Between the Notes

Episode #7 - The Record Store

February 22, 2023 Jack Sharkey Season 1 Episode 7
Between the Notes
Episode #7 - The Record Store
Show Notes Transcript

If you've got one near you, go spend an afternoon rifling through the bins - it will do your soul good. If you don't have one near you, Jack and Bob take you back to a place that is most definitely missed - even if you've never actually been inside a real one.

Also in this episode: Not impressing a Marhsall Tucker Band Fan, the Earth Shop in Point Pleasant, NJ, Tower Records, LA, Camelot Music, the Good Rats, trouble at Wendy's when asking for Polynesian Sauce. 

BTN Episode #7

The Record Store

 

As a teenager, I spent more time in my two local records stores than I probably spent anywhere else outside of my bedroom fortress of solitude. I’d spend hours upon hours sifting through the bins, looking at the artwork, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the cool girls or hanging with my friends of a similar ilk. I was never alone and the store manager never bothered me because he knew I’d eventually buy something.

 

Man, when I had no money I’d come up with a list of at least twenty albums I’d want to buy, but as soon as I had some money in my pocket I could never find anything to buy. My Granny would send me $10 bucks or every once in a while the old man would throw me a fiver for mowing the lawn, cleaning up after the St. Bernard or taking out the trash and I’d hot foot it over to the Camelot Music next to the K-Mart and sometimes I had an idea of what I wanted but most of the time the money would just taunt me as I suffered from choice overload.

 

That little record store was Nirvana to me. There was always something good on the stereo. There were always other people there, and the cooler those other people were, the harder I tried to see what it was they were looking at. After the cool people left a row of bins, I'd slide myself over and see if I could get hip to what they were listening to. It never helped my coolness factor (which has hovered around 3 over the years), but by being a record store wallflower I got turned on to an awful lot of good music – crappy music too, but you get the point.

 

 

 

Anyway, there was a certain magic that happened at the record store, and we’ll dig into that when we come back. 

 

The most wonderful thing technology has given the music fan is quick access to an entire world’s worth of high-quality music, but there's another side to music that has fallen by the wayside: the actual collection and enjoyment of music.

 

A few years ago, before I broke free from the bad habit, my ever-patient S.O. and I skimmed through the premiere of one of those horrible singing contest shows. There was one marginally talented superstar-wannabe who said she was not only a great singer but was also a writer with "tons of content." Content. She was sixteen. That's what music has become to anyone born after 1975. Content. Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?

 

I’m listening to Good Rat's Tasty while writing this piece. If you lived outside of the New York metropolitan area and didn't go to college in the early 80s you probably never heard of Good Rats, and that's sad. They were amazing. Tasty is part of my cerebral playlist in the “just fun to listen to every once in a while” category. But I never considered a song to be content. That would be like thinking of a fond memory and calling it content. I would also have never known anything about the Good Rats if it wasn’t for Don, the burn-out slacker dude who managed my Camelot Music.

 

Everything is just content now. There is no art, there is just content. Content is that stuff that floods your timeline trying to dupe you into watching some dude crash his sport bike because he’s a tool. It’s an advertisement for something else. Content is crap. It has no long-lasting value beyond acting as click-bait. Raspberry Beret and Purple Rain are not content, that are fabrics in the quilt of life.

 

Music is more than some intangible file residing on some ephemeral cloud somewhere out there. We should have seen this coming the day U2 and Apple just put U2's new album in my iTunes account without asking me first, but we have all been far too enamored of the tech that brought us here. The thought process in the New Media Frontier is if U2 and Apple think I should have an album of music then they'll see to it that I have that album. I reject this. 

 

Staring Whistfully Out the Window Segment

My first decent paying gig as a musician came on a Friday night during June of my sophomore year of high school. I made $50. The next morning I walked to my local record store with my fifty bucks and spent forty-seven of it on music. With the left-over three dollars I bought a pack of cigarettes and lunch. To this day I remember (most) of the records I bought that day. At $4.99 a pop, you could buy a lot of music for $47.00. I even bought some music that sucked, but for the most part it was a good score. I never once considered it "content" or as part of some on-going effort to amass a giant collection of music. It had meaning to me, and the records that didn't were soon forgotten. 

 

BACK TO REALITY

A few months ago, I went on a shopping spree at Amazon and bought a bunch of vinyl and CDs. I still haven't listened to all of it. I don't remember everything I bought but I know some of it was pretty good, Pickwick and Houndmouth stand out. The problem is I really didn't enjoy the experience much. I felt like, I don't know, kind of like a sell-out to the mega-corporations that are trying to make me live in a way that assures them the most profit.

 

Clicking the check-out tab on a website and having UPS show up a few days later with a box of music is simply not the same thing as going out and rifling through bins and being part of the greater experience. 

 

But now that music has become nothing more than content, and musicians and artists mere content creators, it kind of makes sense. Music has finally become the sterile commodity the middle-men always hoped it would become.

 

Today we can take music with us everywhere – which ten years ago we all thought was going to be a great thing, and twenty years ago was a fantasy – but all of this portability made our musical lives nothing more than one endless ride in the elevator of some faceless and bleak suburban office building.

 

As humans, we tend to take for granted that which we have easy access to (I mean, how much more do you appreciate your mom now that you have to drive like three hours to visit her in the home?). The things that are always there for us lose their appeal after a while because they're so...familiar. It's the things we have to put in some effort in to enjoy we find the most precious. Sand is annoying. Gold is precious. They both come from the same place.

 

I reject the notion that a songwriter creates "content." My memories and emotions are not mere content pieces.

 

The next time you're in the mood for some new music, ignore what your streaming service says you should like and go to your local record store (if you are lucky enough to find one near you) and spend some time browsing and perusing. Allow yourself to experience the entire musical experience: the search, the acquisition and the exhilaration of stumbling across music you maybe never would have bought were it not for the communal experience of being a human being.

 

I like progress – I’m not an anachronist. But progress that muddles or dilutes art is a sham.