THE RECORD STORE

While driving my wife to work today we were listening to some music, something that’s always the case in my vehicle. I had put together a disc of songs by Ringo Starr and it got to the song “Goodnight Vienna”. Now keep in mind, this wasn’t a huge hit for Ringo by any means, but I liked the song. As I listened to it a flood of memories washed over me.

I remembered the first time I heard about this album coming out. It was a commercial that was running on TV at my grandparent’s house. Occasionally in the summers I would go back to Akron where I grew up to spend a week with them. By this time I was in my teens and a music lover. As I remembered seeing that commercial on TV in that location it made me think back to walking a block or two from their house to a local record store. Not a chain but an actual record store. I remembered that I bought The Rolling Stones IT’S ONLY ROCK N’ ROLL at that store. I also remember seeing Black Sabbath’s PARANOID there for the first time.

That got me to thinking about how sad it is how music and the appreciation of music has changed. Today when a young person wants to buy an album they simply log on to their amazon or iPod account and download it (those that do it legally). More often than not they don’t even bother with an entire album but just a song that they’ve heard. They lose so much not only in how they’re doing this but in what they’re doing.

That first loss is a trip to the record store. Those were always good times for me. My frequent destination was Wooden Nickle in Fort Wayne. You walked in and immediately were awash in music. Loud, but not too loud, music would play giving you some inkling of a new artist or release. The cover was posted by the counter and if you decided it was something you enjoyed you picked it up. If not you walked down the aisles, starting with the letter “A” and browsed through the albums that were on sale there until you reached “Z”.

Some might even remember the special promotion Wooden Nickle offered. With each purchase of so much you received an actual wooden token. Save so many and you got a discount on a purchase. My guess is there are still some of you out there in the area that have those tokens on hand somewhere.

The atmosphere of the record store was always different too. The smell of incense burned in the air, sold no doubt for those who smoked “illegal substances” at home but a part of our generation as well. The smell of new vinyl also wafted through the air. It was an experience just walking through the door.

It wasn’t just the artists that you were interested in either. It was the cover of the album itself. Artists and companies that spent little time considering this were left behind. A great album cover could draw interest in an artist. The king of album covers for me was always Roger Dean. Having done a number of album covers for yes over the years the one that always caught my eye was for DEMONS AND WIZARDS by Uriah Heep, one of the best album covers ever.

We were just like kids of today with little excess money on hand and we chose our albums wisely and with effort. If you weren’t desperate to own the latest release when it came out you could always wait to see if it made its way to the cut out racks, a place where much of my collection came from. I bought my first Michael Schenker Group album that way. But trying to decide on exactly which album to buy was something that was considered and thought over, not a flip decision.

Getting home was different too. Rather than just listen to the same song over and over or mixing it on a disc with other singles only, we listened to an entire album, start to finish. You place it on the turntable, lightly dropped the needle down and listened to side one. When it finished, you turned over the record and listened to side two. Unlike CDs where you can simply skip tracks, records weren’t that easy to do the same. It was easier to listen start to finish. The most amazing thing was that in doing so you often discovered a track that was as good as or sometimes better than the one you bought the album for. That was one of the best things about buying an entire album, hearing the rest of what the artist brought to the table. 

Today’s world is different. Young people download singles and make mix discs or just add those singles to their iPod or mp3 player. Album tracks are forgotten or never discovered. The effort to socialize and go somewhere that sells music, that puts new music on the CD player to listen to while in the store, to discover new music you might like doesn’t exist anymore. Instead you only know of new music through friends or what some web site tells you to listen to.

Worst of all is that more music is manufactured these days than in the past. By that I mean the artist themselves are created rather than discovered. Talent is less likely a part of an artists and appearance becomes central to their success. It’s all marketing and less quality. What sells is less about the music and more about the appearance of being a star.

Record stores still exist. Some cater to all vinyl while some have adopted more CDs than anything. Wooden Nickle still stands and has racks filled with CDs. The smells are still there, the incense and the wooden racks. They still feature music playing and will gladly tell you who the artist is. They support local artists and keep copies of their CDs on hand for sale. But each time I visit I notice that more often than not the clientele is less teens and more often adults.

It would be nice if parents would unplug their kids and take them to a record store now and then. If kids would look into new music coming down the pike rather than artists that were pushed at them like a new brand of cereal. If kids would take a moment or two to go back and listen to something that came out before they were born since most think the world only began with their date of birth. Imagine fresh ears discovering Jimi Hendrix…Joe Cocker…early Rolling Stones…The Beatles…Deep Purple…Hall & Oates…INXS…Marvin Gaye…Mott the Hoople…Janis Joplin…Neil Young…The Allman Brothers. For most teenagers they’ve never heard any of these artists yet know every song by Kanye or Katy Perry. For me that makes it a sad day for music. Make it change folks. Bring music back to today’s youth.

In an effort to bring back those memories of music we once listened to I began a Facebook page called Music Challenge. It began as a simple challenge with my friends, to go back and listen to an entire album each week and then come back and share that with the rest of the group. To list the name of the band/performer, album title, what you liked about that album, a picture of the cover and if possible a few of the songs via youtube. Since we began this it’s been a great pleasure to rediscover that great music we once listened to while watching the vinyl spin. Hopefully other will join our group and we can all bring back some more fond memories.