CITY LIGHTS:

I was a business reporter for a year at our sister paper, the Daily Pilot, and my favorite part of the job was covering people who, through some combination of pluck and good fortune, had found a way to make money off their offbeat passions.

There was the English woman who ran an authentic tea shop in the middle of a drab Costa Mesa strip mall, for one, or the pet shop manager who set up a “dog kissing booth” where proud owners could be photographed planting wet ones on Rover’s mouth.

Businesses like that remind us that, for all the effects of Wal-Mart and globalization, there will always be room for nonconformity. So I was pleasantly surprised the other week to find that Huntington Beach contains one of my favorite of all eccentric businesses: an old-fashioned vinyl record store. I spotted Vinyl Solution Records at 18822 Beach Blvd. en route to visiting the Coffee Mill at nearby Old World Village. In other words, I stumbled across a vinyl shop while on my way to a store containing almost nothing but dachshund merchandise. Huntington Beach is looking promising.

To people like myself who grew up before CDs came to town, those big, beautiful slabs of cardboard have an aura even the loveliest jewel box can’t match. That aura is all there at Vinyl Solutions, in which classic images of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd and others line the walls while hundreds of other weathered LPs fill the bins.

I’ve bummed through vinyl stores in San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Newport Beach and even the United Kingdom, and I’ve found that they invariably contain two things: that delicious smell of aging paper that usually comes with used bookstores, and an owner behind the counter who’s quick to brandish his opinion.

At Vinyl Solutions, that’s Darren “Drak” O’Connor, who grew up in Los Angeles, started his first record store in Glendale and has run Vinyl Solutions for 20 years.

When I visited the store Monday, O’Connor was busy rotating LPs on the store’s turntable — the Doors’ “L.A. Woman” played as we spoke — and sticking labels on new records that local bands had delivered to him by hand.

He showed me one from a local outfit whose cover featured a naked man with a pig’s head being hanged upside down.

It wouldn’t have been as vivid on a CD cover, believe me.

“If people tell me about a new band that’s only available to download on the Internet, I’m not even interested,” he said as Jim Morrison bellowed in the background.

“To me, that’s like listening to AM radio. I want something I can hold in my hands.”

Of course, to any record collector, there’s one Holy Grail: the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” album from 1966, in which the group posed on the cover in butcher smocks, surrounded by slabs of meat and decapitated plastic dolls, to protest Capitol Records’ “butchering” of their original British LPs. The cover was recalled quickly amid public outcry, and only a few of the originals still exist.

I asked O’Connor if he had a copy, and he said he’d gotten one about 10 years ago from a local kid who donated his parents’ record collection. Within days, a collector bought the butcher cover for a mere $1,800.

Still, like anyone in a niche market, O’Connor had his ear to the ground.

“They recently got a copy at Mr. C’s in Orange,” he told me.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].