By Dinorah Prevost
Out of her camper van, she works a record player and blasts Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sex Machine.”
Arielle Stevenson does that with most of the used records she sells; it’s to show they aren’t scratched and actually play. Ahmad Jamal’s “Happy Moods” album is next in the queue. She picked up the technique while working at record stores around St. Petersburg.
Now, instead of working for someone else out of a brick-and-mortar store, Stevenson takes records on the road in her yellow 1972 Volkswagen van.
Stocked with around 1,000 vinyl records, she parks at events and markets across St. Pete as Hello Darlin’ Records. She also sells cassettes but doesn’t carry CDs, saying there’s “no love lost.”
Stevenson, 29, started Hello Darlin’ in December 2017 after a job change fell through. The USF St. Petersburg alum was leaving St. Pete Records to work a 9-to-5 job.
“I thought I had a gig in nonprofit and it didn’t work out, and so I pulled this out of my bag of tricks,” Stevenson said.
She was out of graduate school at USF St. Petersburg and hadn’t found a full-time job yet. So she said she started to weigh her options based on her skills.
“I thought, ‘What (experience) do I got?’ I’ve worked in record stores and worked in records for a long time… and I know how to do a mobile business. I know how to do communications and branding,” she said.
Stevenson started working in radio at WMNF in Tampa while attending Largo High School. She had a nighttime show by the time she was a senior and had “free range” over all the vinyl records.
“Hello Darlin’” came from country singer Conway Twitty’s song of the same name.
Stevenson said it was an easy choice to run her business out of a Volkswagen. She was constantly around them growing up.
“Everybody in my family did Volkswagen restoration,” she said. “We always said, ‘Keep it rusty and get it running.’ So we didn’t do too much body work ever. The only thing I did (to my van) was take out the stove (and) fridge so that I could have more room for gear.”
The inside of her van is “all original,” except for some blue paint and stickers on the roof. But under the hood, it’s a different story.
“It has had so many engines, so many lives before me,” she said.
Plus, she finds Volkswagens cooler than your average car.
“I’ve always loved Volkswagens, and people respond to them in a way that they don’t respond to other cars. Like if a Toyota Corolla rolls up, people aren’t like ‘Oh my god!’” Stevenson said.
“Everything in my life revolved… around Volkswagens. So eventually I thought, ‘Whatever (my business) is, put it in a bus,’” she said. “I was always trying to figure out how to squish a side hustle and Volkswagen-y life together.”
Along with her side hustle, Stevenson writes about music for Creative Loafing and has been a stringer on and off for the New York Times since 2012.
“Honestly in the last year, I’ve been working on a memoir about some heavy stuff that happened to me,” she said. “As a journalist, we’re pretty serious people. We deal with a lot of heavy shit. (So running Hello Darlin’) is like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.”
As a woman running a mobile record store, Stevenson said people often ask her how did the bus “get there” and who the records belong to.
She said those people, overwhelmingly, are men.
