It’s at your fingertips here.