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.