Requiem for a record store

Drove downtown in the rain

Nine-thirty on a Tuesday night

Just to check out the late-night record shop

Call it impulsive, call it compulsive

Call it insane

But when I’m surrounded I just can’t stop.

— Barenaked Ladies

Earl Fowler

Even before the plague of Yoko’s vocal stylings on John Lennon albums made us all adept at moving the needle to avoid the heavy breathing and shrieking, there were a couple of Beatles tunes I routinely skipped in my LP salad days.

And I know I’m not alone.

One was on the 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club and was purely a George Harrison affair — the preachy, sitar-heavy “Within You Without You.” Lennon’s “mother superior” cannot fairly be blamed for jumping the gun on that one.

The other was the sound collage “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ 1968 eponymous double LP everyone called the White Album. Ono was all over that one. Lennon was all over her as they were making it.

These days, I doubt whether my hand is steady enough to pick up a stylus and skip a song I don’t want to hear. Way too much likelihood of a scratchy crash landing when I put it back down.

As with my lost abilities to recite pi to the 20th digit, “walk the dog” with a yoyo, or recklessly spin a pen around my fingers the way the late, great Dino Danelli used to twirl his drumsticks for the Young Rascals on the Ed Sullivan Show, I mourn my bygone capacity to experience joy at record stores.

It’s a nostalgia surely shared by millions. And speaking of being Shakey, Neil Young captured the experience of walking into a good record store pretty well in his 2013 autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace. The store he remembers here was in Hollywood, but every town of any size across North America had a spot or two just like this at the time:

There was a thing in Hollywood in the sixties called Teen Fair. It took place near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street across from what was then Wallich’s Music City, an amazing store. Let me describe Wallich’s for you: They sold all kinds of music there — 45s, LPs, sheet music, books about music — and in a little shop upstairs guitars and other instruments were displayed. There were listening booths where you could hear singles on headphones and see if you wanted to buy them. I spent a lot of time there. Of course, the place was crawling with flower children and beautiful hippie girls.

My own experience was much the same and I bet yours was as well, though in truth I don’t recall miles of aisles crawling with wispy Joni Mitchell types.

Sadly, nothing remotely approaching the louche record store scene from A Clockwork Orange in which protagonist Alex (Malcolm McDowell) encounters two avid Popsicle lickers ever unfolded on my many record store stops. Still, since seeing the movie as a teenager I have never been able to listen to the “Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement” without being stirred in a way old Ludwig surely never intended. (Same goes — double and sped up, as it were — for the frenetic calvary-charge conclusion to the “William Tell Overture” employed in director Stanley Kubrick’s immediately subsequent scene.)

Tell you what, though. I still have the used vinyl soundtrack from A Clockwork Orange that I bought, according to the still-affixed sticker, for $3 at a place in Saskatoon called Adelphi Books sometime in the seventies. The performer of the abridged version of the Fourth Movement in the record store scene, I just noticed, was one Walter Carlos, whose Switched on Bach had become the best-selling classical album of all time upon its release in 1968.

(Trivial Tidbits, Part One: That was also the year Carlos started living as a woman.)

That unveiling flashes me back to a clear and distinct memory of removing a Kinks LP from its cardboard sleeve in a second-hand record store called Tramp’s — 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, to be precise — and meticulously scrutinizing it for scratches or warps. There were several. I put it back. Even then it was a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world.

(Trivial Tidbits, Part Two: The song “Lola” was initially banned by the BBC for a reason that had nothing to do with gender fluidity. The song’s mention of champagne in a club down in old Soho tasting like Coca-Cola violated the Beeb’s policy on product placement, so Ray Davies had to interrupt an American tour to fly home to England and re-record the lyric as “cherry cola” for the release of the 45. C-O-L-A, cola.)

Here’s what wasn’t trivial: If you were a typical teen of the time, or of pretty much any time since the 1940s, your favourite record store was the one venue you could always count on as a place to mellow out, relax, unwind, chill — even if you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Especially if you weren’t looking for anything in particular.

Aside from the thrills attending unexpected finds, there were the informative and often hilarious liner notes in a pre-internet age when curiosity about celebrities was difficult to satisfy, let alone sate.

There was the unforgettable brilliance of fantastically shocking or simply fantastic album covers — the rainbow-begetting prism for Dark Side of the Moon, the zipper on Sticky Fingers, the pissed-on concrete piling parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey for Who’s Next, the topless girl holding the model airplane on Blind Faith.

Surtout, the sheer tactility of flipping through album stacks was a form of therapy, as hypnotic and entrancing as prayer beads.

I miss the labelled cardboard dividers that protruded above the rows of 45s and LPs to categorize them by various means: by genre, by band, by vocalist, by movie soundtrack, by country of origin and so on. By cracky.

I miss the expertise and personal touch of the staff, more or less dedicated to helping the  customers aptly described in the movie High Fidelity by John Cusack’s character early on as “mostly young men, who spent all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original — not re-released, underlined — Frank Zappa albums.”

We’ll get back to that.

I miss the bargain bins where you could get discounts of 90 per cent. I miss the Boxing Day sales in the pre-Amazon, pre-Black Friday days when Boxing Day was just one day and it was impossible to find a decent parking spot anywhere.

Yow! I even miss the head-shop gear and the incense sticks often sold as a side hustle, the groovy New Age posters and the underground weeklies, the Furry Freak Brothers and the paranoid anomie of Robert Crumb. The red polka dots on Zippy the Pinhead’s yellow muumuu. Are we having fun yet?

Those memories keep on truckin’ from a time to which most readers of this blog, I would wager, can readily relate (to employ an overused idiom from that era).

But if you think about movies over the last 70 years or so that tap into record store nostalgia, it’s obvious that it wasn’t only the boomers pickin’ up good vibrations at places like Sam the Record Man or hip retailers with such outtasite names as Cheap Thrills, Phantasmagoria and Rock en Stock.

They were hallowed places like churches or pubs, each one different and each one universal. Though the owners’ bottom-line objective might have been to make all sales vinyl, their real raison d’être was to calm nerves and alleviate the blues (often via the blues; still haven’t worked out the logistics on that one).

A rom-com that picked up on this nicely was 2000’s High Fidelity, the Cusack starrer (based on the Nick Hornby novel) that dropped a career-making role into the lap of an initially reluctant Jack Black. Cusack portrays Rob Gordon, the owner of Chicago’s Championship Vinyl (the novel is actually set in London), a record store where he and his two employees, ebullient Barry Judd (Black) and timid Dick (Todd Luiso), conform faithfully to my recollection of the winsome geeks and freaks who worked at these outfits half a century ago.

The three figure they understand everything there is to know about popular music (and do, in fact, evince an encyclopedic knowledge wherever their interests lie), compulsively compile “top five” song and album lists for every conceivable occasion, and openly mock customers whose tastes they consider “sentimental tacky crap.”

“Do we look like the kind of store that sells ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’? Go to the mall,” Barry tells an offended middle-aged man who’d planned to buy the Stevie Wonder hit for his daughter.

But that was too easy.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but off the top of my head, I can think of pivotal record store scenes in, let’s see: Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen’s Mickey and Dianne Wiest’s Holly connect under the watchful eye of Barry Gibb on the cover of his Now Voyager LP); the discount record store trashed by an upside down police car as John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd are chased through a mall in The Blues Brothers; the erotically charged scene in Before Sunrise in which Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) exchange shy come-hither looks while Kathy Bloom’s “Come Here” plays in a listening booth.

The best part of Pretty in Pink is the lip-synching dance number by Duckie (Jon Cryer’s breakout role) to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” while Andie (Molly Ringwald) sits on a record store counter with a Dweezil album prominently displayed behind her. (Trivial Tidbits, Part Three: Dweezil Zappa, elder son of Frank, dated both Ringwald and Demi Moore in the eighties; he was sort of the Bratta Packa Zappa.)

There’s that scene in Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age film Le Souffle Au Coeur in which 14-year-old Laurent (Benoît Ferreux) steals a Charlie Parker album he covets.

There’s Summer (Zooey Deschanel) declaring her love for Ringo Starr in a record store in (500) Days of Summer.

There’s Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) using a record store as an unlikely setting to tell Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) that: “Listen, I was thinking we should break up or whatever,” in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

There’s the very cool way — in a biopic that deserves a much bigger audience on this continent than it ever received — that Terri Hooley (Richard Domer), a DJ who opens a record store “on the most bombed half-mile in Europe” in Troubles-era Belfast, galvanizes a dormant punk scene in Good Vibrations.

Just three more before I end up sounding like a broken record.

Steve Buscemi’s wonderful turn as a middle-aged man caught up in the machinations of two cynical teen girls in Ghost World is an outstanding flick about a lonely blues audiophile. The record store scene stands out in Airheads, a mostly forgettable early Adam Sandler-Brendan Fraser effort about a struggling rock band that hijacks a Los Angeles radio station to get a demo aired.

And if you’re a Canadian of a certain age, you might recall that bathetic sequence in 1970’s Goin’ Down the Road in which Pete (Doug McGrath), a dazed and confused Cape Bretoner eking out a hard-scrabble existence in the Big Smoke, finds himself in what was then the A&A Records flagship on Yonge Street. I wasn’t paying that much attention, to be honest, but my subconscious mind must have inadvertently salted away a recollection of the scene in some godforsaken cranny in my now decrepit, almond-shaped amygdala.

Pete, usually a Stompin’ Tom Connors sort of guy, finds himself ensorcelled by a melancholy work by French composer Erik Satie that a beautiful young woman is playing on a store turntable. She leaves the store alone but he winds up buying the album. I found it moving that Satie, a heavy drinker like Pete who spent most of his adult life in cramped single rooms before his death in 1925, could speak so plaintively and eloquently across the decades to his fellow lost soul.

But of course, that’s one of music’s superpowers.

The gargantuan A&A Records and Sam the Record Man stores on Yonge Street were sonic cathedrals as well as multimillion-dollar businesses in the glory years when vinyl made the world go round at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. Both franchised their booming operations and opened outlets across Canada. At its peak, the Toronto Sam’s alone was said to house almost a million records.

Of course, we all know what happened next. Eight-track tapes came along, then cassettes and Sony Walkman players, then CDs which, by the turn of the millennium, were selling almost a billion units annually in the great republic to the south. Vinyl records were deemed by many to be outmoded, and millions sold their stereo equipment and liquidated their collections for a tiny fraction of what those discs are worth today.

Then came iPods, MP3s, file sharing, the peer-to-peer phenomenon and the whole confusing Napster era, which hollowed out the major music labels for a decade. And let’s not forget online record sales by Amazon and smaller players. Thousands of independent record stores shuttered their operations. Even the big music chain stores like Sam’s, A&A, HMV Canada and once-mighty Tower Records in the States packed it in.

The recording industry began to pick up again in the early 2010s, when streaming services out-pirated the pirates. But in an even more auspicious development propelled by curious kids and implacable audiophiles convinced (indisputably, in my opinion) that records deliver a richer, fuller sound than the thin gruel of other formats, vinyl has enjoyed a spectacular resurgence.

LPs have been on the upswing for almost 20 years now while CD sales have plummeted. You might remember reading that fanatical Taylor Swift legions bought 945,000 Midnights records in 2022, making it the first major album to sell more vinyl than CDs since 1987, two years before she was born.

This trend has of course reinvigorated the sprinkling of record store survivors that grimly toughed it out through the lean years, as well as inspiring many new independents to try their luck. In 2017, Ancaster, Ontario-based Sunrise Records plunged into the spin cycle, purchasing for lease 70 locations across the country formerly occupied by HMV Canada. By 2019, the chain had grown to 85 stores.

Now, it’s not that I don’t appreciate these new outlets.

They’re a welcome refuge on my annual Holiday Season trip to the mall. It’s gratifying to see that Blonde on Blonde, on which I spent $4.20 back in the day, is now selling for more than ten times that. Ditto for those special editions of Revolver or Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. If you really want to show off your audiophilic bona fides, you can drop two grand on a first edition rarity like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

But stop the music. It’s not only the prices that have changed. I never thought I could act this way and I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it. I don’t know where I went wrong, but the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back.

The mall stores and the new independents that I’ve visited, whether their vibes be spurious hipster or throwback faux bohemian, feel as inauthentic to me — as entirely factitious — as the bottomless well of repackaged, remastered, box-setted re-releases of demos and alternative versions of songs under construction that were never intended by the artists for public consumption. Have you ever heard about the so-called hippies? Down on the far side of the track?

It’s not them, it’s me. Well, maybe it’s a little bit them, it’s a little bit me.

I have long owned most of the LPs I will ever want. Browsing in the midst of a younger clientele who consider the Foo Fighters or Green Day to be old school, I can’t help feeling just a little excluded, obliterated, dropped, forgotten as flower seniors are apt to do whenever the plastic revolutionaries with the Bob Marley posters on the wall take the money and run.

In the vinyl analysis, that long, long, long final chord played on three pianos (and tracked four times) at the end of “A Day in the Life” is sounding. Gold-record lads and hippie girls must, as record cleaner brushes, come to dust.

What to do?

Well, the music is your special friend

Dance on fire as it intends

Music is your only friend

Until the end

Until the end

Until the end