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June 1, 2007

Record Stores

The Maltese yellow pages list stores which sells compact disks as “record shops”, a fact which pleases me no end. That, and having several times passed the Antonio D’Amato Record Shop in Valletta, must have made me think about my old record store days, before the business was taken over by chains.

When I was a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and utterly devoted to popular music, there were record stores in Dallas which were owned and operated by local proprietors. Many of my earliest 45 rpm purchases came not from a record store per se, but from a television sales and repair shop in Westmoreland Heights Shopping Village, a little over a mile from where my family lived and about two blocks from where Sheila’s family lived. P&J’s devoted one back corner of the shop to pop music. It’s amazing to think about nowadays, when even the chains might offer no more than several dozen CD singles, that little ol’ P&J had a wall display, changed every week as the chart changed, of the entire Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. One spotted the 45 one wanted on the wall there, or simply asked the old man who ran the place (was he P or J?), and he would produce the single from behind the counter. There was also a rack out front, for browsing, which included up-and-coming singles (he may have even used the ‘bubbling under’ 45s from Billboard) and singles which had recently dropped out of the top 100. This veritable wealth of 45s was supplemented by several racks of LPs, lined up underneath the 45s display. I didn’t buy many LPs there, because his prices were more or less manufacturer’s list and, by the time I began buying LPs, the discount store Gibson’s had come along. But I do remember the summer of ‘70, the summer before my senior year of high school, finding Donovan’s new Open Road record there and purchasing it.

The most notable record store in Dallas was a local chain which sold both records and (at least in some of its locations) musical instruments–Melody Shop. There was a Melody Shop downtown which, in the late ’60s, still offered listening booths for customers to sample records before buying them, and a large Melody Shop in North Dallas’s NorthPark Mall. Melody Shop was marvelous because it sold not only current 45s but also back-catalog 45s. I well recall buying Bob Dylan’s single of “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” at Melody Shop in NorthPark. By that time the song was probably 3 or 4 years old, but I didn’t own Blonde on Blonde, and the single had not been a hit in Dallas. I’m not sure if I’d even heard it when I bought it. I must have practically played the grooves off that single, which I adored.

It was not uncommon at the time for “dime stores” and local pharmacies to have a small record section as well. My old buddy Allen and I often walked across the street from church and browsed the singles at Gilley’s Pharmacy. Two of the singles I bought there are the now-almost-entirely-forgotten “Stop Light” and “7:30 Guided Tour” by the Five Americans. (The latter must have been simply an attempt to get in on “Magical Mystery Tour” psychedelia, but it has its moments. The former, on the other hand, is a song I still adore.)

And of course the department stores had record sections as well, but keep in mind that at this time the more prestigious department stores in Dallas were not the two national chains–Sears and Montgomery Wards–but rather the local chains Sanger-Harris (an amalgamation of the early Sanger Bros. and A. Harris stores) and Titche’s. (The most prestigious of all, of course, was Neiman-Marcus, but that was not a place that my “gang” or family shopped at. As high school students, my gang thought it was cool to go to Neiman’s Downtown on our “State Fair Day”, which happened to be during the store’s annual Fortnight celebration, celebrating a different country every year. We loved the British Fortnight, to be sure.) It astonishes even me how much of my life is a vague blur or a mystery to me, but I sharply recall using high school graduation gift money to buy both Procol Harum’s Broken Barricades and T.Rex’s T.Rex at the Titche’s store in Wynnewood Village. This purchase of T.Rex began, if I recall correctly, the T.Rex craze shared by Sheila, Melanie and me, which preceded “Bang a Gong”’s popularity by several months.

And what about Gibson’s, which I mentioned above? Any of you who are roughly my age and who lived in the South in the late ’60s will recall Gibson’s, I suspect. It was one of the first discount chains, beginning (like the later and much reviled W*lM*rt) in Arkansas and spreading for a while like wildfire. They discounted. Oh, my, they discounted! I can remember monaural LPs that cost only $2.47; stereo LPs that cost $2.87 or $3.17. It’s remarkable how the world of music can open up when a kid can buy an album for the price of 3 singles! I bought The Byrds’ Greatest Hits and Love’s Forever Changes (which I didn’t much like at the time) at the Gibson’s store on S. Westmoreland in Oak Cliff. I bought the Seeds’ Future album at the Gibson’s store on E. Ledbetter, where my uncle worked: and this was after having seen the Seeds in concert, so I was quite ecstatic about that. Sometimes even grocery stores sold records. I bought the Seeds’ first album at the grocery store (was it Safeway?) in Jeff Davis Shopping Village, just across the street from my grandfather’s gas station where I worked on Saturdays and during the summer.

Another cool record store opened while I was in college: Hit Records, near the intersection of Hampton and Illinois roads. The owner drove a green MGB/GT, which I quite lusted over. I remember buying Journeys End by Matthew Fisher and Roger Daltrey’s first solo album from Hit. For a while, until the tax rate went up, I suppose, “Mr. Hit” (as I thought of him) priced his LPs so that, with the tax added on, the price was an even price involving no pennies. My memory, which may be wrong on this point, tells me that he sold $4.98 LPs for $3.29, which with tax came out to $3.50. $5.98 LPs were $4.33–$4.60 with tax. (Why do I remember these things?) (Why do I tell you?)

By the mid-’70s, Dallas had a new chain store–Sound Warehouse (later to become Blockbuster Records and finally to be merged with Wherehouse). In these early years, they also did DEEP discounting on new LPs, deep enough to put latter-day powerhouses like Best Buy and Circuit City to shame. Selected new LPs were often close to half-price, and I don’t mean just the latest Boston or Peter Frampton record. Even something as relatively obscure as Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane’s Rough Mix would get the treatment too. But by this time something else had come along as well: used records.

The first used record store I have strong memories of (maybe it’s the first used record store I’m aware of) was called Metamorphosis Records and was located in the Quadrangle area of Dallas, near downtown, in an old house. The couple who ran the store, Mike and Barbara, were also musicians: sometimes while browsing the store, I would hear Mike playing guitar, and I distinctly remember purchasing a cassette of theirs a few years later. Some of the LPs they had for sale were promotional copies liquidated by radio stations. Others were just used LPs. Depending on condition and obscurity, an LP might be as cheap as $1.25. In fact I distinctly remember making my first Leonard Cohen purchase from Mike and Barbara, a scratched but highly playable copy of Songs of Love and Hate (still my favorite Cohen record) for $1.25. Because these records were pre-owned, and therefore almost always already opened, you could sample them on the turntables there in the store and take chances on artists you might not otherwise have heard of. Mike and Barbara would have to qualify, I suppose, as latter-day hippies, and when punk and new wave came along, they heavily featured those records in the store as well–new records. At some point they relocated just a few blocks away, onto McKinney, a prominent North Dallas street, and carried rock-related materials as well as records. I bought my little box of Brian Eno cards (the name of which is momentarily escaping me–Obscure [Something]?) there, and I can remember seeing Iggy Pop’s book I Want More on display. They carried English import copies of records which had not yet been released, or would never be released, domestically. I bought “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Ceremony” and “Procession” from them; one of the early post-mortem T.Rex assemblages of latter-day singles, most of which I hadn’t heard (it may have been called simply A & B Sides; and U2’s Boy.

Record stores were exciting, truly exciting in those days. And I consumed music voraciously and with a ferocity which I haven’t had in years.

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