The news that the Virgin Megastore on Union Square will be closing soon is shocking, but not totally unexpected. Just a few years ago, the equally large Tower Records closed all its outlets. And what of the giant record-store chains of yesterday? There is apparently one Sam Goody’s in New York City, a far cry from the chain in its heyday. King Carol doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does the Record Hunter. And let’s not forget that at one time, every major New York City department store had an active record department.
It appears that in the near future, I’ll do all of my CD buying online, except for occasional trips to specialty, used-CD stores such as the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, N.J., or Academy Records in Manhattan.
I know that many younger people don’t even buy CDs – they download all their music from online services. But doesn’t that deny people the fun of looking at CD covers and reading liner notes? And what about the experience of going to the record store, meeting friends, and just talking to the knowledgeable people behind the counter about music and learning a lot from them?
In the Navy
I had the good fortune to work in two record stores, one wholesale and one retail. I won’t tell you where the wholesale store was, for obvious reasons, but it supplied a lot of retail stores “down the shore” in New Jersey. It was also “connected.” One day, I was given a stack of (vinyl) records that each had stickers saying “To Be Sold Only in Outlets of the U.S. Navy.” My job for the day was to take a blow dryer and, one by one, remove these stickers so they could be sold in this wholesaler’s own retailers in Jersey. I didn’t say anything.
The owner of the store talked something like Tony Soprano, and someone told me that he was given this store plus a few others in reward for “taking the fall” and serving time for a higher-up who had committed a robbery.
Because this wholesaler carried such a great volume of records, I vividly remember seeing the first albums of artists who later became major stars. For example, we always had two or three copies, but no more, of an odd-looking record with an old photo of Asbury Park on the cover called, appropriately, “Greetings From Asbury Park.” A few years later, the artist, Bruce Springsteen, was one of the top singer-songwriters in America.
A Retail Store in Midtown
The retail store I worked in, a fairly large one, was in Midtown Manhattan. It was there that I first heard the word “disco.” Half the people working there were would-be actors, actresses and musicians. Of the two managers, one, a young guy with shoulder-length hair, was heavily into jazz – his hero was Sonny Rollins – and talked in an already-outdated jive talk. It might have already been 1974, but to him, every girl was still a “chick,” every guy a “cat.”
The other, in his fifties at the time, was also a jazz fan and had met many of the great jazz musicians of the ‘50s, such as Sonny Stitt, in their heyday. But he was even more heavily into Sinatra, and from time to time put out Sinatra bootlegs, which he sold in the store. My feeling is that he produced them more as a labor of love than anything else – they contained a lot of rare radio airchecks and alternate takes.
“If I met Sinatra, and I showed these to him and told him I put them out, I wonder what he’d say?” he wondered. If such an encounter ever did happen, I thought to myself, Sinatra and/or his bodyguards might not have been pleasant.
This guy also had a serious side to him. The movie “Lady Sings the Blues” had just come out, and a long-haired guy about 21 years old – the age I was at the time – had just bought a Billie Holiday album at the store. As soon as he left, our manager started insulting him left and right. I wondered why, since he really knew jazz and had talked about Billie on occasion.
“Well,” he answered, “people like that don’t really appreciate Billie – she’s just a symbol to them because she was an addict and came from a poverty-stricken, minority background. If they really appreciated her music they wouldn’t be buying only her, they’d be buying Sarah, Ella, Lester Young and Charlie Christian, too!”
The store’s famous classical music department was headed by a man in his early 60s with a German accent who had probably been a refugee from Nazi Germany years beforehand. He lamented the sloppiness inherent in the operation. “If you go to Germany nowadays and say you want to work in a record store,” he said, “you can’t just work on the floor. You’ll be stacking records, organizing them, opening boxes and memorizing catalogue items for two years before you’re even allowed to see a customer!”
Then, there was the owner. I don’t remember much about him, but at some point he began receiving private “visits” from a tall, long-legged, extremely scantily clad young lady who spoke abominable English. Soon, whenever an “important person” with whom the owner did business showed up at the store – such as the printer he used to print our ads – he would call for this young woman, and the important person would also disappear into the back office with the young woman.
Records weren’t all we sold. The front of the store had all sorts of items that are almost totally unknown today – record-cleaning brushes and cloths, cleaning fluid, head cleaners for cassette players, and, of course, phonograph needles! Stereo freaks of the ’70s and ’80s spent hours cleaning their records, adjusting their tone arms until they put just the right weight on the records, and bragging about their speakers, “woofers,” “tweeters” and other audio equipment.
Thus ends my little look at the record-store business, circa the 1970s – a business that today’s young people, unfortunately, will never know.
Originally Published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
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