3 Questions with Alex Rodriguez, A.K.A. Record Safari

With heat above 100 degrees on opening day of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival this past weekend in Indio, California, it was inevitable that Alex Rodriguez would see a lot of extra customers in the Record Safari store he curates annually at the festival. The shop’s powerful air conditioning keeps everything nice and cool, and all those precious new and vintage vinyl platters warp-free. 

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While some other festivals sell records and CDs, Coachella’s is the largest-known festival record store—and was fully stocked for Record Store Day this past weekend. Among the releases was a limited edition of festival act the Marias’ new single, “Back to Me.” In 2020, Rodriguez was the subject of a documentary—fittingly called Record Safari—that followed him in his search across the U.S. for vinyl for the store at Coachella.

He says the clientele spans from fanatics to the merely curious. “Some people say that they buy them just for the covers because they want to put it up on their wall,” Rodriguez says. “But for a younger generation, in their twenties or even younger, they didn’t grow up with it, right? They grew up with downloads, MP3, iPods, streaming. So this is completely new to them, and in a way, it’s new and exciting.”

He’s also been DJing at the festival since 2012, as DJ Record Safari, and last Saturday opened for Weezer’s afternoon set. We spoke during Weekend 1 of Coachella 2025.

Coachella having such a large record store on-site seems to make a statement about its love of vinyl. Do other festivals have a store like this?

There’s tons of music festivals that have small stores or multiple vendors or have a mini record swap or something, but we’re the largest record store at a festival, to the best of my knowledge. We carry a lot of records by the artists playing. Let’s say someone watches a band and they’ve never heard them, and now they’re like, “Wow, that was great!” They can come here and if we have the record in stock, they can buy it. And we also do a good chunk of new and a good chunk of used. So it caters to all types of record collectors. We have some CDs and cassettes as well, but it’s like 95 percent records.

Are you still traveling the country looking for vinyl? Where has the search been taking you?

I was in Europe for a month. I went to 10 different countries. And I just recently got back from Japan. I’m finding less and less in the United States. So now I’m branching out: “All right, I gotta go to other countries.” I went to Japan because the Japanese yen is pretty weak compared to the American dollar. I had to take advantage of that, so you can get a lot of records there for pretty cheap right now. That’s not a secret. I ran into 10 other stores from the United States there, and then there was tons of stores from Europe and Australia. Japan’s getting hit pretty hard right now for record buying. 

You just opened with a DJ set for Weezer on Saturday. How is it DJing at Coachella?

That was pretty cool because I actually was booked for the main stage and the Goldenvoice people knew I was a pretty big fan of Weezer. When they booked them as a special guest, they called me and said, “Hey, we know you love Weezer. Do you want us to move you to Mojave [stage] and then you can open up for ’em and watch ’em?” I was excited to do a full-on rock set. In all the years I’ve DJ’ed since 2012, I’ve never done just a full-on rock set. I tried to also play some artists that have recently passed away, like David Johansson from New York Dolls. It’s my way to say, “Whoa, he’ll never be able to play here now, so I’ll play him here.”

I’m pretty sure I’m the only DJ that’s ever played an all vinyl set [at Coachella]. I was told by someone at Goldenvoice [Coachella’s producer] that even if someone used records in the early 2000s, they still were using a laptop with it. Part of why I still continue to DJ is because I’m the only all-vinyl set you’re gonna get at Coachella. Which sometimes has problems—like, a record skips or sometimes the vibrations from the stage cause the needle to jump, or there’s been times where it’s too windy and my record’s flown off the table. But that’s all part of spinning records. 

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