Record Store Days, Flip Side

Tower was a big box store with an indie heart. They hired people who cared about music, and even though Tower was a chain, each store had its own personality. I worked at a tiny record store in Bellevue, and as much as we begrudged Tower's gigantic-ness, we still admired them (and you'd find many of our staff after work browsing Tower's shelves.) My girlfriend-eventually-wife and I would stop by the crummy Shakey's pizza place down the street, and after pizza with extra cheese, we'd head on down to Tower to hang out. (It didn't hurt that she'd sometimes wear this flimsy t-shirty thing that had me walking into walls...)

The store in Bellevue gave me my second adolescence. I was there when we got our first shipment of the Sex Pistol's single "God Save The Queen", and bang, I felt like I was 13 again. So many great 45s would show up week after week, many of which I have now on CD compilations, burned or otherwise (like The Strangler's version of "Walk On By", performed Doors-style, or The Undertones, a pop-punky Irish band who sang "Here Comes the Summer" like a revved-up Celtic Beach Boys). And then there was the transcendent moment when we opened the boxes containing "The Beatles At the Hollywood Bowl". It was crap, of course, the music drowned out by the screaming (which is probably why it went unreleased for so long), but it was the first new Beatles album in many a moon -- AND I WAS THERE WHEN IT CAME OUT!! It felt like I'd gone back in time and met Jesus' 3rd cousin Shlomo -- sometimes just being downstream from the real thing is enough.

Later I worked at Northern Lights and/or The Landing, and one of my fondest memories is working the Folklife Festival in Seattle. For one brief, shining moment, we were the Offical Record Store of Folklife, and I had a great weekend selling LPs and cassettes of Dougie MacLean, Stan Rogers, The Good Ol' Persons and so many more.

I found so many mentors in record stores -- Ron, who told me about Roy Bookbinder, Tony Rice, and many more bluegrass & folk artists; the time when I went to Discount Records in Seattle to beef up the reggae collection of Music Street in Mount Vernon (by then, we were owned by the same company, so we could shift stock back and forth), and the guy there kept pulling out (I found out later) classic reggae LPs ("Oh, you'll need this, and this -- and definitely this...") -- LPs that still live on in my CD collection; the older black gentleman who'd stop by the store in Bellevue and tell me about Ivey Anderson (vocalist on "Take the A Train" by Duke Ellington) and The Three Suns; the guy who'd bring his Swedish jazz LPs into Northern Lights; Thom and Ron from Northern Lights/The Landing, of course (I'm still stunned that Ron managed to get Richard Thompson & Danny Thompson to play the Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon)...the list goes on. Thanks to all and sundry; I hope the tradition continues in tiny record stores across the world...