Record Store Day or Demise?
Date:
04/20/2012 Contributor:
Saturday is Record Store Day. I only learned of this in today’s Boston Globe, so I guess record stores, those few in operation anyway, could still stand a lesson in Marketing 101. As it happens, I’ve already made plans to be at Integrity’n Music tomorrow for another of its regular in-store jazz sessions. Store owner Ed Kresch will present the New Unity Quintet, which features the drummer Jonathan Barber and other emerging jazz players from Hartford. Meet me in Wethersfield around 2.
Speaking of record stores, Leon Wieseltier, Literary Editor of The New Republic, published the essay Going to Melody in February about the closing of Melody Records in Washington, D. C. Wieseltier paid tribute to the store as “one of the primary scenes of my personal cultivation. For thirty years, it stimulated me, and provided a sanctuary from sadness and sterility. Going to Melody was a reliable way of improving my mind’s weather.”
Anyone accustomed to whiling away an afternoon scouring the stacks of a record store and eavesdropping on the conversations between patrons and the presiding discophiles on staff will appreciate Leon asserting that “the motive of my visits to the store was not acquisitiveness, it was inquisitiveness. I went there to engage in the time-honored intellectual and cultural activity known as browsing,” which he added, “is a method of humanistic education.” Wieseltier cites Amazon's new app Price Check as "the immediate cause of [Melody's} demise."
Closer to home, For the Record in Amherst and Dynamite Records in Northampton, Pioneer Valley institutions that once seemed as essential to the culture as any civic body, are both long gone. (I might add that Netflix just isn’t sealing the gap that opened for this cinephile when Pleasant Street Video closed its doors last summer.) And Jack Woker, proprietor of the venerable Stereo Jack's, the favored haunt of collectors and assorted eccentrics on Mass Ave in Cambridge for over 30 years, announced last spring that the store was losing its lease. For now, Jack’s has been given an extension that will keep it in business until August (at least), but the handwriting’s on the wall: a pizzeria up the block needs to expand, and there’s more money in dough than in vinyl.
When I sent this news to my list last year, I wondered what would bring us to Mass Ave anymore? Once the store is shuttered, it’ll mark the closing of one of the last outposts of spontaneous social connection for music lovers and collectors. Where will we go to enjoy a bit of dialogue with fellow devotees of Joe Henderson, Irma Thomas, Richard Thompson, Bill Charlap or Charlie Rich? Or to get a tip on something we missed, whether it was released last month or a half-century ago?
Besides Fenway Park and the Boston Garden, it was record stores that drew me to the Hub over forty years ago when I'd hitchhike from Worcester on pilgrimages to Skippy White's in Roxbury, Discount Records on Boylston Street, Harry Chickles on Gainsborough, and Cheapo in Central Square. Long before the advent of jazz history classes on college campuses, liner notes were as informative as anything on a jazz reading list, so even if I could afford only a couple of LP’s, I would read the backs of a dozen more while I made my selection, all the while knowing there were in-house consultants nearby. Alas, it’s just not our world anymore.
One of my correspondants wrote last year to say, "No, it's not our world anymore and it's not fair because it's not as if we were hogging the rest of it, only hanging on to a small but civilized patch where so much came together and even more had its own integrity." As Wieseltier puts it, “The disappearance of our bookstores and record stores [and video stores] constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.”
Drop me a line with your memories of shopping for records.
Comments
Time marches on . . .
. . . but not necessarily with my approval. Now, of course, even the CD/DVD stores are on their way out -- for it's all circulating in "The Cloud" now. A funny thing. for me -- back in 1970, long about this time of year, I did some free-lancing for Crawdaddy Magazine while I was back in NYC for a few weeks. Along with doing an interview with Annette Peacock, reviewing a show with Ian & Sylvia reincarnated as the Great Speckled Bird, and a solo album by John Sebastion, I concocted a fantasy piece set in the remote future (the '80s, I believe), wherein (shades of Al Gore) I sort of anticipated the internet. The "cloud" of transmissions was, in this fantasy world, called "The Song." And it was, shades of Occupy Wall St., Tahrir Square, et al, an instrument of revolt of such protean shape-shifting that the authorities were endlessly confounded.
So I guess; yes. I should - and a part of me sort of does - welcome these exponential unfoldings of artistic (and other) possibilities -- both the creation and the proliferation thereof.
But, guys and gals - and some grey heads may recall this - when I was 15 - 16 years old, and my first girlfriend later first wife and I went into a record store, the salesperson graciously, solicitously offered to play us cuts from the records were considering!
We felt that it was all inexpressibly special. And friends, it was.
The year? 1959. The album we settled on, after sampling about a half-dozen? Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come. Had you told me then that I would be waxing nostalgic about that stunningly revolutionary music some 60-plus years down the road, I would have found that absurd and ludicrous.
But here I am -- here we are. What a long, strange trip, indeed. Thanks for being one of my preeminent guides on the jazz music parts of the journey, Tom. Thanks to you, this music that I've loved from earliest memory has been vastly enriched. You are a regional treasure and, if only we could get you syndicated, you would be a national one as well. And who knows . . .
Roget
music store
Before the inimitable Integrity 'n Music, for me, there was Ray Beller's Music Store in Manchester, where I bought the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album, as well as Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'. After school and most Saturdays, I'd spend hours pawing through the bins and later on perused the sheet music with nearly the same gusto. It marked the beginning of a habit and, since my pockets were mostly empty, like Wieseltier, it was more about being inquistive than acquistive.
record stores
Just heard NPR story about a record store in LA Murrays record shop is for sale. The 90 year old owner and former rabbi said just not making any money, Looking for someone to buy collection and maybe donate to college or museum. I have fond memories of going to music store that had booths where you could listen to the records they had for sale. My mother got her start playing songs from the newest record releases on the piano at Woolworths in Oswego NY circa 1927 as a 16 year old. Yes you can hear any kind of music on the internet but the human touch, conversation and intimacy of finding new music has been lost with the demise of record stores.