Ah, the things you find on old laptops...
While recently seeing if my previous laptop could still breath, I found some old writings. This one, below, is a piece I did about 10 years ago when asked to write about my favorite records store for a compendium the now defunct Get Bent website was putting together. My particular fave rave store didn't just rest on a good used selection, but ended with an appearance from the FBI!
Then last week, Record Revolution in the Coventry section of Cleveland, closed - I frequented that place a few times over the years; then I tripped across the Other Music documentary last weekend on Night Flight, and that seemed like another cosmic nudge to post this.
So check it out if you care, and go visit your local record store today!
If memory serves, the first album I bought at Wax Stax...
************************************************
Wax Stax, Parma, Ohio, 1985 – Eric Davidson
My hometown of Parma, Ohio, was a suburb (the largest in the nation in the later 1970s; not anymore), on the west side, about 15 minutes from Cleveland proper. That’s where the great record stores were, on the far east side of Cleveland specifically; or in Lakewood, the slowly hip-morphing near west side suburb that had cool things like neat old homes, vintage stores, dusty dives, rusting diners, even gay people. But that was still about 15 minutes away from no-drivers license me.
So I made do with the weak mall chain store (yeesh); and a surprisingly worthy shop, Record Revolution, that sat on the far, old, outdoor strip of that mall (my first lesson in learning how most of the things I appreciate in this world will be shoved to the margins). I got my first Velvet Underground record there (White Light, White Heat). There was a huge Peaches Records & Tapes (one of many of the disappearing non-mall, self-standing chain stores, though this one oddly survived under different names until just a few years ago). And then a good used joint, Record Exchange, opened in a small retail strip within walking distance. (It moved a few years later, after adding racks of video games, an ocean of used VHS tapes, and metal tees, and changed its name to “The Exchange,” no doubt to divorce itself from the dying music market.)
And before that even, there was always The Shoppe, a quirky, incense-stunk, flared pants-era cobble of curiosity shops in a big old house in kind of nearby Berea. They always touted that their new vinyl was only $5. Like I wanted a new copy of The Nylon Curtain! It was only worth bothering a friend to drive me there for the selection of “imports,” which at that time in the ‘burbs meant anything not on a major label; or even lame-lier, a German Red Lorry Yellow Lorry 12” single. But I did find some of my early favorites there. I remember, in 1983, sitting in the car outside The Shoppe, the heater on, snowy outside, waiting for my friend to finish his purchase, looking over the Murmur liner notes, thinking “Man, I can’t believe they had a copy of this!”
So all things considered, I guess I didn’t have it that bad. But the Parma-approachable record stores always had that patina of “west side” to them, which if you lived in Cleveland then, you’d understand. No cool fliers on a board near the door. (“Baby sitter Needed!” doesn’t count.) No piles of weekly newspapers and more fliers flopped around the windowsill near the door. No endless racks of dirty plastic-sleeve 7’ singles. And no crotchety “old” 29-year old at the counter making fun of/informing my purchasing habits. Not that the local stores didn’t have their charms, but let’s put it this way – in 1985, you don’t want Scorpions and Heart posters on the walls of your indie record shop. You want Cramps and Smiths.
So oh the joy when Wax Stax opened! Tucked away in an even more remote, crumbling, and weird little strip, behind another nearly as old strip, next to a barber shop and nothing else, to me it was the Taj Mahal. With Cramps posters. On the way to/from Wax Stax, I had to pass the Catholic church I was weekly hauled to. And pondering the contradictions between the church rooftop cross and the Stooges, Ramones, Prince, and Rodney Dangerfield albums in my hand did more to form my morality than 1,000 confirmation classes. At least it felt like 1,000!
But back to the real place of worship…Wax Stax was great! Smaller than any of the previously mentioned stores in town, it was packed with a much higher percentage of cool shit. The thing is, there was a Wax Stax on the east side, and this was an attempt to expand into white flight-ville. So when they opened, the place was already packed with lots of great used and new goodies sent over from the other store on the cool east side. They had actual imports, bootlegs, fanzines, and the #1 sign of any great with-it record store of that era – promo copies. Lots and lots of promo copies.
See, back then record labels did not just email out, via publicists, a mp3 to blog writers who won’t even take the time to download them. No, record labels sent out finished copies of their albums. (While I wrote for the Cleveland Scene magazine in the late-80s/early-90s, I probably accumulated 33% of my collection via the “freebie box” in their offices, or trade-ins of said freebies.) And labels sent promo copies to record stores too, often more than one. Made sense, right? You want to make sure the employees can hear the new shit, talk it up to the customers, and hopefully order more. Ha, right! What the hell do the employees care? They would’ve ripped open a new one to hear it. But whatever, it was a wealthier time. (Or is that wasteful-er?)
Bad Moon Rising, Zen Arcade, Tim – probably paid no more than $4 for each of them. Promos all! (Not to mention all their used records rarely rose above $5; new, $8.) The lone female clerk/manager was not only from the east side too – and hence knew what “Pere Ubu” meant – but was not surly and condescending in the traditional indie record shop sense, and pretty cute, too-boot! And she gave great trade. So I was bringing in Bobby Brown and Guadalcanal Diary promos, and a few of these fledgling “CDs” I was getting from the Scene, and trading them in for cheap-ass copies of Death of Samantha, Buzzcocks, and the Volcano Suns. It was as close to mafia accidental back of truck falling off shenanigans as I was likely to get in my life. Or so I thought.
One day, a little less than two years after Wax Stax opened, I was sifting through the “B” section (“Well, “All That I Wanted” is a good song, but a whole Belfegore album?!” Nah…), and in walked two guys wearing – and I am not embellishing here – long trench coats and fedoras. They flashed a badge at the manager, said a few things to her, then looked over: “Hey buddy, yer gonna have to take off for awhile.”
Yup, fucking FBI guys, I shit you not. It was one of those mini-moments at the end of the ‘80s where major labels decided to throw a bone to “Cracking down on unlawful sale of promotional copies.” Read the stamps on those old things. It says some nonsense about those being the property of the label. (The labels never tell you that they write those promos off on their taxes, right after subtracting them from the artists’ future royalties.) The preponderance of bootlegs might’ve had something to do with the flat-foots storming the gates too, and maybe some grass passing through the back door. But who knows.
Wax Stax only closed for about two weeks. Once reopened, it didn’t seem much different, though the scare worked, as there were never again as many promos or bootlegs in the racks. But the two new managers were really nice guys – one a tall, skinny, bespectacled collector geek; the other a black guy in tattoos and dreadlocks who was into Ministry – in Parma! Cool. (Yes, for about a month in my life I thought Ministry fans were sort of cool. Especially black ones. Hey, it was 1987!) Then about a year and a half after that, some really odd older drunk guy (or maybe a hop head – my inebriation radar wasn’t as well-calibrated back then) bought the place, added more t-shirts, posters, video games, cassingles, and those expensive CD things, and, well, you can see where this is going. The place sucked…and closed about a year later.
But by then I was going back and forth to school at Ohio State University in Columbus, soon to move there permanently. And for my purposes, Wax Stax had done its job exceptionally well. My standards for a cool used record store had been diamond-cut, and as I toured the world with the New Bomb Turks, stopping first at every town’s indie record store, I could make like General Patton surveying the far hills.
The other day I was scanning down my iTunes list. I didn’t feel like Patton.
Come to think of it, Used Kids Records in Columbus, Ohio was probably the most important record store in my life. But that’s another story…which you can read about in my book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books).
