Been awhile since I've been to Nashville and Memphis. Both Tennessee cities have taken it on the chin this week, and join the Gulf Coast area as this nation's early adopters to the climate change game. I heard an NPR report that the Nashville crisis is one of those five hundred year flood scenarios, but I think statistical declarations like that today are meaningless. As the clean up begins in both historic music cities people continue to learn how hard it is on the system in the midst of epochal change.
I think back on of all those trips to Nashville to visit both of the record-video stores we operated, and to visit with one of our major distributors, Ingram Entertainment. Our big store in the city was on West End Avenue, very close to Vanderbilt University. I still have fond memories of the opening events, and the big softball game we played with the road crew and new hires for the store. The manager and good friend, Michael Ludvik, had moved from the Bay Area to take on the new store with a regional managership to follow shortly. The smaller store was located on Opery Mill Road. They both shuttered when the Tower ship went down in 2006. The stores in Nashville, just like their eighty-plus counterparts in other cities, were just the victims of a commercial climate change in the industry where they resided.
I bring all this up, because I got a new book from my lovely wife yesterday. The cover reads: From Vinyl To Digital and Back Again Record Store Days
. The book was written by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo, and has a forward from Peter Buck of R.E.M. As a record store employee in the very early eighties I had the pleasure to meet and talk with Peter and the other members of the band in very tight backstage quarters at the Keystone Palo Alto club in early 1982. This was their first major tour, which followed the release of their debut EP release, Chronic Town
. It was a memorable night for me, and I still have the original EP in my collection. Most of this morning I've been pouring the through the pages of this book, sorry about the allusion Tennessee, and thoroughly enjoying myself putting little bits of history back together again after the industrial storm of this decade went through most of the entertainment retail bricks and mortar. Old powerful store names like Wallich's Music City, Licorice Pizza, Peaches, Commodore, Sam Goody's, Wherehouse, Music Plus, Oar Folkjokeopus, Wuxtry Records, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores and so many more are featured throughout the pages with unique stories of passion, guile, humor and determination.
The cool thing about this book, which is a testament to the authors and probably a great editor, finds each chapter as part of the greater whole but also a self contained story on its own merit. You can pick the book up at any point and put it down the same way. I call it the Chuck Klosterman method of book creation. Genius.
My beloved former boss, Russ Solomon, is liberally featured throughout with insightful anecdotes and messages. There are plenty of other great luminaries quoted in the pages helping create a detailed look at a century's worth of music retailing. The pages have lots of fabulous historical photos. A small statistic, which made me do a double-take, revealed that about a hundred years ago, okay 1906 to be precise, there were over 25,000 retail store fronts selling recorded music in the United States. By the mid 1950s the number had been paired to 7,500 locations,. Today there are less than 3,000 locations selling recorded music.The authors admire and honor many of the current merchants still retailing today, but especially to the folks at Amoeba for their discipline, catalog and success.
If you're in the mood for some fun history in a pop culture music vein this book is gold.
In case you thought I forgot where I started this post, here is a rhetorical question. Who would have thought the oldest existing record store in the country, George's Song Shop, would happen to be found in Johnstown, Pennsylvania?
Stay out of the hollers, friends.
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