"Things are never quite the way they seem..."

WOXY
Back to the Future Playlist
Saturday, 11 October, 2003

8 a.m.
Thompson Twins – “Lies”
The Go Betweens – “Karen”
The Connells – “Fun & Games”
Poi Dog Pondering – “Jackass Ginger”
Hot House Flowers – “Don’t Go”
Tom Robinson Band – “2-4-6-8 Motorway”
Happy Mondays – “Kinky Afro”
The Cure – “Jumping Someone Else’s Train”
Gary Clail – “Human Nature”
Felt w/ Liz Frasier – “Primitive Painters”
Dumptruck – “Back Where I Belong”
Matthew Sweet – “We’re the Same”
Deee-Lite – “Groove is in the Heart”
David Sylvian – “Red Guitar”
The Pogues – “Dirty Old Town”

9 a.m.
John Hiatt – “Thing Called Love”
Royal Crescent Mob – “Love Rollercoaster”
The Cramps – “Surfin’ Dead”
Television – “Friction”
Pete Shelley – “Homosapien”
Nick Cave – “Deanna”
Love & Rockets – “Haunted When the Minutes Drag”
Gang of Four – “I Love a Man in a Uniform”
Falco – “Rock Me Amadeus”
Edie Brickell – “What I Am”
Circle Jerks – “American Heavy Metal Weekend”
Duran Duran – “Planet Earth”
808 State – “Moses”

10 a.m.
Squeeze – “Take Me I’m Yours”
Talking Heads – “Cities”
Terence Trent D’arby – “She Kissed Me”
Pet Shop Boys – “Suburbia”
Golden Palominos – “Clustering Train”
Flesh for Lulu – “Postcards from Paradise”
Enigma – “Sadeness”
Soho – “Hippie Chick”
(open for request)
The Police – “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”
Stray Cats – “Rock this Town”
The Cucumbers – “My Boyfriend”
Us 3 – “Cantaloop”
(open for request)

Although The Record Store was primarily known first and foremost as a place to buy music and music-related ephemera, we also did a brisk side business selling jewelry and smoking paraphernalia. There were plenty of regulars who never bought music from us at all, but were there each week to buy pipe screens, rolling papers, or one-hitters. Because of the quasi-illegal nature of the paraphernalia side of the business, we were forced to stop selling the harder-core head items like bongs, but we sold whatever we could while still staying on the right side of the law. This included cleanse kits.

The first cleanse kits we carried were “Quick Flush” herbal teas. Even though kits cost nearly $20 a box and users had to drink a couple of quarts of the stuff for it to work, we sold out each and every weekend. In a blue collar steel-and-auto manufacturing city where alcohol and recreational drug use was about the only fun to be had, I guess selling out of piss-test helpers wasn’t all that surprising.

While the herbal teas remained popular, we soon expanded our trade to include vials of a synthetic compound that could be mixed with urine to mask THC, and shampoo kits that stripped the THC out of hair. The teas were most popular with those who knew they were going to have to take a drug test – usually those in the process of job hunting. The chemical vials were most popular with assembly-line workers, who could be pulled from the line for a test at a moments notice. Users were instructed to keep the vials with them at all times – preferably someplace warm, like the front pocket of jeans or inside a bra. This is because the synthetic compound needed to be the same body temperature as urine in order to work.

You are probably wondering by this time why I’m banging on at such length about drug test kits when this post is supposed to be about my old WOXY play lists, and I can only say that the first thing that leapt out at me about this play list was Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform” which reminded me of the inordinate number of military personnel who came into the store in search of those cleanse kits. By far the most requested items for the soldiers and flyboys were the shampoo cleanse-kits. One of them once told me that it was because the government rarely bothered with piss-tests for personnel who had already completed basic training – instead, the U.S. military preferred the hair-strand test for our boys in uniform. I do not know how things are in today’s military, but back then soldiers were tested each time they had been away on leave.

And since most soldiers had their heads shaved during basic and kept it close cropped throughout their tenure in the armed forces, the shampoos we sold were rarely ever used above the shoulders. Mostly, as I was nervously informed by a worried flyboy, hair would be plucked from the legs, arms or – wait for it – the groin area. Ouch. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals in the shampoo kits tended to burn the, erm, more “sensitive areas” upon which they were applied. Such were the lengths our boys went through in order to serve their country.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a decent video of Gang of Four, so instead I give you another military-inspired song from the 80’s:


Stan Ridgway’s “Camouflage”

"It's the little things we do..."

Another quirk we endured at The Record Store was The Things List. The Sav claimed it was his inherent right to make lists because he was a Virgo, which simply confirmed his ensconcement within the Me Decade’s post-hippie mysticism of horoscopes, garish satin shirts, creepy porn mustaches and white powder-fueled paranoia.

He certainly managed to get his zodiac on every morning writing out the daily Things List for us to follow, putting our initials in a tiny circle next to the chore he wanted us to do. He drew a line next to each “thing,” on which we had to sign upon completion. If by some chance we had indeed done the chore but had failed to sign the line next to the chore, The Sav treated it as an uncompleted chore, and you’d hear about it the next day.

Not that The Sav EVER confronted us to our face. He was too passive-aggressive for that! Instead, he’d scribble a scolding little diatribe on the Things List which we’d all have to initial - to prove that we’d read and understood. It was very bizarre.

Some of the items on the Things List were logical, like straightening the racks, refolding the T-shirts tidily, cleaning the glass showcases and running routine stock checks. Other items were frankly puzzling, especially those that went into great detail on how we needed to accomplish the goal. In particular, he always specified that we were to “use free newspapers to clean showcases & door,” which I suppose is understandable, and perhaps even environmentally commendable, since the shop had racks of alternative newspapers that no one seemed to ever pick up. But then there were gems like “with scotch tape, pick up bits from back of showcases” which just cracked us up.

The Sav was a maniacal penny-pincher and wouldn’t buy paper towels for cleaning the showcases or for stocking the dispenser in the office toilet – apparently the rarely laundered moldy green hand towel was ample - yet he’d instruct us to waste an entire roll of scotch tape pulling up bits of dust and fluff basking in the florescent lights inside the jewelry showcases. It didn’t make sense, and no amount of working the term “mini hand-held vacuum” into conversations made a difference. He could have saved hundreds of dollars per year in scotch tape fees by investing twenty dollars in a mini-vac, but it would have also meant saving the staff some time and effort – picking up bits took a mighty long time, after all – and he couldn’t fathom the idea of us standing around, doing nothing, although nothing is a relative term, because his “nothing” was our elaborate cut’n’paste sessions, overly complicated hacky-sack games, smoke breaks, and general piss-taking and one-upmanship with other local music nerds. Plus it cut into our magazine reading time. Oh, the horror.

Oftentimes he’d try to be sneaky when adding certain items on the Things List, thinking that he could trip us up for not doing what he expected of us. For instance, he’d specify that Reynolds was to go through and re-alphabetize the CDs from A-G, which actually meant “I’ve hidden a stray CD somewhere that needs to be returned to its rightful spot.” Now I’m not saying that things didn’t get mixed up in the racking, because they most certainly did, especially on Saturday nights. But unlike our customers, who hid things they wanted to buy in the hopes that it’d still be there when they got paid, The Sav never wanted to hide anything he thought we might be able to sell. Nine times out of ten we’d find a dusty Nana Mouskouri hiding out somewhere in the racks, usually around Deicide. We can only imagine how relieved she must have been to be rescued and returned to Easy Listening.

Another sneaky Things List nugget was dusting the CD spinners. The store used to sell a multitude of storage units, including four-sided, spinning black CD towers made of wood or (less often) plastic. Because he regularly burned incense right next to them, the towers seemed to be coated with a permanent layer of grime, hence the need for a good scrub every other day. This was habitually one of my duties, since The Sav was sexist enough to deign cleaning a woman’s job - which was fine by me since that meant we girls never had to take out the trash or empty the vile waste barrel outside the front door – and I quickly cottoned onto the fact that hidden somewhere on those dusty spinning shelves would be a small “X” for me to wipe away, proof that the spinners had been cleaned. I never had the balls to go through with it, but I used to fantasize about dusting off the shelf with the “X” but leaving all the others untouched, just to see if it would be noticed.

We could always tell when something we’d done – or more often failed to do – would fire up The Sav, as the number of misspelled or completely omitted words on the Things List would increase tenfold, as did the overabundance of words in all capitals and an exuberant use of exclamation marks. Like the time TC forgot to collapse and recycle the cardboard boxes The Sav had tossed into the back hallway after a stock shipment had been unpacked. The criticism went something like this: “SINCE SOME ONE NOT BRAKE DOWN CARBORD BOX THE BACK HALWAY YESTER AS INTRUCTED, IF FIRE MARSHAL VISIT & SEE BLOCK EXIT WED BE FINE AND FIND WOULD COME OUT YOU’RE PAY CHECK!!!!!” And of course there would be a tiny TC with a circle around it, and a line next to it for TC to sign and admit he’d neglected an important duty.

These diatribes never made us feel hurt or ashamed—which I suspect was the intention— because we were too busy being amused by them. We took great pleasure in fishing a discarded Things List from the waste bin and taking a red pen to it; sometimes correcting the mistakes, sometimes diagramming the sentences to demonstrate the pitiable subject and verb agreement. It wasn’t that he was an uneducated man – he could be quite brilliant at times – but when agitated he morphed into an English teacher’s worst nightmare. Looking back on it now, I suspect that perhaps We were HIS worst nightmare, which makes him all the more commendable for keeping us on the payroll for as long as he did. We couldn’t have been good for his blood pressure.

"And if drinkin' don't kill me, her memory will..."

The Record Store had its share of wonderfully odd and colorful customers, and we had our share of assholes and shoplifters. We had deadbeats who special ordered hard-to-find imports and ephemera and then failed to pick up said items when they arrived, and we were blessed with some truly awesome music-lovers. Nevertheless, the majority of our customers were average folks who liked a certain song or artist and just randomly stopped in to our store hoping that we had it in stock after they'd already struck out The Mall. There were a few, however, we couldn't even classify as "customers."

Such was Mr. Dougherty.

In all the years he shuffled in, I can't ever remember him buying anything from us. He'd ask to look at cassettes, usually old school country artists like Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, but he never bought them. He'd hold the cassettes in his quaking hands and scan the track listings, musing out loud about this song or that. Sometimes he'd sing a few lines in a hoarse rasp, asking if we knew what it was, and other times he'd remember a title and ask us to look it up, because he could no longer remember who sang it. He seemed to always inquire about the same songs and artists, forgetting from month to month that he'd already been given the answers to those questions.

I say month-to-month because we only ever saw him at the first of the month. After he'd taken receipt of his disability check, Mr. Dougherty would turn up in a taxi with a wad of green bulging from the pocket of his polyester trousers. Sometimes he arrived so early that The Beer & Wine Emporium next door wasn't even open yet, and so he'd kill time with us, leaning heavily on the glass showcase at the front counter, his long, grizzled fingers flexing to keep the tremors at bay. Every five minutes he'd ask what time it was, and then ask what time they opened next door.

All the while the meter was running.

Mr. Dougherty was a drunk, plain and simple. Even if the stale reek of day old booze permeating through his pores hadn't given him away, the watery eyes, bulbous red nose and quaking hands certainly did. And while most of the staff tried to steer clear of him when they saw the taxi pull up outside, I usually stuck around and helped him, even though I knew he was just wasting time until he could get his fix next door. Perhaps it was because he reminded me of my own drunken uncles, rather than altruism on my part, but I always tried to see him in the way that he wanted to be seen, rather than the way he actually was. And so I saw a young man full of promise and potential, instead of the pathetic, weaving wreck in the wrinkled western shirt.

There was a time, long ago, when Mr. Dougherty had been somebody, and he loved to bend my ear about his days amongst the Nashville elite. He had played poker with Hank Snow, hauled luggage for Patsy Cline, and chauffeured George Jones in his tricked out Cadillac. For Mr. Dougherty had been The Mechanic to The Stars.

Returning home after the Korean War, he found that small town life no longer appealed, and set off for the bright lights of Nashville to put to use the mechanic skills he'd perfected during the war. To hear him tell it, he was a real wiz-kid, and before too long found himself working for a company that provided exclusive automotive services to the cream of the Nashville crop. Mr. Dougherty might not have been able to remember conversations from one month to the next--possibly even one DAY to the next-- but 40 years later could still recall what the inside of George Jones's stretch Caddie looked like. He could remember, and describe in loving detail, the smell of Tammy Wynette's perfume mingling with the AquaNet she sprayed on her well coiffed hair, as Mr. Dougherty drove her around town. He never tired of retelling the story of eating fried chicken with Chet Adkins and his band at some little dive in the deep south, when he drove their tour bus. He claimed it was the best fried chicken he'd ever eaten, and wished he could taste it just once more.

He'd regale these stories in succession, his watery eyes momentarily coming alive. "I had it all," he'd claim with a wry smile that split his face into a million little creases, "I certainly did." He told of meeting and marrying "the most beautiful girl in the world," and how she took to the road like she'd been born to do so, and how they made a great team. She was his right hand man, so to speak, reading maps and making sure their privileged passengers were well taken care of. He drove the busses, fixed breakdowns, and hauled luggage, while she cooked meals for the bands, did their laundry, and made sure they always looked their best. In his eyes, she was a goddess among goddesses. Throughout the golden age of country music, the duo rubbed elbows with nearly all the big names: Loretta Lynn ("a beautiful lady and a saint, she put up with a lot"), Johnny Cash ("a godly man, but filled with the devil"), Dolly Parton ("sweetest little thing you ever did see") and his favorite, George Jones ("they called him No-Show, but he always got there when I was a'drivin'.")

Somewhere along the way the bottle got to Mr. Dougherty. His stories seemed to end in the mid-70's, so that must have been about the time his goddess took off with another man. Maybe she couldn't take the drinking any longer, or maybe she was the reason he took to drinking, but the two incidents are forever entwined, and with his long thin face in his quivering hands, Mr. Dougherty would openly sob at our front counter, telling me that his life just wasn't worth living without her. I'd seen the vicious circle all too often in my own family: a spiraling descent between the bottle and lost love.

Embarrassed by his open display of raw, drunken grief, I'd try to comfort with a pat on his bony arm and empty words, saying "it'll be all right, it'll be ok," when I knew that it wouldn't. Mr. Dougherty knew it too, and with sad, sunken eyes pleading, he'd ask me to play his special song, the one he'd ordered once upon a time but just couldn't bring himself to buy. I kept the single filed away where no one could buy it, and played it whenever his cloak of heartbreak became too heavy to bear.

"He said I'll love you 'til I die
She told him you'll forget in time
As the years went slowly by
She still preyed upon his mind

He kept her picture on his wall
Went half crazy now and then
He still loved her through it all
Hoping she'd come back again

Kept some letters by his bed
Dated 1962
He had underlined in red
Every single I love you

I went to see him just today
Oh but I didn't see no tears
All dressed up to go away
First time I'd seen him smile in years

He stopped loving her today
They placed a wreath upon his door
And soon they'll carry him away
He stopped loving her today…"
As the song neared the end he'd bury himself in an old handkerchief and again ask for the time, misery in his gravely voice. And at the appointed hour, he'd hobble slowly toward the door-- his sad, empty eyes moist with the anticipation of obliterating the present, and erasing the past.

"Just looking back before they take it all away..."

Henry was our golden oldies customer. He wanted nothing less than to go back to “the good ole days” of his youth, and to his credit, he had a long memory for the songs that were played at his high school sock hops, 50’s AM radio and each week on TV courtesy of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

He wore his high school class ring – Class of 1959 – and while short and stocky always looked neat and tidy in a pressed shirt and trousers. His fair hair, although thinning on top, sported an expensive cut. Only his crumpled and stained baggy blue London Fog coat belied his impeccable appearance.

Every Sunday morning, not long after the store would open for the day, Henry would wander in the door, greet each of us politely and turn his attention to our singles racks.

In the beginning we would give him our usual spiel of asking if he would like some help, but he’d shake his head and continue flipping through the racks. It soon became apparent that he was painfully shy: he rarely made eye contact or uttered anything more than “hello” to us for the first few months.

The Sav, who opened the store on Sunday mornings, took it upon himself to draw Henry from his protective cocoon. He'd stand at the front counter, within Henry's earshot, and talk to himself, hoping that Henry would eventually take the bait and respond.

He didn’t.

When Henry would finally make his selection of 45’s – he always bought three at a time because the store offered a discount, and Henry liked saving money – The Sav would glance at the titles as he punched the cash register and try to elicit small talk about the songs or artists. Henry wouldn’t bite. In fact, for the first few months none of us even knew Henry’s name. We all referred to him as “Shorty’s Dad,” because he reminded us of an older version of another of our beloved regulars.

It took The Sav several months to figure out a way through Henry’s armor of silence: he offered Henry the chance to look through our new oldies catalog for possible special orders. This was big. The Sav NEVER let customers look through our wholesale catalogs, lest they get ideas about circumventing The Record Store by placing an order directly with the wholesaler. Never mind that most wholesalers required a minimum order of several hundred dollars. The Sav was convinced that any person who saw a wholesale catalog would immediately decide to open up their own record shop and put him out of business. I guess it was just a bit of leftover paranoia from his cocaine-fueled 70’s heyday.

The rest of us paid no mind to this obsessive distrust of our customers and pulled out the catalogs for folks all the time—as long as The Sav was unlikely to get wind of it. Of course this only worked with customers we saw on a regular basis- those who hung out in the store enough to know the way things worked and who could therefore be trusted to keep it on the down-low. So for The Sav to pull out the Collectibles Catalog and tell Henry he was welcome to thumb through it, well, that was considered a very big deal amongst the staff.

Once Henry had access to the Collectibles catalog he warmed considerably to us and began to drop little nuggets of information about himself. We learned that he had never owned a driving license and preferred to shop at establishments along the bus routes. It was fortunate that there was a dedicated Metro stop right outside The Record Shop. We also learned that he didn’t own a telephone. For awhile he simply informed us that telephones were more trouble than they were worth, but over the years he got comfortable enough with us to admit that the real reason he didn’t have a telephone was because no one ever rang him when he had one, so he didn’t see the point in wasting the money.

We also learned that he lived by himself in a small efficiency apartment over a salon, which explained his expensive haircuts and well manicured appearance. He got them free in exchange for sweeping up hair from the salon floor during the work week. Henry had no other job. He had spent the majority of his adult life caring for his aging parents, and after they died he was frugal with his small inheritance. His idea of extravagance was in allowing himself one new pair of shoes each year, a nice meal in a restaurant once a month, and three 7” singles each week. He spoke disparagingly about his older brother, a lawyer out in California, who had forced the sale of the family home out from under Henry after his elderly parents had died. According to Henry, his parents had only enough money to send one son to college, so they sent the eldest son, and told Henry that since they couldn't give him a higher education they'd give him the house instead, and he agreed and stayed there, never marrying, to take care of them. After their death, however, Henry bitterly recalled how his brother figured out a loophole and, in Henry's words, "sold my house right out from under me."

Sundays at The Record Store were fairly cake. It was just busy enough to stay entertained, but not so busy that we were headless-chickening between the three cash registers while trying to keep an eye out for shoplifters, as was the case most weekend nights. I enjoyed working Sundays because I could fill up most of my day inventorying the Billboard Hot 200, singles charts and back stock. I could also count on having a nice long chat with Henry about the "good old days." Sometimes, when there was a lull in the action and The Sav had left for the day, Henry would pull out a pile of singles and I'd play them over the vintage Marantz sound system. As the music transported Henry back to a happier time and place, he'd lose himself in the memories, and take me with him through a stream-of-conscience rap about "how it was back then." I learned the names and locations of many a long-gone restaurant and store, could see the ball players in their crew-cuts and the girls in their poodle skirts and pony tails, such were Henry's vivid descriptions. It was a little like hearing someone describe the movie American Graffiti, but with a local flavor. Occasionally Henry would let slip about a girl he had dated, a girl he still pined for some thirty years later. His heart would break anew each time he visited the lonely town of CouldHaveBeen.

I loved hearing Henry's stories and always tried to make time for him each Sunday. I think we all did. He and The Sav were a little closer in age, and The Sav remembered a lot of the same places Henry did, so they'd bounce memories back and forth like verbal table tennis until The Sav was ready to leave for the afternoon. So it went for nearly seven years.

The Sunday that Henry didn't turn up was cause for concern amongst the staff. We worried that he had fallen ill, or that something bad had happened to him. We were unsure as to what to do, since we couldn't call him and had no idea where his apartment was located, and so we did nothing and waited to see if he turned up the following week. When he didn't, we took it upon ourselves to start calling around to all the beauty salons in town, hoping one of them would know him.

There are a lot of beauty salons in a city phonebook, and we called them all. Reynolds took A-K at the front register phone, and I took L-Z at the back phone. An afternoon's worth of phone calls later, no one we rang knew Henry. Puzzled, we abandoned our search and hoped for the best. When a third Sunday passed without Henry making an appearance, Phil went out to the bus stop and spoke to the driver, who, when given a description of Henry, knew where he usually embarked each week. The driver said he hadn't seen him in a few weeks and had wondered about the little man in the blue London Fog coat, but had shrugged it off. Once we learned where Henry got on the bus, we could narrow our search. Since we’d already tried all the salons in the Yellow Pages to no avail, we started calling everything in the Business White Pages that was in the vicinity of Henry's bus stop and sounded vaguely like it might be a beauty parlor. I can't help but look back on this seemingly hopeless venture and think about how much quicker it would have been to pinpoint the salon with the help of the internet, but we didn't have that luxury yet. And so we called dozens of businesses, hoping against hope that one of those numbers would come up trumps.

And it did, but it was too late. In her broad, flat upper Michigan accent, shop owner Shirley recounted that Henry had collapsed and died at home from a brain aneurism just a few days after his last visit to our shop. She told us through tears that his brother, Henry's only known relative, hadn't even bothered to come back to claim the body. He made arrangements over the phone and had Henry laid to rest next to his parents, without fanfare, and had a cleaning company go in to Henry's apartment a few days later to clear it out. Everything had been thrown away: clothing, photo albums, yearbooks, scrapbooks, and of course, his beloved record player and 7" singles.

Much has changed since Henry passed away, and The Record Store no longer exists. But the power of a song can elicit long dormant memories. And sometimes when I am transported back to those halcyon days, I think of Henry.

And I understand.

"Never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye..."

Until I heard “Never Gonna Give You Up” playing in the background at a deli today, I’d nearly forgotten all about Shelly, the store’s biggest Rick Astley fan. For several years, coinciding with his ascent and self-imposed exile from popdom, every one of us must have talked to Shelly on the phone at least thrice weekly. She had it bad for Joey Lawrence too, but she could get a heady dose of Joey on TV each week, since he starred in the sitcom Blossom, but honey-voiced Astley was her Number One Heartthrob, and American television simply did not give her the fix she required.

Shelly loved Loved LOVED Rick Astley. Loved him as only the truly obsessive can. It got to be a running joke at the store that every time the phone rang we’d bet nickels on whether or not it was Shelly calling. This was in the days before caller-ID, but it wasn’t like we really needed caller-ID anyway. Usually one out of every ten calls turned up trumps, with Shelly barking out arcane Rick Astley questions at us.

Oh, we didn’t have to answer the usual stuff, like when the new single was being released, or what the next projected single was going to be, or whether or not the label was going to issue an extended dance remix. Nope, we had to answer questions about his house, what sort of dog he might have, what color were his eyes. Luckily for us, Philbert had the presence of mind to pick up a British teeny-bopper magazine he happened across at Books & Co. one day, after noticing that it had a two page q&a with the reluctant star. It was possibly the best three bucks we ever expensed to the store. We kept it filed with the special orders, within arms reach of the phone, should we have the misfortunate to answer her call.

Now as with many of our most memorable customers, there was something a little odd about Shelly, Rick Astley/Joey Lawrence obsession aside. We weren’t quite sure what was up with her, since our only contact with her was via telephone and she never stepped foot in our store in all the years I worked there, but after having dated a guy who had a brother with Down Syndrome, I noticed a helluva lot of similar characteristics.

There wasn’t anything odd about her dialing finger though, let me tell you. A typical conversation with Shelly went something like this:

“Record Store, may I help you?”

“Ummmmmmmm. WhenisRickAstley’sbirthdaySNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…..”

Shelly always took a deep breath right after the Ummmmmmmm, and whatever air was left over at the end of the sentence was expelled down the line via her nose. She must have kept those nostrils pressed right up against the receiver. It had a fat greasy sound, like sizzling bacon.

“Hi Shelly. Let’s see. Rick Astley’s birthday, huh?” we’d make idle chit-chat, stalling for time while we flipped through the tatty pages of Smash Hits.

Silence. She was holding her breath, waiting to see if we had the correct answer.

“February 6, 1966” we’d proclaim triumphantly, to which she’d exhale a strangled “thankyouSNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn….” and hang up. This sort of thing went on daily, and after awhile we all learned a multitude of esoteric Rick Astley facts. Like how he started out his career by preparing the tea for the British production team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and how he was “discovered” at age 19 singing in a band called F.B.I., and how he had two older brothers and one older sister. The magazine was so useful that the store eventually began importing it in via an indie distributor, usually a few weeks out of date but still chock full of enough Britpop nuggets that we developed a waiting list of special orders for it. If there was any Rick Astley trivia within the pages, the magazine was whisked across the street to Kinko’s for photocopying. In the course of several years, we built up a towering pile of Astley-related ephemera, all paid for on the store’s dime.

Reynolds used to really get into talking with Shelly. He could keep her on the phone longer than any of us, not that the rest of us tried very hard. But Reynolds was and is a people person, and if the store wasn’t busy when she rang, he’d lean on the glass showcase up front, thumbing through the pile of Smash Hits clippings, and occasionally making up his own Rick Astley Fun Facts, which he would scribble into the margins for the rest of us to follow in the event that we answered the phone and Shelly blasted the inquisition at us. He made up a Fun Fact about Rick Astley disliking Brussels sprouts, for instance. According to Reynolds lore, Rick Astley had also owned a Jack Russell terrier named “Aloysius” as a child, and his favorite drink was Tang.

He also managed to gain her trust enough to extract little innocent fantasies out of her, like how she wished the album sleeve for the “Hopelessly” single would come to life so she could brush the sand from his arm, and that his beige cardigan sweater looked so soft that she just wanted to touch it. And Reynolds would say something like, “Shelly, is that the only thing you’d like to touch?” and we’d all fall about ourselves in riotous laughter, while Reynolds scurried away toward the ticket booth with his hand cupped over the phone, lest she hear our howling and hang up.

The one thing he never managed to wring out of her was her phone number. All of us had tried, unsuccessfully, to finagle her number so we could call her when we took shipment of new import 12” singles or Smash Hits magazines, but apparently Shelly had been warned by her parents not to give out their number, so she’d get angst-y and hang up on us whenever we asked for it. So each time any Astley-related memorabilia arrived, we’d simply slide it into a brown paper album bag with her name scrawled across, and place it with the special orders. I guess her parents used to stop by on their way to work early in the morning, before most of the staff had rolled out of bed, to pick up anything we had put aside for her. The Sav was the only person who ever interacted with them.

Shelly was absolutely shattered when Rick’s third album bombed. At first we tried to hide it from her, knowing what a fragile flower she was, but we couldn’t shield her from the horrible truth of Casey Kasem’s Top 40, when “Hopelessly” peaked at a sorry #31 and then fell away into obscurity. She was truly distraught and agitated, and ceased bellowing out trivia questions at us when she rang. Instead, she wanted to know how come we weren’t pushing the album harder. We were suddenly at fault for not forcing the album on the buying public.

“HowcomenobodysbuyingRickAstleySNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

Bless her, we didn’t have the answers she needed. What we did have, however, was Reynolds. We’d disclose his hours to her each week, so that she had his virtual shoulder on which to cry. He eased her through those rocky months, giving her encouragement by telling her what a special fan she was, and how it was true-blue fans like her that were the best fans, and how he was certain that Rick appreciated her love and support. He went from poking gentle fun to being dial-a-shrink. All those years of chit-chatting had bonded them, and he knew how real her heartache was, and he took it upon himself to do something about it.

He rounded all of us up and requested that we go on a little treasure hunt. We were to find anything and everything related to Rick Astley that we could. Reynolds rang the record label and import companies, I spoke to our various clothing and memorabilia distributors, and The Murphdiver scoured Goldmine Magazine for collectibles. A few weeks later, we’d managed a promotional t-shirt, some 12” singles, loads of promotional flats and posters, a keyring, a teacup with his face on it, a couple of buttons, and our piece de resistance: an autographed glossy 8x10. We boxed it all up, wrapped it in gaily decorated paper, and typed up a little thank you note on pink treble clef stationary, and forged Rick Astley’s signature on it. Then we clued in The Sav so that he could give the box of goodies to Shelly’s folks the next time one of them stopped in.

Her parents made a special trip to the store one evening a few weeks later to personally thank the staff—and in particular Reynolds—for our kindness. Our offhand gesture had made their daughter the happiest teenager on the planet.

Astley retired from the world of pop music shortly after Shelly took receipt of that package and soon Shelly likewise vanished from our lives, to be glimpsed only as a flashback in a downtown deli on a rainy afternoon.

"Look What the Cat Dragged In..."

One of The Sav’s old drug buddies from the store’s mid-70’s glory days happened to be an A&R guy with Capitol, so over the years we had a lot of Capitol acts make in-store appearances. The first in-store I ever worked was for hair metal band Poison, at the time signed to Enigma, which was a subsidiary of Capitol.

Had The Sav realized that Poison was a bunch of dudes, he’d probably never have asked for a booking, but The Sav was convinced the band, with names Bret, Rikki C.C. and Bobby, were chicks. Hot chicks.

The night before the album was released, The Sav stood at the front counter gawking at the album sleeve and fanning himself. Whenever he was hot and bothered he always fanned himself whilst tugging on the fourth button on his shirt. It was one of his many quirks. Sometimes he fanned himself when he was angry with one of us, but usually he fanned himself whenever good looking girls were in the store, or when he was checking out the centerfold of High Times magazine.

So The Sav fanned himself for a bit before showing the album sleeve to Reynolds and Tom. “Check out this hot band!” he mouthed conspiratorially so that I wouldn’t hear. Tom and Reynolds both looked at the cover and then at each other, puzzled. No one had heard of Poison at that time, but the guys were pretty sure they were looking at glam rocker dudes rather than hot chicks. The Sav pointed to the top left hand corner of the album and said “I’d do her in a heartbeat!”

Reynolds snatched up another copy of the album and flipped it over to read the back. “Greg, I don’t think these are chicks,” he said, shaking his head. “One of them is named Bret Michaels. That sounds like a guy name to me.” Tom agreed, picking up a third copy to peruse. The Sav was having none of it. “No, these are definitely girls. Look at the lips on this one—that’s all girl right there. And have you never heard of Bret Ekland?” So the guys did what was expected of them, which was to let his bastardization of Britt Ekland go and deviously agree with him that yes, Poison were hot chicks.

Tom caught up with me at the back of the store and relayed the news, to which we had a good laugh. Naturally I went along with their assessment when The Sav showed the album sleeve to me and asked the question. “Well they certainly look like girls to me!” I admitted, although like Tom and Reynolds, I was fairly certain they were guys.

The Sav had his Capitol contact on the phone the next morning to find out Poison’s itinerary. As luck would have it, they would be rolling through our neck of the woods in a few months, opening for Ratt at Hara Arena. The Sav immediately insisted that the band do an in-store before the gig, and Mr. A&R said he’d see what he could do.

By the time the Ratt/Poison tour made it to our city in January of 1987, everyone—The Sav included—knew they were guys. We’d been selling the album moderately well since its August release and The Sav had it in the evening rotation at the store, much to our chagrin. It was starting to drive us nuts.

Having never worked an in-store, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but The Sav and Philbert, both in-store veterans, warned me that it would be as manic as Christmas Eve, and much, much louder. The Sav had also informed us girls that we needed to “dress like rocker chicks” for the appearance, which was probably his own little fantasy, or possibly because he hated my normal thrift store attire and faded Chuck Taylor’s. I borrowed a fringed leather top and a pair of zebra print spandex tights, and I was ready to go. Jenny, I noticed, paid no mind to The Sav’s pervy suggestion and came in wearing a pink Oxford shirt with the collar flipped up, and baggy jeans.

Fans began lining up hours before the scheduled appearance. We employees had to remove all the Poison albums from the shelves and stack them up on the front counter, so that fans wishing to purchase a copy could do so without having to fight through the crowd. It also meant that less than honest fans would not get a five-finger discount by slicing one open during the melee and pretending they’d bought it. We made sure to open and remove the shrink-wrap from each album we sold before handing it over, in an effort to keep the store clear of debris.

Jenny and I spent the morning decorating the back of the store, plastering Poison posters and flats over every available surface. The guys dragged in the stools and dusty tables from the back hallway, wiped them down and we draped posters all across the front and around the sides, like lip-gloss glam table skirts. We opened several boxes of Sharpie markers and placed them strategically on the ledges behind the tables, within easy reach of the band when they arrived, then sat back on our heels and waited for the mad rush.

By 4 p.m. the store was heaving with fans. The queue stretched the length of the store, out the door and halfway around the building. People were freezing outside and starting to get antsy. We’d been blasting the album non-stop for the last two hours, and already my nerves were as frayed as that stupid leather top.

After Mr.A&R rang from the arena to say the band was finished sound checking and was on their way, The Sav sent Philbert through the back hallway to wait at the emergency exit door for the band to arrive. The Sav and his buddy had done enough in-stores together over the years that things ran like clockwork. Even the fans at the back of the building didn’t realize when the band arrived, because they had been loaded into a non-descript white rental van. Not very glamorous for the guys, but extremely discreet.

I don’t remember a lot about the actual in-store because I was working the front checkout, selling shedloads of Look What the Cat Dragged In to rabid fans, but I do remember how friendly and down to earth the guys were after we’d cleared everyone out and they did some shopping. C.C. Deville was the only one who we felt was stuck-up, because he didn’t talk to anyone and wouldn’t take off his stupid mirrored sunglasses, but later on I found out that he had been nursing a severe cold brought on by the freezing midwestern weather.

Two months after their in-store appearance at our store, the album was exploding off the shelves, thanks to the single “Talk Dirty to Me” receiving heavy rotation on MTV.

Bret Michaels ended up dating a Middletown girl named Susie just after the in-store. I’m unsure whether or not they met in the store that day, but for years afterward, whenever the two of them were in town visiting her family, or when Poison was in town for a show, Bret would always stop by the store to shop and say “Hi.” He told us he’d never forget the store that took a chance on them before they were famous.

If he’d only known…

"You don't have to go home but you can't stay here..."

It had been a busy Saturday evening at the record store and I was, as usual, working with Reynolds. It was nearly closing time and we were scrambling around, trying to finish up our allotted chores so that we could get the hell out on time.

Reynolds had already unplugged the OPEN sign and I’d jumped the gun a little by cashing out the back register, so we busied ourselves with wiping down the showcases and straightening up the racks to run out the final minutes of our shift.

I asked Reynolds if he had already locked the door, and he shook his head and said that he’d gotten sidetracked by a phone call just after he’d helped that final customer, so I volunteered to go back up to the front and lock up while the last strands of Pink Floyd’s “Outside the Wall” drifted from the speakers.

As I passed the front register the door opened and a couple of young guys in olive drab jackets walked in.
“Hey guys, we’re getting ready to close,” I said, but they ignored me. They brushed past and my eyes followed as they walked straight to the back of the store and began to browse. Reynolds, who was still straightening up the racks in the back, looked up at me and spread his hands in an exasperated display of “What the fuck?!” I gave an exaggerated shrug that he would be sure to see, and then turned to lock the door.

Which is when another group of people—a much larger group this time--came through the door. I tried to stop them, tried to block their way, but they continued to surge forward and I found myself walking backwards, telling them that the store was closing up for the night. They acted as if I wasn’t even there! I heaved my way through them, like a salmon swimming upstream, to get to the door, but just as my hands reached the handle the door jerked open again and still more people piled in. It was like a stampede, and I pressed my back against the singles wall to keep from getting overrun.

By this time Reynolds had fought his way to the front and with a steady stream of obscenities we locked the door—me fumbling with the deadbolt while he struggled to hold the door closed, as those on the outside tugged with all their might to get it open.

Having locked the door, we turned to face the heaving throng—it was like being on the floor of a sold out rock concert. People where everywhere, elbow to elbow. Reynolds and I looked at each other, eyes wide with wonder and terror.
“How are we gonna get rid of all these people?!” he exclaimed.
“I know,” I said, “Grab the Yoko Ono single.”
“Shit, it’s not here!” he cried as he flipped through the O’s, then the N’s and the P’s, in the fleeting hope that it has been misfiled. It wasn’t there. We were royally fucked.

I climbed onto the front checkout counter and stood up so that I could be seen, taking care not to bump my head into the heavy wooden sign bearing the words “Check-Out” hanging overhead.
“Hey! Hey! Can I have your attention!” I bellowed through cupped hands. The crowd paused to look up at me.
“Please bring your purchases to the front counter RIGHT NOW! We are closing!”

They continued to stare, momentarily, and then simply went back to flipping through the racks and yacking away with nary a care in the world.

I climbed back down and tried to convince Reynolds to give it a go, but he wasn’t very eager. Said he didn’t want to look like an ass. I set my jaw and shot him a look, then took another quick look at the mob. Folding my arms, I leaned back against one of the t-shirt showcases, trying to figure out our next plan of attack. Reynolds seemed to be out of ideas and pulled out the little yellow sticker-covered stepstool and plopped down, chin in hand.

I glanced at the digital LED display on the credit card machine and did a double take. It read 1:18 a.m.! Holy hell, I began to panic. It was two hours past closing time and the store was still swimming with people. I turned around to give Reynolds the news, and saw that he was zipping up his black wool jacket.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m outie” he proclaimed, and walked over to the door.
‘Dude! You CANNOT leave me here alone!” I spat at him, dread filling every pore of my being. “Just look at them!” I flailed my arms, gesturing toward the back of the store, where towering piles of albums and CDs teetered precariously in their hands. Reynolds didn’t care. He turned on his heel and walked out, giving ten more people time to slip through the door before I managed to race around the counter, pull it shut and flip the deadbolt.

I woke up gasping for breath.

This was my recurring nightmare, suffered at least once a month for as long as I worked there. Sometimes I was with TC, or Shelly, or Tom instead of Reynolds, but it always started out the same, and ended the same, and my panic always hit its zenith when I glanced at the digital clock and saw the teal blue 1:18 a.m. winking at me.

"From a starship over Venus to the sun..."

Larry was another of our mentally challenged regulars. I’m not sure how much of his disability was inborn and how much of it was foisted upon him by his overbearing, stiflingly repressive, weird mother, but he definitely had some issues.

Larry always had a happily dazed look about him, as if he was watching a fireworks display for the first time, and since he was only 4’9” he was forever looking upward anyway. Skyrockets in flight.

As with most of our mentally challenged regulars, Larry was very malleable when it came to parting with the money he made as a trash man, or as he liked to call it, a “waste manage corn ater.” He’d come shooting through the door at top speed, already halfway through a scrambled sentence by the time he screeched to a halt in front of the tape counter. Larry always bought tapes. He never seemed to care what he bought as long as he was assured that it was “a Hot One.” He was very concerned that his taste reflected those of the masses. He’d ask us what our top sellers were, then he’d ask us to read off the top ten Billboard albums of that week. If something we were selling jived with the Billboard chart, he wanted it. No matter what the genre—although it has to be said that he didn’t really care much for rap and metal—he’d still buy it, because it was “a Hot One.”

Sometimes he’d barrel into the store and rush to the tape counter, slap his palm onto the glass showcase and proclaim, “Metallica. It’s a Hot One!” And yes, we’d agree, Metallica was a Hot One. “Whitney Hoosen! She’s a Hot One!” Again, we’d agree that Whitney was indeed a Hot One. He’d be so excited to be on a roll that he’d start to laugh, and Larry’s laugh sounded to a certain extent like Peter Lorre’s. He’d nod his head in abject excitement, his pointy teeth protruding from a gigantic grin as he chanted “yeah, yeah, it’s a Hot One!” Even funnier was when he missed the mark and called out the name of something that was definitely not a Hot One. “Huey Lewis! He’s a Hot One!” and we would shake our heads, to which Larry’s head would automatically swivel from a nod to a shake and he’d mutter “no, no, no, that’s not a hot one.” Then his face would light back up and he’d proclaim, “But he used to be hot!” and we’d agree.

As his reading level was that of your average seven year old, his mispronunciation of artists was legendary around the store. Paula Abdul was Paula Bull. The Fine Young Cannibals were Five’n’Pineapples. A Tribe Called Quest was Time Q. (no, I have no idea what brought that one on) Milli Vanilli was, of course Milli Vanilla. Primal Scream was Pride and Stream. And to this day, I still refer to a certain country singer as Billy Ray Cypress. (as an aside, we also had a customer who referred to Whitesnake as Wotsnok, but that’s another kettle of fish entirely)

Although Larry enjoyed talking with us and reveled in his pseudo-celebrity status at the store (there were times we all applauded when he burst in, and he’d wave like Queen Elizabeth), he felt we’d led him astray once or twice. For instance, I had persuaded him to buy Psychocandy, which he hated, and Reynolds talked him into a Jellyfish tape once, which he might have actually enjoyed had it truly been a Hot One, but it wasn’t—so usually he was keen to let Billboard mandate his choices.

Regardless of his intellectual failings, he could occasionally come up with nuggets of abject brilliance. He once combined chart topping singles by Kylie Minogue and The Beach Boys when he requested the song “Kokomotion.” Another time he was standing at the tape counter when someone walked in and asked for Anita Baker, Milli Vanilli and Neneh Cherry. Larry turned to me without missing a beat and said, “Vanilla, cherries, baker. Someone wants a pie!” And then he’d laugh like Peter Lorre.

Now behind his back the staff referred to him as “Shorty.” Mainly this was because we couldn’t bring ourselves to refer to him as Hot One Larry, and we needed to differentiate between our other Larry regulars, one of which we referred to as Leisure Suit Larry, not because he wore a leisure suit, nor because of the video game of the same name, but because he only ever bought remixed 12” dance singles, which reminded us of Saturday Night Fever, which equated with 70’s polyester threads. Hell, it turned out later that Leisure Suit Larry wasn’t even called Larry, but the name seemed to fit and we continued to refer to him as such, even after we found out his real name was Felix.

For a few weeks each year, Shorty attended some sort of camp for the challenged. He always came in a day or two prior to leaving so he could stock up on the Hot Ones and impress his campmates. During one summer camp he managed to get himself a girlfriend, and he brought her into the store one evening on a date and introduced her. She had the same diminutive stature as him, had the same moon-faced dazed expression, and was something of a shrinking violet—the perfect foil for Shorty’s overblown excitability. It was clear they were made for each other. Despite our cynical nature, we all found it irresistibly sweet to see them wandering around the store, holding hands, as he pointed out the hot ones to her.

Somehow he managed to keep the relationship secret for a few months, but eventually his domineering old cow of a mother found out and put the brakes on the relationship. Although he was obviously quite broken-hearted he made it clear to us that he didn’t wish to tangle with his mom, so we quietly dropped the issue and stopped asking about Violet.

We all truly enjoyed seeing Shorty, and genuinely liked him, even if he could sometimes overstay his welcome. I think the longest he ever hung around asking about Hot Ones was 4 ½ hours. It wasn’t like we were working on commission, so we didn’t really mind that he hung around, but sometimes he got in the way when we were busy. Unlike some of the other regulars who didn’t know when to leave, with Shorty we could simply tap an imaginary watch and say, “Larry, it’s getting late.” He’d snap a Hot One from the perusable pile, peel off the cash and off he’d go on his merry way, out the door with a wave and a grin.

Every now and then Shorty, who was nothing if not a victim of instant gratification, would decide that he wanted to special order something. Mainly I think he did it because he saw other customers doing it, and therefore it was the hot thing to do. But there was the odd time or two when he was very sure that the Hot One he wanted was worth waiting for. In his mind I think he reckoned the item was so hot we couldn’t keep it in stock, which meant that he HAD TO HAVE IT. He’d stop in every day thereafter until the coveted Hot One had arrived. Which was fine by us, because none of us wanted to risk having to phone his house to let him know the cassette was ready for pick up. This was because he wasn’t allowed to answer the phone, so we had to deal with his scary mother, who would screech and snarl and accuse us of paving a path to hell for her little boy. Larry was, at the time, in his mid-30’s. Sometimes she’d ring up the store looking for him, and if he was there she’d cut loose as soon as the receiver was passed to him, or she’d feign some urgent illness that needed his immediate attention, and if he wasn’t there when she rang she’d cut loose on us, just for good measure.

Although he couldn’t read above a second-grade level and had a relatively child-like outlook on life, Shorty held a driving license, which just goes to show that anyone can get a driving license in America, because he seriously shouldn’t have had one. He could barely reach the pedals for a start.

And it was the combination of that license and his tyrannical mother that caused the accident. Shorty was doing his garbage round when dispatch radioed in that his mom was having yet another of her many episodes. Apparently this one sounded serious enough that dispatch had gone ahead and radioed the information to the truck, instructing the driver to swing back and drop Larry off at the yard so he could go home and tend to her. By the time Larry reached his car he had worked himself into a hyperventilating frenzy. He raced toward home, never even noticing the stop lights along State Route 725. The car he t-boned was carrying a young newlywed couple, both of whom were pronounced dead at the scene. Larry suffered severe injuries and was out of commission for nearly a year. Philbert tried once to visit him in the hospital, but Larry’s mother chased him away.

Once recovered, we saw very little of him. His driving privileges having been revoked, he resorted to walking everywhere, and because our store wasn’t convenient to get to from his house, and because his mother had frightened him into believing that riding a bus would send his soul to the devil, he stopped his weekly visits. When he did stop by, he told us he could no longer buy his beloved Hot Ones, because his wages were being garnished toward the settlement of the dead couple’s estate.

But on a snowy cold December evening last year, Larry was one of the regulars who proudly showed up at the funeral home to pay his respects to The Sav. It was a six mile round trip, on foot, in the snow.

Now that’s a loyal customer.

"All is quiet on New Year's Day..."

It’s been seven years since I left the record store, but I still find myself shuddering involuntarily at least once during the week leading up to New Year’s Day. It’s only after I’ve had a good shudder that I remember that I no longer have to curtail my New Year’s Eve celebrations, because I no longer have to be at the store at 5 a.m. on New Year’s Day to do inventory.

Yep. 5 a.m.

For twelve years I dragged my sorry arse into the store on New Year’s Day at some ungodly hour for our year-end inventory stock-taking. There were times I went in hung over, and there were times I went in having had the barest minimum of sleep, but I always made it in. It was the one day of the year The Sav treated us to free doughnuts, as if that would somehow make it all better.

Inventory usually took all day. The Sav would divide the staff into teams and give us a section of the vinyl and CD alphabet to inventory. Usually Reynolds and I were paired up together, partly because we were quick and efficient, partly because The Sav knew we worked well together, and partly because our banter made everyone laugh and kept spirits high.

There were also the usual bets. Before inventory began, we’d place our bets as to which artists had the most product left over from the holiday, which artists had sold the most during the holiday, which artists had sold the most all year, and which titles hadn’t moved at all, all year. There were a few titles that hadn’t moved in YEARS. Why The Sav kept them in stock is anyone’s guess, but we suspected it was because he harbored a soft spot for the artist in question. Crystal Gayle’s “Nobody Wants to Be Alone,” for example. We knew The Sav had a thing for Crystal Gayle, but that album was a real stinker, and it languished in the bin for Christ only knows how long. I’m willing to bet it was still there when the store closed permanently earlier this year.

Likewise The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards “Amazing Grace.” Oh sometimes we were lucky and had sold a copy of it during the year (usually to some poor schmuck looking for something with bagpipes), but sometimes it gathered dust for a year or two before we could unload it onto some unfortunate soul. And The Sav always reordered it. It was a given that the store would never be Dragoon-less, be it tape or CD. Crystal Gayle we could understand, because she was a looker, but why in the world The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards?! It was one mystery we never solved.

Another item that never sold was the 7” single of Yoko Ono’s “Touch Me” (flipside “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in The Snow)”). It’s a damn good thing that single never sold—and honestly, what self-respecting music fan was ever going to buy that piece of shit?! But it was a good thing nonetheless, because it was our secret weapon. Whenever we found ourselves with a store full of customers at closing time, we simply walked over to the singles bin, rummaged to “O” and slapped that baby on the turntable. It was guaranteed to clear the store in under 30 seconds. Occasionally one of us got carried along in the stampede toward the door, but it was our own fault for being in the way of the exit.

Then there were the Orion albums. The Sav had long since stopped keeping an inventory card for “Reborn” and “Sunrise,” but we still knew they were there, and would always be there. I remember when I first started working at the store and The Sav pulled those two albums out of the rack and told me the “legend” that Orion was supposedly Elvis. It was quite obvious that he believed the hype, or at least had believed it at one time and liked perpetuating the myth.

The Sav liked his myths. He also kept a copy of Klaatu’s first album in the racks, murmuring in hushed tones that it was really an anonymous effort by The Beatles. He also tried to convince us that The Dukes of Stratosphear’s “Psonic Psunspot” was a long-lost Brian Wilson effort, but I set him straight by immediately recognizing Andy Partridge’s voice and clueing him in that it was actually an XTC effort. He didn’t like the album nearly as much after that.

Another album that we always seemed to keep in stock was an import 12” Samantha Fox picture disc. Yes, she had her tits out. I have no idea how many of those The Sav actually had, because the inventory card always indicated we had one in stock, but sometimes we sold it and then the next day it would be back in the rack again. I know The Sav had a large storage locker somewhere, and I can only assume he had an unlimited quantity of the Sam Fox-gets-her-tits-out picture disc.

I’m sure that picture disc aided quite a few young men over the years, but none so much as the chubby, pimply faced Asian kid who used to come into the store to browse while waiting for his mom to come and pick him up after his bi-weekly visit to the Rec Center across the road. I happened to be inventorying the albums--this wasn’t the big year-end inventory, but the twice-weekly stock taking of the Billboard 200, which we did every Thursday and Sunday evening—and the kid was idly flipping through the “F’s” when he hit the jackpot. He stopped in mid-flick and stood stock still for a full 90 seconds. He turned to look toward the register to make sure the staff hadn’t noticed—never bothering to check behind him, which is where I was standing—and then slowly leaned closer to the disc for a good, nudie ogle. After a few minutes it was obvious that he wasn’t going anywhere for awhile, because he had his junk pressed up against the wooden rack in a vain effort to disguise his raging boner. Naturally, at the height of stiffydom, his mom decided to show up.

Poor kid never stood a chance.

"It's Christmas in prison. There'll be music tonight..."

I really loathed working retail during the holidays. The store became overrun with clueless fuckwits who laboured under the delusion that we were like the music stores at the mall. You know, the kind that would take back anything without a receipt, even if it had been opened and obviously played.

Fingerprints mate, easy to see on vinyl and CDs, and don’t even THINK about trying to clean them off. We’ll know. Trust me.

Our store policy was simple:
*If it’s been opened, it’s yours.
*If it’s defective, it will be exchanged for exactly the same item, which will be opened and checked while you wait. If we are out of the defective item, we will order another copy, call you when it arrives, and it will be opened and checked while you wait.
*If the item is still sealed and you have a receipt, we will happily issue a refund.
*If the item is still sealed and you do not have a receipt, we will issue a gift certificate in the amount of the item.

The policy was posted at each cash register, on the wall at the back of the store, on the wall near the front door, and written on placards which were interspersed through the racks of vinyl and CDs. Our ass was covered.

Oh the number of people who tried to worm their way around it, especially at Christmas. We heard every excuse, every dilemma, every sob story and every conceivable string of abuse you can imagine. Once I had a guy break a CD right in front of my face, and shards flew everywhere. He was angry about the content of a gangsta rap CD that he’d purchased for his kid—which had the “explicit lyrics” stamp right on the cover. I even offered to exchange it for the censored version of the disc, but the guy was irate and didn’t want to give the gangsta any money. All well and good, dude, but a policy is a policy. And so splinters of sharp, shiny plastic burst all over the counter, floor and my face. I called the cops.

Even worse than the yuppies who’d decided that our policy didn’t apply to them were the scammers who tried (and occasionally managed) to buy loads of stuff with stolen credit cards. Those were a blast. At Christmas, every time I swiped a credit card through the terminal, I held my breath, silently praying that I got an “APPROVED” message rather than a “DECLINE” or, even worse, a “PICK UP.”

A “DECLINE” could mean a number of things—usually it meant that the card was over its limit, but could occasionally also mean that there had been a lot of “suspicious activity” on it that day, and in those cases the card holder would usually just ask us to call the issuer, which we always did, and they’d prove they were indeed the card holder by keying in private codes or social security numbers or whatever, then we’d swipe again and it’d be approved. Sighs of relief all around. Oh, we still got our share of abuse from folks who’d maxed their limit but still wanted to shop, but they weren’t keen to speak to their card issuer if we offered to ring them. That usually shut them up in a hurry.

“PICK UP” was alternately the best and worst display on the terminal. It almost always meant the card was stolen, which also meant if we successfully obtained it and sent it back to the issuer, they’d reward us. The base reward was $25.00, anything above that was gravy. When “PICK UP” was displayed our instructions were to detain the customer while we phoned the issuer. Most of the time when this happened the customer would either get antsy or belligerent, or both. Some simply took off running -with one of us after them to jot down their license plate for the police. Things could really get heated, especially if the customer wouldn’t/couldn’t provide proof of identity. They would yell at us, call us every name in the book and generally make a big scene in some lame attempt to make it look like it was somehow our fault that they had a stolen credit card in their possession. They weren’t so hard when the police were called though. They usually legged it out the door before we’d even finished dialing the number. Pussies.

Once at Christmas we encountered an entire family of scammers, and they got us for over grand in merchandise. The card was approved every time, but it was an American Express and the person who signed the receipt was not the same person in whose name the card was issued. The first person to do it was the husband of the card holder. He racked up a couple hundred dollars. The following day the son came in and racked up several more hundred dollars worth of goods. This went on until a few days later when the husband came in and tried it on again, but this time he was unlucky and one of us regular employees waited on him instead of The Sav. When Philbert saw the guy signing a name other than that of the cardholder he told the guy he couldn’t accept it. The guy even showed Phil his driving license-to prove he had the same surname as the cardholder-but Phil wouldn’t budge. Phil also had the sense to copy down the guy’s vitals from the license, just in case. The son tried to sneak in another large purchase sometime that same week, but again was thwarted by one of us.

Just after New Years the store got a notice from American Express, stating that the cardholder was disputing the charges. AmEx asked for copies of the signed receipts, and of course they weren’t signed by the cardholder but by her son and husband, and so American Express refused payment to us, even when Phil produced the guy’s license stats. AmEx was just following policy. It was an expensive lesson for a small business owner to learn.

The crappiest experience I ever had during the Christmas retail season was working with The Sav on Christmas Eve. Reynolds, Abernathy, TC and I were scheduled to close, but at 4 p.m. The Sav showed up, told TC and The Ab they could leave, and stated that he’d work with me and Reynolds for the last two hours. Oh joy.

The crowd had already thinned out from the previous few hours’ chaos, and Reynolds and I were secretly hoping to close up a little early, since we both had places to be by 7 p.m. and wanted to get out retail hell as soon as possible. But with The Sav working alongside us, we knew we were out of luck.

As bad luck with have it, a man and woman wandered into the store at quarter to six. Reynolds and I were eager to find out what they were looking for, get it for them and send them on their merry way, but The Sav stopped us in our tracks and instructed us to “let them browse for a little bit.” That little bit turned into 45 minutes, then an hour! Reynolds and I were fuming. We were scheduled off at 6 p.m., and here it was 7 p.m. and that couple was showing no signs of leaving! I’d polished all the damned jewelry I could, and Reynolds had cleaned the showcases, emptied the trash and we’d both folded every tshirt in the cases at least twice, all the while shooting daggers at The Sav and that yuppie couple.

Finally, around 7:45 p.m. the couple simply turned from the racks and started walking toward the door. The Sav, who was standing at the tape counter next to the front door, asked them if there was something we could help them find.

“Oh no,” said the guy yuppie with the leather bomber jacket as he opened the door, “we were just killing some time. We’ve got someplace to be at eight.”

“Thanks a lot, asshole. We had someplace to be a fucking HOUR ago!” is what I longed to say. But I bit my tongue. Reynolds caught my eye and I could tell he had a similar condemnation running through his mind.

Instead, he slowly shook his head as he locked up behind them, and I switched the register over to cash-out mode and began counting the proceeds.

"I'm saving my ticket for then...."

Shortly after I was hired, the record store became an official Ticketron outlet. Ticketron was the first computerized ticket selling service, which gave fans the option of buying their concert and game tickets in advance without having to stand in line on the day of the event. In the beginning, Ticketron charged a flat one dollar service charge per ticket, and even at the height of their ascent in the mid-80’s their service fees were never much more than a few bucks; a far cry from the evil TicketBastard empire, which effectively swallowed up its happy hippy cousin in 1991 and, with no market competition, commenced a heavy-handed price gouging that persists to this very day.

The system was installed on a slow weekday—probably a Wednesday or Thursday. The Ticketron guy had just finished the installation when Reynolds, Tom, Shelly and I turned up for training. Philbert, Jenny and The Murphdiver were already there, as were The Sav and Bev.

Because our ticket booth was minuscule, we were divided up into two groups, with the group already there getting first crack at the machine. The rest of us stood around refolding t-shirts and polishing jewelry—anything to appear busy while The Sav looked on.

Now The Sav was a bonafide technophobe. He’d already proven to be something of a Luddite when we’d gotten new electronic credit card terminals installed at the cash registers a few weeks previous. He refused to use them, opting instead for the tried and trusted manual imprinter. His rationale was that the dotted line for customer signatures was too small. He was also convinced that compact discs were a flash in the pan, but had changed his tune by 1990 when he recognized the money making potential of the little shiny buggers.

And money was the reason he’d opened the door for Ticketron into his store. The store would receive .25c per ticket, and The Sav’s palms were already itching for that first million. Never mind that the store was already earning a buck a ticket from the pre-printed tickets for shows at McGuffy’s House of Draft and Gilly’s. The Sav was, well, savvy enough to know that those clubs had a fairly limited audience, whereas Ticketron would bring in a wide range of shoppers—sports fans, circus goers, and live theatre aficionados, as well as a much larger assortment of concerts for our customer base. He could hardly contain his greedy excitement.

Not that the lure of easy money instantly warmed him to the intimidating machine. He was absolutely terrified of it, and made a big show of waiting on customers, scurrying about the store in an exaggerated display of overburden, and dashing off to the back office whenever there was a lull in the action so that he wouldn’t have to sit through the training lesson. It was months before he actually sold his first pair of tickets, opting instead to have one of us on the clock at all times so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it. Once, when he had to work by himself because someone had called in sick, he had to turn ticket customers away, telling them that the machine was broken. You just can’t make this shit up.

Even by the computer standards of 1986, the Ticketron terminal was simplistic and easy to learn. (Unless you were The Sav, natch) The monochrome screen displayed a series of boxes, and all the user had to do was key in the event code and the number of tickets needed. One keystroke later and the available seating appeared on screen, listed from best (closest to stage or field) to worst (farthest away and/or obstructed view). The store was given a large three-ring binder filled with laminated venue maps, so that customers could look at the seating charts and decide whether or not they wanted the tickets. Each week the corporate headquarters in Hackensack, New Jersey would mail us a packet with all the upcoming new shows in it, complete with the on-sale date, date of show, venue and event code. It was easy, exciting, and within two months of installation was giving the store an extra few grand a month in revenue.

With the terminal came a few unforeseeable problems, most of which had to do with how to handle the big shows. At first The Sav was content to let fans camp out in the parking lot the night before big shows went on sale, because for the most part the punters were respectful of property, cleaned up after themselves and there was generally a feeling of bonhomie and jovial camaraderie among the fans.

This all changed after the Molly Hatchet incident.

It wasn’t like the show was going to sell out—it was Molly Hatchet, fercrissakes. Plus it was at Hara Arena, a general admission venue. We never thought anyone would be foolish enough to camp out for a general admission show that had no danger of selling out. But then again, we never factored in the stupidity of the average Hatchet fan.

When we closed the shop for the night, the lot was empty. We had no reason to suspect that sometime in the night, the bearded buggers would stagger out of their seedy bars and descend en masse upon our parking lot for a big ole hairy biker party.

Tom and Philbert were scheduled to work the next morning, and when they pulled into the parking lot it was like a real life version of Mad Max, only grimier. The Sav always arrived early to open up, but had wisely waited in his van for reinforcements. The three of them slowly picked their way through the dirty denim, stepping carefully over the red-eyed, drunken fraternity and their stringy-haired ole ladies sprawled out all over the sidewalk. Most were so completely gone that they had forgotten all about the tickets. Broken whiskey bottles glistened in the early morning sunlight, jagged gems among pirates.

Sometime in the night, it was soon discovered, the gang had set fire to one of our trash barrels and the other one had been used as a makeshift toilet. Not that these folks were capable of actually hitting their mark, if you catch my drift. After the ticket fervor died down poor Tom drew the short straw and had to hose away a veritable shit storm. He was not a happy boy.

And thus was invented the Line Number. The glory days of camping out for a concert ticket at our store were over.

"When I am king you will be first against the wall..."

All I could think about was pawning him off onto someone else. Someone else far, far away. I was no longer concentrating on what he was saying, and I’d stopped caring months previous. I found myself standing before the PhonoLog with clenched teeth, trying not to press down quite so hard on the pen as I wrote up another Special Order form. I’d already gouged grooves clean through three squares of paper, the pen digging through the layers on the pad while I silently cursed his very being.

I guess every store has at least one of them. They hide behind the anonymity of the telephone, trying to make the shop employee’s life as miserable as theirs obviously is. They believe they are all-powerful when they have the buffer of a telephone distancing them the object of their abuse.

Reginald Pennington was the bane of our existence. We didn’t hear from him very often, but when we did we could guarantee that he wouldn’t let up until he had infuriated us with his incessant needling, questioning and pestering, and then when he FINALLY got a rise out of us, he’d call us abusive names and slam down the phone in our ears.

He was a Prince fan, so whenever the petite purple one was slated for a new release, Pennington would reappear into our lives like a festering boil, but much less welcome. He’d ring the store to inquire about the release date, and would argue with us that the date we had was wrong. He’d insist that only he knew the “real” date and claimed to know Prince personally, yet got extremely huffy when asked why he needed to place an order for the LP with us, when surely Prince would be happy to send him one, since they were so tight like that.

Pennington had some serious social issues, the least of which was delusions of grandeur. He fancied himself secretive and mysterious too, when in reality he was just a paranoid little creep. He’d special order all kinds of Prince and protégé 12” singles and imports, but would never leave his phone number for us to ring him when they were in. He’d insist we tell him a projected arrival date so that he could call us, rather than the normal way around. This would have worked out just fine, except that he would “forget” to ring us for months at a time and the singles would eventually find their way back into our regular stock and be sold almost immediately to any number of club kids that came in on Saturday nights before hitting the dance floor at 1470 West. And naturally, whenever Pennington remembered to phone for his singles, they’d be long gone and he’d be furious.

On this occasion, he had me on the line, insisting that I read off all the PhonoLog entries for Prince, Wendy & Lisa, Sheena Easton, and Sheila E. so that he could decide what he wanted to order. I can’t remember the exact conversation anymore, but somewhere along the exchange he insinuated that he was our best customer. I couldn’t help myself. The derisive snort slipped out and echoed down the phone line before I could reel it back in. He then demanded that I “show some respect because,” he sneered, “I can take my business elsewhere!”
“We don’t need business like yours!” I spat back at him, and he slammed the phone down in my ear.
Later that evening I got a call from The Sav, wondering who the hell Reginald Pennington was, and why was he ringing him at home—especially when Cheers was on.
“He’s the Prince fan who never picks up his special orders,” I offered.
“That guy?” The Sav was incredulous. “He calls my house, frightens my daughter half to death with a litany of threats, and then when I get on the phone he calls me motherf*cking c*nt and slams the phone down!”
“Wow. Yeah, he’s pretty much an asshole. Every one of us has had a go-round with him, Greg. Welcome to the club.”

Then The Sav goes and does the impossible. He managed to wheedle Pennington’s phone number out of him the next time he rang the store. If there was ever a man who could use reverse logic on an already reversed logic, The Sav was that man. He gave Pennington a phone number for the Paisley Park division of WEA in exchange for Pennington’s phone number. And once he had that phone number, we ALL had that phone number.

For the next year, whenever any of us were out and about we’d dial the number from a pay phone. Sometimes we’d reverse the charges. Sometimes we’d call and make snorting pig noises in the receiver. Sometimes we’d just say nothing at all, listening to his strangled cries of “Hello? Hello?”

Then came the evening I took a call from a girl named Jacquelyn at Warner Brothers. She was at the end of her rope because some freaky guy kept calling and harassing her. Her assistant had managed to chat civilly with the guy long enough to find out two things: he was from Dayton Ohio, and he shopped at our store.

At first it didn’t register that it might be our wee Reggie. I listened sympathetically to her and made all the right, soothing noises. She complained that he usually rang on the 800 number, which rendered the call untraceable. She had already spoken to her superiors at WEA, to the phone company, and to the police, because the guy not only drove her nuts, he’d threatened her on several occasions and asserted that he’d never be caught. She even saved some of the threatening voice mail messages he’d left, and did I want to hear his voice in case it jogged my memory? By then I’d put two and two together and told her to hold on while I dashed to the office to grab my purse. Triumphantly I reeled off his phone number to her.

I wish I knew the outcome. I hope Jacquelyn from Paisley Park managed to get him. All I know is that after the night I gave Jacquelyn his number, Pennington never called our store again.

"Am I too old? Is it too late?"

One of the best perks of working in the Record Store was getting to listen to music all day, every day. Not everything we had to listen to could be considered "good," as The Sav's taste in music was mystifyingly bad, but he didn't hang around the shop any longer than he absolutely HAD to, so his selections were suffered until he had left the store and we could see his rusty brown van putting its way up the street.

I listened to a lot of music back then--we all did--and each workday brought with it the chance to hear new stuff, and to turn on fellow co-workers and the punting public to new, great sounds.

We'd hide the vinyl in our cars, waiting for the moment when The Sav's van turned the corner onto Burgville Road, headed for home, when we would dash in turn outside and grab up our armfuls, gleefully hauling them inside the store for the perusal of our co-workers. Later the vinyl switched to CD's, but the ritual was the same.

We always tried to bring in stuff we knew the others might like, rather than what we ourselves liked. And in the spirit of comeraderie we always pulled our selections from another co-workers pile, rather than our own. So when it was Reynolds' turn to choose, he might pull something from my list, or from TC's, or Philberts--but never from his own. It was just an unspoken agreement, and served us well.

One album that was never in dispute was Pink Floyd's The Wall. It was the soundtrack to every Saturday night that I can remember working at the record store. We played the store's battered white label test pressing until the turntable went to the great gig in the sky, and then we switched to my Mobile Fidelity CD copy. Every Saturday night at 9 p.m. we put it on, and for the next two hours were transported through the fertile, tormented minefield of Roger Waters imagination, riding the pure ringing tones of Gilmore's floating fretwork.

It has to be the most listened to CD in my collection. Give or take the rare Saturday night off, my calculations tally 576 times The Wall was played while I worked there.

At this point in my life, I doubt that record will be surpassed.

"Goodbye...lay the blame on luck..."

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard, so much and for so long. It could have been a sad, solemn experience—it was the end of an era, after all. Instead, the gathering Saturday evening at the record store was filled with music, fun, friends, good food and life-affirming laughter of the type I haven’t experienced since leaving the store for Corporate America. Memorabilia covered the walls: photos and apparel spanning the 32 year history; posters from the days when The Sav booked concerts; tapestries with the smiling sun logo. Photo albums seemed to multiply on every counter space. Some of the hanging mobiles were missing, as customers eager for a piece of history had placed bids that were too silly to be turned down. Candles flickered on and around the antique showcases, still brimming with ornate silver jewelry and handmade, one-of-a-kind necklaces. Marcum had dug out all the old award-winning reel-to-reel commercials, which he duped onto CD and blasted through the powerhouse vintage Marantz amplifier. We roared at the risqué radio ads and lamented the conservative voice of today’s milquetoast airwaves. The signature incense burned all around. The smell has always been the same, and we laughed assuredly that no matter what sort of shop may open in the space in the future, it will still smell like the Record Store. The smell has permeated its being, and will live on infinitely. We gathered around the Artists Showcase in the back of the store, peering at photos of our much younger selves smiling with Ace Frehley, Queensryche, Poison, Winger, L7, Badlands, Pantera, The Cranberries. We howled at our haircuts, our clothing, our youth. We reminisced about our missing fellow employees and wished them there. And because they weren’t there, we were merciless in our remembrances and laughed heartily at their expense. The stories spilled out. Confidences were breeched--it no longer mattered. We pulled the widow aside and admitted the secret hi-jinks we got up to while on the clock. What was the harm? We could no longer be fired, after all. Oh and there were some really juicy bits too. Two employees lived “rough” in the store when they were evicted from their apartment. They kept sleeping bags in the car, slept in front of the showcases, and left just before The Sav turned up to open the store at 8 a.m each morning. He never knew. Another employee took an informal poll on how many staff got jiggy in the back office—with customers, with boy/girlfriends, with each other. There were admittances of getting high in the back hallway, getting hammered on the clock, sending customers to pick up food orders, and having The Melvins play a concert in the store after closing. There were over 100 people in attendance, and The Sav never even knew the event took place. We tried to remember the rules of the elaborate game of hacky-sack we used to play, which involved trying to knock as many country artist cassette tapes from the shelving as possible. Reynolds remembered that we got points deducted for knocking off artists we liked, like Soundgarden. Another “game” was the friendly competition between all the guys, which consisted of amassing as many “hot chicks” phone numbers as possible. There were extra points for the “hotness” of the girl, and there were bonus points if she visited the store more than once in a week’s time after giving said phone number out. Even more points were added if she returned with a mix tape for the guy—double bonus points if the mix was a good one. Each had his own hiding place for his “stash” of numbers: underneath the turntable; tacked to the wall behind the special orders; in an envelope beneath the amp. Since most of the guys had girlfriends, the competition was simply an ego booster—proof that the guy “still had it.” There were times it backfired on them, with entertaining results. One guy was stalked by a Michael Jackson fan after he turned down her repeated requests to go to Prom. She used to follow him when he went on dates with his girlfriend, and would sit outside his house in her car. His girlfriend, rather than being angry, felt sorry for the girl and went to sit with her, bringing her tea and coddling the sobbing girl. Another employee had to deal with a hippie chick who, after being rebuffed several times, sat on the curb outside the store and cried every single day for three weeks. Only when the guy was working, of course. Tears of laughter streamed down our faces as we remembered the dreaded Things List. Each morning The Sav wrote out a list of tasks for us to perform during the day, to keep us busy and keep us out of trouble. As if! And woe be unto any employee who managed to somehow piss off The Sav. Between guffaws and chortles, we reeled off the tasks that verified “shit list” status: blowing up the deflated Led Zeppelin blimp; polishing the brass poles; changing the bin liner in the outside trash barrel. Webber even coughed up a tidbit of unprecedented shit list material: having to put three coats of varnish on every wooden LP bin in the store! “I don’t know what I did, but it must have been a whopper!” he mused. Reynolds shot an eye up to the deflated Zeppelin and reckoned it hadn’t been inflated once since he left in 1997. It certainly didn’t look as though it had. The Zeppelin brought the musings upward, and we began to point out all the crafty cut’n’paste sessions we had, mostly at the expense of the hanging mobiles. Rather than do actual busywork whilst on the clock, we’d spend hours devising intricate cut’n’paste masterpieces. My handiwork was still there: Macaulay Caulkin and Ice-Cube masquerading as members of The Crusaders. Janet Jackson still sports a Darth Maul mask. Reynolds face still smiles merrily on the body of Billy Duffy, as The Cult’s Sonic Temple mobile dangles from the ceiling, gathering dust. PJ will always be the Cut’n’Paste King. He and TC did cut’n’paste battle every day for several years, commencing with TC defacing a copy of Rolling Stone with PJ as the middle Hanson brother. PJ, however, emerged the victor with a craftily placed series of TC’s face over every usable surface available. PJ snapped a photo of TC at a Dingle-Jam concert, and then spirited it off to the copy center across the road for an evening of fun. It took several weeks for TC to locate and destroy all the incriminating evidence, the last of which was his stoned mug plastered on the body of Jimi Hendrix, holding court high above the album racks in the middle of the store. The subject turned to the regulars, each name or description bringing with it a flood of laughter and yet more stories. We missed them, we admitted, even the ones who drove us crazy and grossed us out. We regaled tales of sightings outside of the shop. Hilarity ensued. We posed for photos, stood behind the showcases once more, hugged for eternities. We were the fortunate few—former employees of one of the best, most renowned independent record stores in the country. The final closing of the store could have been maudlin. Instead we celebrated that it had existed at all. If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

"A Wizard, A True Star"

"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. " -- Marcel Proust

He went out to shovel snow last Thursday after the winter storm hit. His wife thought he was still in the den, watching television, and when she couldn't locate him inside the house, looked out the front door to find him lying on the walkway, already gone. He was only 56.

Judging from the throngs of folks who gathered last night at the funeral home, he was well loved, and will be sadly missed. His oldest daughter has vowed to keep his dream alive, and plans to leave her managerial job to take over ownership of the shops. She will close the original shop, which has always been his shop. He designed the layout, built the racking and counters, chose the color scheme and theme, and commissioned a personal incense which was burned in the store several times a day, every day for 31 years. The store, she said, has too much of him in it, and rather than alter his vision with a remodel, she will close it in his memory. It's a tough decision, but I think it is also the right one, for exactly the same reasons as she stated.

She will take over the Springs store, and will put her own vision into it with a remodel and a fresh outlook. It's a wise choice, as the town and the store are kindred spirits.

There were lots of faces I recognized; his wife and daughters, long-time customers, current employees, former co-workers from my twelve year stint, staff from the halcyon days of the mid-to-late seventies, school chums. We stood in circles, reminiscing and laughing, surrounded by storyboard photos of his life. For once he had no say over what photos were on show and what music was played, but I can't help thinking he would have been pleased, if a bit embarassed by all the attention. Poignant and fitting, he was remembered with a minute of silence on the airwaves of the local prog-rock station yesterday. His widow was touched when informed of their tribute. "Oh you know he would have loved that."

And then she looked around at all of us and joked through her tears, "He would have loved that free advertising!"

"Them good ol' boys were drinking whisky and rye, singing 'this will be the day that I die..."

We all took the piss out of him a lot, and none of us had much respect for him because we thought he was lame for putting a price-tag on any and everything in the store that he could, but for the most part he wasn't always the complete cheezy-bastard that we made him out to be.

He graduated at the height of hippy idealism in 1968, and his love of music compelled him to work in a record shop called The Music Box until he could save enough to start his own. By 1974, he had achieved that dream. And what a great record store it was. He won numerous awards for his tongue-in-cheek, humorous radio jingles and racy television commercials. He orchestrated in-store appearances by some of the hottest artists of the day. He let the employees pretty much do whatever they wanted, and he held vast parties in the store after closing.

A bankruptcy and a downsizing changed that for him in 1982, but he still remained a committed music fan. The difference in the days of old and the "new era" was that he became a first rate penny-pincher and cut corners every way he could. By the time I started to work there in 1986 he was considered by staff to be a "really cheap & cheezy bastard." I didn't care though, because being a long time customer, I knew it was the best record store in town, and one of the oldest and greatest independents left in the country. I had wanted to work there for years, and one spring evening in 1986 as I was picking up a special ordered import LP, he asked me if I was looking for a job. I had a job at the time, but HELL YES I was looking if he was offering. He had me fill out an application on the spot, and two days later I started working at the Record Store.

I guess I feel a little guilty about all the slagging-off we employees did behind his back, because all in all, he wasn't really THAT bad of a boss. Hell, he usually fucked off home before 6pm and left us to our own devices until our midnight closing time. We got away with a LOT of crazy stuff that we'd have been fired for at any other place. He knew what those bottles of booze were doing in the back office fridge, knew several employees got stoned in the fire-exit hallway every weekend while on the clock, and he knew we got up to all sorts of other shenanigans. We were always eager to help customers, but we were also just as eager to take the piss out of their musical selections, and sometimes we intentionally put on certain albums just to piss people off. We thought it was hilarious. We also thought it was hilarous when he'd catch wind of something we'd done and get upset and huffy.

But as I said, he wasn't really as bad as we made him out to be. In fact, sometimes he could even border on "cool." He and his wife became vegetarian in 1970, and raised three vegetarian daughters. He and his wife were an inspiration for me, and it was because of them that I learned about TVP and how to fix tofu properly. They retained a lot of their "hippy ideals" and stood up for their beliefs. For their 25th wedding anniversary, they purchased a vacation home in Florida, and vowed that soon they would retire there. His dream was to work part-time at Disneyworld, because he loved the "happy vibe" he got from being in a place where everyone was enjoying themselves.

He passed away yesterday, never having achieved that dream of retiring to Florida and working part-time at Disneyworld.

He did, however, achieve his dream of owning the best damned record store the city has ever known.

Farewell Sav. Rest in peace.