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a celebration of sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Generous Expertise

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The terrific documentary about Other Music popped up on Prime Video last month. I’ve wanted to see this for a while — the NYC store, much mythologized, really was the ideal of an indie record shop. It had it all: a niche selection curated by the owners and staff, records filed under sometimes-baffling genre section names, cards with reviews filled to the edges with jumbled handwriting affixed to releases, store layout and organization to the point of disorganization, and so on.

The documentary made me miss New York City (I’m so happy I got to visit a few months before The Strange Times) and, of course, browsing in record stores. But, most of all, I miss the communities and interactions that revolve around great shops. This aspect of music culture was fading, along with independent retail stores, with or without COVID interference.

Other Music, New York City

Record store clerks get a bad rap for being smug jerks, judging customers’ musical tastes from behind the counter. Sure, I know a few of those —perhaps on a bad day, I’ve been one of those — but I think the cliché is overblown. As the Other Music doc shows, record store employees are often helpful experts in their chosen fields. As Caroline said as we watched the movie, “I could listen to them talk about records all day.” They know a lot about music, they listen to a lot of music, and their favorite thrill is turning someone else on to great music. People who work in record shops live for that.

There’s a moment in the documentary when a customer says to the clerk, “I’m looking for something like Lou Reed that’s not Lou Reed.” We wait for the side-glance, or a snarky response, or the indignant huff. The legends and depictions of pretentious record shops train us to believe this might be a terrible thing to ask. The customer is brave even to bring it up. 

But record store staff enjoy questions like this. The request is open-ended but has a launchpad. It’s an invitation to explore, and, most of all, it’s the customer saying, “I trust you to turn me on to something I haven’t heard yet. And I’m inclined to love it.” Maybe that’s just my own experience (I owned a record store once, remember), but I think I’m right. 

I can’t imagine the response if that person asked for “something like Lou Reed but not Lou Reed” on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe he’d get a handful of helpful replies in the spirit of a record shop clerk, but the snark would cover those over like a storm cloud. I don’t know of an internet equivalent of a space where one stranger can ask another for an open-ended recommendation without fear of trolls or insults or intimidation. 

Record stores are places of generous expertise. It’s sad that the concept almost seems quaint in this volatile age. And that’s what I miss the most about stores like Other Music. Hopefully, these stores — Other Music not included, unfortunately — will be around once we get out of this mess. In the meantime, watch the documentary. If you ever had — or have! — a favorite record store, this movie will move you.

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A couple of weekends ago, 1200 record stores participated in Record Store Day. I don’t need to tell you that this was a weird edition of the annual tradition. Record store day occurs typically in April but, this time was pushed to June, as there was a thing called “wishful thinking” back then. As that plan fizzled out, we’re now celebrating RSD 2020 through three ‘RSD drops’ on the last Saturdays of August, September, and October.1One wonders if this monthly schedule was inspired by ‘Bandcamp Days.’ In part, the idea is that spreading it out will thin the crowds showing up at actual record stores. This schedule, in theory, will also help space out the releases, so they’re not all hitting on a single day. I’m not so sure.

The decision exists in our current retail paradox of ‘less physical customers, more physical sales.’ The dramatic lines in front of record stores (which you can see in photos from a year-old blog post of mine) are no longer welcome. Elbow-to-elbow bin browsing is not allowed. That’s a shame as peeking at the person’s selections next to you is how vinyl junkies make friends. 

Most record stores won’t open their doors to the record-collecting masses. The RSD organizers frowned on online orders of exclusive releases, but this year it’s acceptable. Stores are trying to restrict orders of these limited items to local addresses, which sounds like a losing battle. Some stores are using a lottery to determine which customer snags a rare vinyl release or who gets to step in the store for an allotted time. Others are using platforms like Instagram, posting a photo of the record. Then it’s ‘first come first serve’ among the commenters. And, appropriate for this year of live-streaming, Zoom-led RSD tours from stores are happening.

In Variety, Mick Pratt of the Northeastern US indie chain Bull Moose says of the challenges, “I choose to be optimistic about it and hope that it will be great and it will not result in too much stress, either for staff or for customers who are like, ‘Damn, what I really needed to get through 2020 was this record.'”

How did it go? It seems like it went okay, but shifting vinyl fans from crowding the stores to crowding the internet had foreseeable problems. Here’s a tweet from Damon Krukowski, whose old band Galaxie 500 released the live album Copenhagen for RSD:

Regardless, the point is to support these stores (among all the other independent businesses you’re supporting) during this difficult time. You don’t need to wait for the next Record Store Day to do so. We can’t lose these places of generous expertise: the record stores, the bookshops, the locally-owned restaurants, the farmer’s markets, etc. I have the feeling once we get out of this, we’ll need these places more than ever. I don’t know how we’ll manage if they’re gone.

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John Shepherd has a generous expertise. You’ve probably heard about the short documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens by now. So you know Shepherd’s expertise wasn’t only his musical selections. Though I’m not convinced all those knobs and wires and screens and machinery actually did anything, you know, scientific. You might also know that his generosity extended to alien life forms. He DJ’ed to the great unknown, an audience that may or may not be out there. I know the feeling — I used to have an overnight slot on college radio.

As evidence of my embarrassing music-nerdom, the most crucial part of the documentary, to me, is when, in vintage footage, Shepherd pulls Musik Von Harmonia out of his vinyl collection for a local TV crew. As obscure as that album is now, it was but a rare fossil when that television ‘human interest’ piece aired — sometime in the ’80s is my guess. Shepherd’s geek move was strategic. He knew this would go out on television, potentially to an audience in the hundreds of thousands. So what album does he choose to show? And then he plays some of the music, announcing “now here’s a song from Harmonia” into the microphone. Shepherd’s audience is now more than extraterrestrial, and he knows it. 

Like making friends with the person browsing next to you at the record store, John Shepherd aims for connection. He’s satisfied if that connection is with aliens or a TV viewer left dumbfounded at a Harmonia album on the evening news. The film’s director, Matthew Killip, speaks about these connections in The Guardian: 

Killip was interested in extraterrestrial life less as scientific inquiry than cultural phenomenon – “if you make a film about someone trying to contact aliens, there’s an in-built narrative problem, which is that they don’t contact aliens,” he said. But he found Shepherd’s lifelong interest in contacting someone, or something, in outer space to be “deeply romantic”, and more universal than a guy rigging thousands of dollars of radio and electrical equipment in his grandparents’ living room might seem. “We’re all sort of sending out a message hoping that someone else will pick it up and understand us and understand who we are,” Killip said. “We’re all trying to make contact.”

The compact but poignant documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is streaming now on Netflix. And, John is right — Musik Von Harmonia is an album worth hearing.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Starting Points

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• As a former niche record store owner, I can’t wait to see Other Music, the documentary on New York City’s much-loved and much-missed outsider music shop. Writer and investor Om Malik beat me to it, giving the film an enthusiastic thumbs up. He found a profound message about how the discovery of music we love attaches to a moment in time. There are people, memories, and places forever associated with songs and albums. Unfortunately, algorithmic discovery doesn’t connect itself to our memories, and the music becomes dissociated from personal meaning. Malik writes:

While the film is about a record store, it is really about serendipity and the emotion of discovery. We need a story to make something a memory. I watched the documentary and instantly remembered every single salesperson, their quirks, and even their snobbery. […] This is the missing piece of Spotify as we know of it today. The faceless algorithm does nothing to cement the moment of musical revelation in our memories. I am currently tripping on Oceanvs Orientalis, but I have no idea how I ended up finding them and liking their music. By comparison, a friend’s beau introduced me to El Jazzy Chavo. Every time I play his music, I think of the two of them and our bumpy car ride together.

Even if algorithms are efficient at providing basic “if you like this, then you might like this” music recommendations, they deprive us of the joy of discovery.

This sentiment is on point now more than ever. We’re living sequestered thanks to COVID-19, and opportunities to hear songs for the first time in clubs, restaurants, or in cars with friends are rare. That said, I wonder how much the music we’re finding now will live on in our emotions as the ‘songs of lockdown.’ [LINK]

• Shawn Reynaldo’s latest First Floor newsletter is remarkable. He asks himself, “What does ‘doing better’ actually look like?” Shawn refers to his desire to confront systemic racism, especially as part of the electronic dance music industry. His piece starts with a lay of the land and what others are doing — or are trying to do. Then Shawn leads into a self-examination:

Looking back at my own career, I’d like to say that I had avoided these traps, but the truth is that I’m just as guilty as most other music professionals I know. I admit that before last week, I hadn’t really considered some of these issues, as I was complacent in the fact that because I had written about and booked countless black artists over the years, I was doing my part to help. After all, even though my colleagues and I had been mostly all white, we were also “progressive” people with good intentions and the right politics, which placed us on the right side of this struggle. It almost feels ridiculous to be writing these things now, but after doing a lot of reading, reflecting and listening in recent days, it’s now obvious to me that I wasn’t doing enough.

Shawn goes on to list how he plans to start ‘doing better.’ These suggestions are thought-out and I’m making note, adopting them as well. And, as Shawn knows, these serve as a starting point. The changes we need to make go deep — both outside and within — and they will evolve as addressing lingering issues will reveal new challenges. Be sure to read Shawn’s full article — it’s powerful, and I can’t stop thinking about it. [LINK]

• Related to ‘doing better,’ One Little Indian Records has been using that name since 1985, releasing seminal records from Bjork, The Shamen, Chumbawamba, and others. As of yesterday, the label has renamed itself One Little Independent Records.

• I’m learning about Czech performance artist Milan Knizak, a ‘member of Fluxus behind the Iron Curtain.’ Like Christian Marclay, who followed him, Knizak broke, burned, soiled, and tormented records. Then he put them back together with glue, tape, and who knows what else. Much to the chagrin and detriment of his turntable and needle, he played these reassembled records. If you’re curious about what that sounded like, then hold on to your hat … here you go:

• Today’s Lake Holden photo at dawn is a pretty one = [LINK]

Other Music and the Bigger Ends

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The New Yorker:

This Saturday, Other Music—the tiny, beloved, and outré record shop on East Fourth Street—will cease its retail operations. Critics can and have read Other Music’s bow-out as representative, in an allegorical way, of any number of bigger Ends: the End of music as a physical medium to be collected and doted over, the End of curated off-line retail, the End of curation, the End of the East Village, the End of New York. Most of those Ends—whether real or imagined—have already been eulogized so aggressively that to revisit them now seems plainly indulgent. In our accelerated culture, collective nostalgia, in which we mourn the freshly antiquated for reasons that are unclear but still enormously potent, is its own cottage industry.

There are no record bins anymore—no little plastic signposts signifying content, broadcasting a set of principles, musical and otherwise. Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in her digital library. The idea of “Other Music” as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.

Empire Building: Vinyl Edition

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The Dallas Morning News:

[Josey Records managing partners Waric] Cameron and [Luke] Sardello say they approached [vinyl pressing plant owner Stan] Getz about buying A&R in July. They’d known him for years, having run dance-music labels of their own in the mid-1990s; like every local label, they had to get their records pressed at A&R, especially since the CD essentially killed the vinyl industry by the early 1990s and the nearest facility is now in faraway Salina, Kansas.

As recently as five years ago, buying a record-pressing facility might have been considered a dreadful investment unless you also had a time machine to go with it. Yet sales of records continue to climb: According to figures provided by the Recording Industry Association of America, more than 13 million LPs were sold in the U.S. alone in 2014. Numbers haven’t been that high since 1990.

“The business of vinyl is an old business model, and it’s the one that has survived everything,” Sardello says. “Vinyl has survived streaming, and not only has it survived, it’s thrived. It’s up 40 percent each year. So what else is there to detract from it? It’s never been easier to access music, and yet vinyl is as strong as it’s been for the last 25 years.”

At the same time, they will begin opening other Josey Records stores: Cameron says he wants to have six to 10 more outlets in the next two years in “major metropolitan areas,” including San Antonio.

“The thought was always vertical integration,” says Sardello, “We started thinking about bands. We started thinking about a label. We started thinking about a studio. We started thinking about more stores and how we can work with bands and labels and go from pressing your records to distributing our records to putting them in our stores to sending your band on a store tour.”

Kudos to these guys, who I’d met on and off back in my DJ’ing days. The lede buried in the main story, but that I highlight above, is the plan to eventually cover the manufacturing, distribution, and retail stages of releases under the company operation. This is the strategy major labels used to dominate in their heyday, so it’s interesting to see an independent upstart take on similar goals. Of course the elephant in the room is that today’s ‘physical product’ climate is much different (despite comparisons), and the majors themselves no longer follow this process – acquiring equity in streaming services, in hopes to somewhat replicate the traditional food chain, seems to be the current major label modus operandi. So it’s a gusty move to pin such high aspirations on a format with an unpredictable shelf-life … vinyl’s extended perseverance is an optimist’s hope. But, as I join in optimistically rooting for vinyl, I’m also rooting for Josey, and we certainly need more gutsy maneuvers like this in the independent music biz. Rock on.