Author's note: This piece was written for the 2nd annual National Record Store Day in 2009. It's still as relevant as ever.
There isn’t enough nitrous oxide in Stearns County to make getting off this
twelve-hundred dollar sheepskin rug worth it, I thought. After the hard stuff
wore off, a giant sparkly unicorn balloon full of laughing gas at sunrise
seemed like the only normal thing to do.
“How many cartridges
do you think it would take to fill up a unicorn balloon?” Joe asked the sex
store attendant who was packing up two cases of nitrous cartridges for us. He
was in his twenties and had been working the overnight shift.
“Uh…what do you
mean?” he responded.
“You know, a silver
unicorn-shaped balloon you’d give to an eleven-year-old girl for her birthday…”
Joe attempted to explain, the vessels in his eyes looking like they were about
to spray blood all over the glass display case housing hundred dollar Blue-Ray
pornos.
This wasn’t the time
or place to mention the words “eleven-year-old girl”, I thought.
“Umm, three?” the
poor sap guessed. He was wrong; it took seven.
That was, of course,
before my lips turned a permanent shade of blue and my brain was muddled into a
thoughtless paste of exhaustion. It was eleven in the morning now, and sixteen
consecutive hours of reckless drug use was beginning to take its toll. I now
regretted the nitrous, and so did Joe. I’m sure he was also regretting the
agreement to travel to the Electric Fetus for the second annual National Record
Store Day—an event created to shoot business and traffic into the vein of a
dying industry.
We walked about
twelve blocks through St. Cloud’s central nerve, surprised by the hustle and
bustle of a Saturday just before noon. Public daylight was somewhat of a
mystery to us on weekend mornings. Sidewalks were covered in napkins and
scattered decks of playing cards and all sorts of random, drunken filth.
Our nerves were shot
and social interactions were something to avoid at all costs. The public scene
didn’t want to deal with us—or rather, didn’t know how to—when suddenly, a
voice shouted, “Did you guys make this mess last night?”
A
woman was leaning out a glass door of a downtown business, staring at us like
she had been waiting all morning. I felt guilty, but I know I didn’t make the
mess—we were only downtown for about twenty minutes the night before, and that
was for the drugs.
I dug into my pocket and felt a thin sheet of plastic.
Pulling it out, I saw it was the ace of spades, another curious mystery from
the night before. It was on the ground, scattered throughout the sidewalks among
fifty-one of its near-identical siblings. So, if anything, I was only guilty of
cleaning the mess from last night.
“No ma’am, this couldn’t have been us,” I said, “we
stayed home last night.”
“It must have been those dirty drunks,” Joe added.
“Isn’t this the only place to have fun though?” the
woman asked. I couldn’t tell if she meant it rhetorically.
“Apparently not,” I said, “turns out you can still have
fun at home.” Indeed you can.
We continued on, only a block away from the Fetus. I had
no idea what to expect—whether the place would be crawling with bearded stoners
and unaffected hipsters not-so-violently shoving their way to the front of the
store to be the first to buy the rare, live Pavement vinyl from Germany—or if
we’d be the only ones in the place.
We finished our cigarettes and stepped inside, trying
our hardest to walk and look like decent, law-abiding citizens. The smell of
incense through the northwest door was suffocating. I removed my sunglasses for
a brief second before I saw my reflection in display case housing pipes,
causing me to finally realize sleepless nights of steady drinking and drug use
made me look like a zombie. The orange lenses on my BluBlockers gave me a false
sense of security, knowing full-well that I looked equally as ridiculous
wearing sunglasses indoors—but at least the normal people couldn’t see my eyes,
my undoing.
As it turned out, the Fetus was no busier than usual.
Five or six shoppers browsed the “everything-made-of-hemp” clothes section
while some punk gazed longingly at the obnoxious bong he and his roommates have
been pooling their pizza delivery money towards for weeks. There was only one
shopper in the actual music side of the store—an effeminate hipster, complete
with too-tight jeans and a denim jacket from hell, wearing a striped scarf and
a beret. Yes, an actual fucking beret. He was in the corner, obviously looking
at jazz on vinyl
We were all a collective representation of the record
store customer base—music junkies, regular junkies, and twenty-somethings
looking for strange kicks on Friday nights with their friends. And the record
store itself represented its place in modern times: barren and desolate, barely
kept alive by the remaining handful of people who shop there, even on its rally
day. We were it…we were Record Store
Day. But at least we all knew where to find one another.
In the past five years, over a 1,000 local record stores
have shut down throughout the nation, sent to the glue factory by online
retailers like Amazon and iTunes, leaving only two-thirds of the hometown shops
standing. People don’t give a shit about CDs or vinyl anymore (sans hipsters
and collectors). Why hold something real that requires moving and talking and interacting, when you can use your
computer to magically make The Smiths appear on a little computer box that fits
in your pocket?
But who am I to judge? I’m just as guilty as the rest of
them, hanging stores like this by their feet and bleeding them dry. It was only
hours before that we were listening to The Postal Service’s Give Up in its entirety a half dozen
times in the dark. It came from the little black digital music box in my
pocket, too. The only difference is that I bought the actual CD from a real
person in a record store. Or was it Target? Like I said, I’m in no way part of
the solution.
Why was it
like this though? Why was there only one person looking at actual music on this supposedly popularized national celebration in
the only local record store in a
seventy-mile radius? And why the fuck
did I get off that plush, white sheepskin rug for this?
There were no motives, no incentives, for any of it. Not
for a customer base as small as the indie record store’s. To be honest, I’m
surprised this place has been able to stay afloat in this awful city for this
long. iPod-toting, iTunes-downloading rubes have been destroying this town’s,
and every other town in America’s sense of community to the ground. So what was
supposed to bring people in today—free
popcorn and lemonade?
Other stores nationwide had incentive, probably because
those cities have the customer base to supply
incentive. In-store appearances from Ani DiFranco and Franz Ferdinand popped up
in bigger cities while The Boss and Elvis Costello, among a whole handful of
others released limited-edition vinyls that’ll probably be pirated online by
Monday. The Electric Fetus in Minneapolis had local band, The Bad Plus, perform
and ex-Soundgarden frontman, Chris Cornell, for a meet and greet.
But there was nothing real to offer in St. Cloud’s
store. Nothing really worth a trip into mid-afternoon sobriety.
“It’s actually been pretty busy in here so far,” Dan,
the music aficionado behind the counter told me.
Busy? I
thought. I knew him and he knew me, and I don’t know who he thought he was
trying to fool. He’s soft-spoken and excited about the day, I can tell—a
passionate lover of music. If he weren’t working today, he’d be on the other
side of the cash register. That, or probably getting drunk.
“Is it supposed to get busier?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, it should be. We’re having some giveaways later
and we have a couple of rare albums on vinyl,” he said.
“Like the live Pavement album?” I said, glancing at the display
wall next to the delicate, beret-wearing hipster.
“Yeah, it’s from Germany in 1988.” Our conversation
stalled. We stood in silence for what felt like thirty seconds, looking at the
shelves as if they would talk. Was our level of dumbness that noticeable and painful to deal with, or was there really that
little the store had to offer?
They also supposedly had free food and drink, something
our bodies were desperate for, but it was nowhere in sight. Joe and I didn’t
stick around to find out if they were handing out green brownies or electric
Kool-Aid later on though—the lull of emptiness and overpowering weight of
gravity was killing us. We were struggling just like the record industry.
“Owning a record store is like cornering the market on
slide rulers,” Joe said walking back down the street.
As much as I hate to admit it, the bastard was right.
Trying to keep your head above water in a business so outdated and
under-appreciated was a lost cause. We can’t do anything without a computer in
front of us now—we don’t need actual, tangible
things to satisfy our needs anymore. We don’t talk to people with our real
voices anymore, we don’t go to stores to buy things and we don’t take the time to
notice anything. There’re computer
programs and the Internet for all of those things now. If you want a book or a
poster, you buy it on Amazon and read it on your godforsaken Kindle or iPad;
your music is from iTunes or pirated as a torrent; you can even go grocery
shopping online. And fuck that. Honestly, fuck
that. Even talking to your own
friends seems to be a hassle in real-life today; that’s what Facebook is
for.
And what about album artwork? Do we really not care
about this integral part of the music: the cover? There’s something about
buying an album and being able to actually hold
it in your hands and even display it if you want. Would you buy a Monet or a
Picasso that you could only look at on your computer monitor? Absolutely not.
You’d have to be a Scientologist to think that irrationally. Think about the
classic album covers throughout history: The
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover of Dylan and his then-girlfriend arm in arm, walking down a street in Greenwich Village; The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road covers are as much modern art as the music itself; if
someone had never heard Nirvana, they’d still be able to tell you there’s a
naked baby’s dick on the cover of Nevermind.
Why would we want to miss out on these things? Why just disregard them as if
they held no aesthetic value?
We were running out of steam, so we sucked down another
cigarette and walked a few blocks to The White Horse for lunch and a beer; one
of the few things you can still do without a computer screen in front of you.
Everything was starting to wear off and we felt awful. The beer provided only
mild satisfaction—from its wetness—since the alcohol in it no longer served any
purpose. We forcibly choked down our sandwiches and walked back to our friends’
house, where we committed all sorts of moral wrongs over the past fifteen
hours. Joe’s girlfriend laid uncomfortably awaiting our return in the darkness.
There was a sense of comfort and safety in that dim
living room. Good music was still coming out of the speakers, as it was before
we left for the Fetus. It was that music that served as the generator for our sleepless
endeavor the night before. That,
illegal medicine, friends, and a rug. Hours ago, that glorious sheep rug was
occupied by the three of us, spacing out to the sounds of expanding balloons
and then, with a couple deep breaths, thirty seconds or so of mental bliss—over
and over again—to the beats of LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33.
I remember buying the album two winters ago, knowing
basically nothing about the band. I needed something new to listen to,
something fresh. So I went to the Fetus and found the black-covered compact
disc case. Then at the counter, I ended up talking to Andy, the Electric Fetus’
in-store, all-knowing music guru about the direction Of Montreal’s sound has
gone over the past decade for a solid half hour. He’s one of the reasons I like
getting off my ass, away from a computer and going to my local record store—his
never-evolved high school nerd frame, little wire-rimmed glasses and
breathtaking mullet—asking him about any artist in the store, and getting some
sort of meaningful and honest interaction with a Real Person. He knows me by
name, and says it when I leave the store—and that can mean more to me than the
music itself. My Sony Vaio doesn’t have that effect on me.
“In some ways, the retail experience is almost as
important as the music,” John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp said about Record Store Day.
He’s right: it is. The journey is the destination.
I can always remember going to record stores—talking to
people, holding real things and having something to show for
my money. And maybe that’s why we need record stores, maybe that’s why we need
to go do things. I don’t remember
anything about the last time I downloaded music from the Internet. I didn’t see anyone or talk to anybody. I didn’t have an Experience. I didn’t move.
I have experiences I remember when I go to record stores.
I once saw Stephen Malkmus come out of the back room of the Electric Fetus in
Minneapolis, reeking of grass—before playing a short set in front of a packed
record store. And today, I saw nobody in my record store on Record Store Day,
but at least I’ll remember being there. At least I did something.
It isn’t the
record store’s fault for struggling. It’s our fault for staying inside,
shielded by a keyboard and a backlit screen—shielded from what we’ve all become
too busy for: the people and community around us. We’ve become selfish whore
robots, always connected to the machine—whether it’s hanging out of our ear or
on our laps—and I think the only ones left who really care are the people who
still go to record stores.
