YOU should learn from your mistakes. If you’re business-minded, you can, and will, profit from them.

Take Rick Ward.

He’s got a record shop. Vinyl, mostly. Rare, mint condition copies of just about everything.

There was one day, back in the golden ‘80s when people were madly selling off their record collections for next to nothing and replacing them with compact discs, when Rick came across thousands of 78s and 10-inch records, spread over a back lawn.

“I was just buying (blues guitarist) Les Paul 10-inch records - new like they were straight from the shop - when this lady walked in and said: “I’ll give you $100 for the lot,” Rick says.

“So she got the whole lawn-full - thousands and thousands of records, and they were all mint.

“I thought: ‘I must do that sometime.’

“Did it plenty of times. Soon I had a house full of records I didn’t know what to do with, so I thought I might as well have a shop, rather than just give them away.”

He built up a collection that brought collectors to him like moths to a candle; and that, in turn, gave him a collection of contacts such that when the golden age came to an end and people came to rely on people like him to feed their addiction, he was still able to get his hands on records.

Rick still buys a lot of records.

Enough records that the DJs and other fanatics who pick over Porthole Records like ants at a picnic can come back month after month and do it again and again.

And they do.

Five minutes to 11 Friday morning, there’s a crowd waiting for the door to open. Ten minutes later a buyer is at every rack, fingers flying.

Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap … a sleeve is slid up, then slid down … slap, slap, slap, slap, slap … a sleeve is slid up and set aside … slap, slap, slap … and so on. Every set of fingers slapping through the goods ever so softly; the cumulative effect a machine-like hub-bub of extreme urgency.

The scene is something like a combination of John Cusak films.

Put the puppeteer-come-filing clerk from Being John Malkovich in the record shop owned by Cusak’s character in High Fidelity and you’ve got a rough picture of the intensity, colour and eccentricity.

All male, all deadly serious.

“Kiss, Creatures of the Night … you don’t see many of them,” says one bloke, astonished.

He doesn’t buy. Already got it.

Heavy-metal (glam-metal?) is big with a lot of people, but most Porthole customers are hip-hop DJs not looking for Kiss. Jazz, progressive rock, blues, folk … a good example of just about any genre - apart from glam-metal - can have an intriguing tidbit to offer a musical quilter.

Some collectors have quirky parameters.

This particular Friday someone rang and asked for records pressed by the ‘70s Australian label, Sweet Peach … anything put out by Sweet Peach.

Hard-metal fans are possibly the most hard-core.

“They always buy the vinyl and the CD - every format,” Rick says, a little in awe. “I think they’re obsessive, but there you go.”

Each to their own.

“Rick’s always had prime records here,” says Delta, a hip-hop artist.

“You know Herbie Hancock? There’s like a ukulele cover version of Herbie Hancock’s Palm Grease, off the Thrust album. Really slow, mood funk sort of shit. I got that here, for 50c or something.

“I actually found a copy of it first at the Brickworks markets, but it was scratched up. Then I found a brand-new copy here.

“A lot of dealers, they don’t love the music so much - they love the money. This guy, he loves the music, and that always makes it a better store … ah, Jesus!”

Another diamond goes onto Delta’s stack.

This Friday, the intensity is all the greater for Porthole having only just reopened - a year after fire and water destroyed most of its records, including Rick’s private collection of priceless artefacts upstairs.

It’s been a tough 12 months.

Without Rick’s rich sources of records, restocking would have been impossible.

As it is, it’s a collector’s dream.

The racks are full again and the shop has lost its only irritant - a chap who was once a constant presence at the counter, chain-smoking and picking on the customers’ selections.

Maura, Rick’s one-time assistant, says everyone could be assured of being assured that their “music was too soft”.

“It didn’t matter what they had, it was soft … shit,” she says. “Probably it wasn’t good for business, but Rick is one of these gentle types of people who doesn’t like to kick people out.”

While the shop was closed the law was changed.

No smoking, now.

That means no more put-downs at the counter. And what Rick does behind the counter is his business.

Some, such as that unlamented chap, might say that Rick’s taste in music is a little soft - prog-rock, mostly.

“Late ‘70s, early ‘80s psychedelica I'm into … and blues,” Rick says.

He was just getting into psychedelics when drafted into the Australian Army, which gave him a big dose of the blues. True, the army gave him money and sent him to where the music was hottest. Rick wasn’t happy, though. The art school student had tried to persuade the selection board that a diet short on steak and long on heavy-duty hallucinogenic chemicals had rendered him unsuitable for service.

“They said ‘Sorry mate, you’re going in’. I told them I wasn’t going to kill anyone.” Still, the authorities considered him A grade military material.

In his off-duty hours, Rick devoted his time to buying as many records as he could lay his hands on. On-duty, he devoted himself - with a clear idea of where he wasn’t going - to rendering his young comrades-in-arms very, very stoned.

Super-sized joints on route marches was the least of it.

“They kicked me out because I had a locker full of magic mushrooms,” Rick says. That is, whatever locker space wasn’t taken up by vinyl.

It was a locally-produced record that got him started - Johnny Broom and the Handles.

“When I wanted to hear it again I couldn’t find it, so all you could do was go and find the record … at garage sales and that. Well, there were some fantastic finds. I was the first one who was going ‘round buying records.

“I couldn’t go out now and find anything. There are 50,000 guys doing it.”

And besides, the garage sales and markets have just about dried up as sources of good records. No-one’s thinking vinyl is worthless nowadays.

Rick opened Porthole Records in 1995, just up the road. A year later he bought the place he’s in now.
Some people ring up and offer Rick records, some come in, but it’s the hard-earned contacts that bring in the wealth of diamonds that blow the DJs’ minds.

“I’m at the age now where there are people that know me who are selling off their collections - people a little bit older than me, who I might’ve got to know at record fairs, who say: ‘I’m ready to sell.’ These collections might not be my cup of tea … but they’ll be someone else’s cup of tea.”

Port Adelaide is his cup of tea.

Rick is the last Port Adelaide Ward in a line that goes back to the 1850s. The last surviving house beside the Birkenhead Bridge is the one he was born in. His father was raised in that house, too.

Mostly, the Wards have been shipwrights.

Rick’s great, great grandfather was secretary to wartime prime minister Billy Hughes. Another relative, Frederick Ward, was the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt. “I saw the death-mask of him, and he was (a dead-ringer for) my brother,” Rick says.

Thunderbolt married a beautiful half-native woman in New South Wales - the woman who famously swam out to the Cockatoo Island gaol with a saw and bust him out - hence the Aboriginal strain in the Ward bloodline.

It’s heady stuff, but Rick is not a man to volunteer anything. He’s a listener. Mostly, he listens to people talk records.

“You got some good records here, mate,” shouts a newcomer.

“A couple, yeah,” Rick says.

His regulars like to remind him of their Porthole finds.

“One I got here was the great lost Kinks album,” says Des - a veteran local collector. “Just so many great albums. I’ve got Iron Butterfly here, Moby Grape … all the ‘60s bands. Just look at the wall there … Jesus! You just don’t come across ‘em.
“And the prices are good.”

There’s a Beatles Gold Box for $300 and an original US pressing of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme for $100. Some stuff costs a lot more, most of it a lot less. The days of the 50c find are over, though.

This writer’s find of the day was the collected ravings of the late, unlamented Idi Amin, for $10. I also scored the Coltrane.

“I’ve never played the Idi Amin - it’d probably freak me out,” Rick says.

Each to their own.

- DEREK ROGERS