Every Day Is Record Store Day

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 19, 2009

The time was 1969. The place was Air-Waye Records on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. And the album was “Disraeli Gears” by Cream.

There you have the basic facts behind my first solo purchase of a record album, and the start of a spending spree at local records stores that has continued unabated to this very day. I just picked up copies of Radiohead’s “OK Computer” (Remastered Version)” and Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” (don’t ask me why) on Friday at Mad Platter Records on West Gay Street in West Chester.

I’d like to encourage you to join in my consumerism. Yesterday was Record Store day across the United States and Great Britain, a day set aside to celebrate, promote and sustain the local independent record stores that still exist in this age of downloads and file sharing. Although lots of such retailers have shut down in recent years, about 2,000 are still putting music out there for us to gather up, and many—like the Mad Platter -- are thriving. Maybe you should go out and see.

Record Store Day was the idea of Chris Brown, a long-haired, goateed music guru from Bull Moose, a chain of 10 record stores in Maine and New Hampshire. Now in its second year, Record Store Day is being celebrated at more than 1,000 independent record stores in the U.S. and in 17 countries.

"I wanted to have a fun kind of party event at Bull Moose where we could thank our customers and just have a fun time," he told the Associated Press.. "I realized that it would be a much better party if we got the other stores involved, just make it a national thing."

I like the idea of a day that gives me an excuse to do what I love doing anyway – going to a record store and shopping through hundreds of titles – but in a way I think it is a shame as well. In my mind, every day should be Record Store Day.

To be sure, I’ve spent a lot of time in record stores that could have been put to better use, but what of it. As they used to say about Midnight Basketball, lurking in records stores kept me off the street when I otherwise would have engaged in socially destructive behavior, like spray painting graffiti on neighborhood walls or studying for the law school entrance exams.
Air-Waye Records was about a mile from my home and I could easily ride the Schwinn there with my friends. Before “Disraeli Gears” with its “Sunshine of Your Love” hit came along, I’d picked out dozens of 45s to buy and badgered my parents into picking up copies of the latest Beatle or Beach Boys album, so my life was not without the sounds of the ‘60s before then.

The phrase “kid in a candy store” does not begin to describe the hours I could spend at Air-Waye thumbing though the racks of LPs, trying to imagine what it would be like to own each and every one of them. Those were the days when album art covers were just starting to come into their own as a cultural medium, and I am sure the owner of the store got used to the sight of me flipping the albums over and over the better to read and stare and contemplate the figures on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” or the Bob Dylan painting on the cover of “Music From Big Pink” by The Band.

Not that I’m obsessed with the subject, but I can tell you that I still remember there were two prices for LPs at Air-Waye -- $4.19 for new releases and $3.49 for older ones. Don’t ask me why. When folks of my parents’ generation start moaning about how they knew the country had gone to hell in a hand basket when a gallon of milk went above $1, I smile knowingly and think of the number of albums I could buy with a $20 bill and some loose change these days if we’d stayed out of that hand basket.

I understand that we cannot as an economic system cling to businesses that are outdated, and that sometimes things just don’t last. I haven’t seen too many haberdashery stores opening along the avenue lately, and frankly I’m not sure I care. But if record stores are going to disappear from the face of the earth, I would simply rather that they do so after I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil so that I won’t have to know about it.

Meanwhile, I think ‘m going to stop by Mad Platter and ask Debbie if she’s got an extra copy of “This Mortal Coil.” It’s not “Disraeli Gears,” but then what is?