Pop-Ed: Record Store Memories on Record Store Day 2013

the staff has some fond memories to share …

Ann Hale: There used to be a cd store called Disc-Go-Round a few miles away from my house where you could trade in old CDs and buy used ones. My best friend and I used to ride our bikes out there to trade in the music we no longer listened to for new stuff. Up until I was old enough to do this, my parents always bought my CDs, so riding my bike out there was a big deal.

The first CD I remember buying for myself was Cosmic Thing by The B-52′s. I had played the cassette tape so many times that the radio had started to gobble the tape up, so it was time to upgrade.

I remember being horribly disappointed because I couldn’t find it in the B’s section where it was supposed to be and then freaking out when I stumbled upon it in the soundtracks section where someone had misplaced it. I listened to that cd many times over the years and I still own it to this day. It skips on the Deadbeat Club track but I cant bring myself to replace it. In fact, I still own the cassette that my player wanted for lunch. I guess you could say that Cosmic Thing was the soundtrack to my childhood.

Nick Porcaro: I was six when That Thing You Do! hit theaters. I don’t remember much about the movie, a Tom Hanks period piece chronicling the rise and fall of fictional ’60s rockers The Wonders, but the title track was perhaps the best song the Beatles never wrote. It was penned by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains Of Wayne, actually. (Imagine that!) The song still holds up in 2013, though its production is certainly too clean to pass for a British Invasion relic. More importantly, I played that song to death on my First Sony cassette player; my craving for infectious guitar hooks and sicklyvsweet vocal harmonizing survives to this day.

Brent Johnson: It was Saturday, Aug. 14, 1993 — and I remember every detail.

Billy Joel’s River Of Dreams had been released that week, and my mom promised to drive me to Camelot Music at Brunswick Square Mall to pick up a copy once the weekend came. Rarely had I been that excited. I was 9 years old, and I had never bought a CD of my own before.

Even in elementary school, I fostered an immediate love for The Beatles, Elton John, and countless other classic pop-rockers. But Billy Joel was my idol. For a young kid discovering the pure joy of rock music, he was a perfect hero. He composed catchy, sturdy, character-driven songs that were easy to remember and a blast to mimic. He was cool but not hip — wearing jeans and sneakers with a sports jacket and sunglasses. I remember asking my mom if I could buy the red blazer and black button-down shirt he wore in the ‘You May Be Right’ video. (She said no.) I tried to grow my hair into his late-’70s faux afro. (It didn’t work.) I took piano lessons, and when my teacher asked me to try classical music, I didn’t want to. (“I only want to play Billy Joel,” I insisted.)

He hadn’t released a new record in four years when River Of Dreams came out. That made it all the more enthralling. I gave the clerk a $20 bill, took the CD home, and my mom told me I had an hour to listen to it before lunch. I sat on the living room floor next to my parents’ stereo and played the album front to back — from the snarky crunch of ‘No Man’s Land’ to the angry euphoria of ‘The Great Wall Of China’ to the shrugging resignation of ‘Famous Last Words.’ Even then, I knew there were few things in life as fun, as entrancing, and as beautiful as music. And to me, Billy Joel encompassed those emotions better than anyone.

Little did I know, that would end up being his last pop album. So in many ways, that moment — the only moment I’ve ever had to experience a Billy Joel album when it was fresh — holds a place that’s even more precious in my life.

Remembering this moment actually makes me a little sad as we come to another Record Store Day. The concept of going to a store and buying a piece of cardboard or plastic with an album inside is so endangered that we need a day to celebrate it. As the world embraces those brittle MP3s on their iPods as the main way to take in music, it hurts to know that the crisp memory I have of buying River Of Dreams happens so rarely these days. LPs and CDs really are pieces of art. You can hold an album in your hand, inspect the artwork, decode the liner notes, and witness a story arc when you let the tracks play in order. That seems lost now. We may have a world filled with music at our fingertips at every second, but how much do we truly appreciate it anymore?

Bobby Olivier: The first album I ever purchased was more of an indirect transaction. See, it was the unedited version of Eminem’s breakout, The Marshall Mathers LP and I was 11. Eleven-year-olds should never listen to that album, which is full of violence and vulgarities, let alone be allowed to purchase it. I coerced my mom into buying it for me with my money, citing that my friend, who seemed to be in good moral standing, owned it as well. I did not know that he had the edited version. After a week or two of listening to the record non-stop, I was singing the words in passing one day, my mom heard me, listened to the album herself, picked her jaw up off the floor and returned it. No more Eminem. In my heart, there is still a level of mystique that surrounds the album that popped my cherry — hard.

Jason Stives: I can’t recall the first album I ever bought in a record store. It’s been so long ago that I can remember a time when the closest record store, the Princeton Record Exchange, had just one door to walk through. Fast forward to my sophomore year of college and there I was working behind the counter of the same place, now equipped with double glass doors. My traditional work garb up to that point rotated between t shirts of Fall Out Boy and Flogging Molly so walking into a store full of audiophiles I was open to some heckling and looking back it was justifiable.

However, I remember getting along quickly with the cast of characters that became great associates of mine. The smell of nostalgia in the store (that’s mainly old VHS tapes and worn out vinyl) and the inside jokes that would become staples over an almost four year period. Despite my choice of band t shirt I stunned my new co workers with a vast knowledge of ’60s and ’70s acts. I was still the new guy so I hadn’t earned my merits yet but it was the start of many fond memories and a plethora of great music. My coveted purchase from that period is one that some of my co workers were envious of: a vinyl copy of Queen II, and in remarkably good condition! I plucked it from the backroom after pleading with one of the record appraisers and 5 years on it still holds up not just in sound but the overall enjoyment of the buy.

Bill Bodkin: I could regale you with the tale of how I walked into the Compact Disc World at the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, N.J. (which is now a Joseph A. Bank) and purchased the Escape From L.A. soundtrack with my own money. But I won’t.

Instead, I want to look at my vinyl experiences on this Record Store Day, especially since artists releasing limited edition vinyl in conjunction with Record Store Day has become such a big thing.

My late father was an avid record collector and by the time the ’90s rolled around — vinyl had become somewhat of an endangered species. This lead my dad to become an obsessive vinyl adventurer, an audiophile version of Indiana Jones — exploring whatever town or city his work or his free time allowed him to find the 45 RPM singles that he so desperately wanted for his collection. See, during his run as a US Marine in the early ’60s his record collection had been under the watch of his younger brother — who ended up “borrowing” many of these records to fill the jukeboxes of the bars he was working in. For decades my Dad hunted the world for his lost collection.

And that’s where I came in. Being my dad’s sidekick and he being my best friend, we often would find ourselves in odd little antique shops, dingy hole-in-the-wall record shops or on the rare occasion, an actual nice place like Princeton Record Exchange or The Relic Rack, flipping through an endless sea of record sleeves, looking for these lost vinyl nuggets. And when we found one, it was a celebration. A high-five, a pat on the back and usually called for us to have a celebratory meal, which of course, we’d keep secret from mom … who knew what we did as soon as we walked in the door. To this day, I can’t figure out how — psychic mom powers perhaps?

And I will readily admit, I did not like any of the music we were looking for. My dad was doo-wop junkie, raised on the sounds of the street corner in the Bronx. Almost signed to a major record deal himself (to become a new version of The Belmonts, who were Dion’s backing group), his musical world was all about harmony and falsettos. This would obviously come into clash with my later audio appetite of destruction when I fell in love with heavy metal. But seeing the joy on my dad’s face when he made that find, was awesome.

It was the same joy, actually multiplied by 1.000, when I bought my dad his final piece of vinyl. My parents decided to sell their house in 2008/09 and it was determined that his collection of 45′s was going to have to go since their retirement home was to be much smaller. It broke his heart when he sold his collection for next to nothing. A mere few hundred bucks, for what undoubtedly was worth much more.

So that Christmas I found a copy of his favorite single, “The Treasure Of Love” by Clyde McPhatter on it’s original 45 RPM pressing and gave it to him for Christmas. It was the best present I’d ever given him. And while he never ended up crossing every one of those lost records off his list; it was this record, a one he’d probably purchased a dozen times, that actually completed his collection. Since he had sold all his copies of it months earlier, this became his greatest vinyl loss and now, this was his greatest vinyl possession.

Now, the record is in my hands. And it will remain unplayed. The rich sound of Clyde McPhatter’s vocals will remain lodged within the grooves of this record and it will remain a symbol of the days of father and son tramping around New Jersey and New York on the hunt for lost songs and creating a bond that will never fade.