by Jason Cohen
Whenever I go back
to my hometown of Philadelphia, there are but two things I have to do: First, Ivisit the family, and then I go home — home being that nurturing, adventurous
place where I spent the better part of my adolescence. Home being the Record
Cellar, on not-so-bustling Bustleton Avenue, where, according to the store’s
T-shirt, “Records Are Like Life.” A dingy room, staffed mainly by three guys
named Neal, Craig, and Pat, who crammed it with wooden racks full of new and
used albums, and a rack downstairs for 7-inchers. All through high school I
bought and liked practically everything they recommended. It was a good store,
but that’s not particularly important — it was my store. Everyone who’s more than just a casual fan of music has a similar place or
experience. For a long time the best indie store in New York was in New Jersey,
and scores of Manhattanites took the PATH train to Hoboken just for the
privilege of shopping at Pier Platters (if there was a show at Maxwell’s that
night, all the better). My Anglophile friend Mickey has walked into Greenwich
Village’s Rebel Rebel almost every Friday for years, certain in the knowledge
that: a) his NME and Melody Maker will be there; and b) if one of
his favorite bands has a British single it would already be set aside for him.
And to take just one example from this city, back in the punk days Inner
Sanctum was (along with Raul’s) as much a subcultural community center as a
retail establishment, drawing in people who went on to do crazy things like
start rock & roll bands, or free weekly newspapers.
These days, the term “record store” doesn’t even appear in the Yellow Pages
anymore, which seems like a semantic loss regardless of whether or not you
prefer CDs. Nevertheless Austin’s cup does runneth over. In Waterloo, we have a
homey and independently run store of uncommon breadth and size. Similarly
diverse, with their own particular strengths and customer biases, are Sound
Exchange and Musicmania. The welcoming used-only emporium Duval Discs keeps a
stock that is both wide-ranging and up-to-date, and so does Technophilia, where
you can also find a handful of new and imported products. There’s ABCDs in the
Lincoln Village, and way up north there’s Soundways (in the Lake Creek Shopping
Center), and Revolution, just off of Parmer Lane. And there’s also Tower, which
took a lot of flack when it opened (for both its corporate parent and its
destruction of the Varsity), but it’s always been the best a chain can be.
What a chain can never be, of course, is Neal, Pat, and Craig — the guys
behind the counter who own or run the place, and have specific pockets of
knowledge that mean nothing to most customers but everything to certain ones.
The bigger a store is the less identity it has, and while eclecticism is nice,
so is minute expertise. Fueled by a combination of obsession, elitism, and the
need for like-minded souls, people want more of what they like, or what they
like faster, or to know that what they like will always be in stock. A great
record store should feel a little bit like the owner’s record collection and a
little bit like our record collection. We want to see stuff we already have
because that tells us we belong, and we want to see stuff that we always wanted
but could never find, and we want to see stuff we’ve never heard before,
because if we trust the store, we know we’ll like it. Whether it’s a blues or
soul fan at Antone’s, an indie rocker at Sound Exchange, or a Tejano lover at
Maldonado’s, a relationship develops.
So it makes sense that in a market that could be glutted, there are four new
kids in town geared towards very specific genres and customers. Over the last
year (more or less) Austin has seen the addition of Alien on 15th Street; Inner
Mind on Lamar; 33 Degrees on San Jacinto; and Stashus Mule on 37th St.
The broadest of the newcomers (and the newest, having opened in September) is
Stashus Mule, but even if you’ll find Pearl Jam or Beatles CDs there, the store
has a strong post-punk identity, epitomized by what owner Lou Cioci refers to
as his “shrines.” One wall is like a college radio history lesson, from CBGBs
to Chicago hardcore to Seattle. Others display prodigious amounts of
Replacements and R.E.M. records.
“There might not be too many people that need the REM Spanish “Stand” promo
7-inch, but if they do, I’ve got it,” says Cioci, who worked in record stores
in Boston and Manhattan before coming to Austin. On the one hand, he’s kidding
around, but on the other, he does have it in stock. Plenty of other goodies dot
his bins, which put an equal emphasis on vinyl, including new releases. More
desirable rarities (like PJ Harvey’s limited edition Dry Demos CD) and a
good number of those live “import” discs round out the stock, along with some
jazz, blues, and seminal pre-punk rock.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from MTV, radio, or, okay, yeah, the print
media too, but the club/dance music scene is more vibrant than ever. Austin has
enough people embracing it, for the moment at least, to support two record
stores, Alien and Inner Mind. Both shops are tied to local clubs, with Alien
owned by head Proteus deejay Herb Agapetus and Inner Mind started up by the
co-owners of Ohms, Michael Lawder and Reza Gohary. And both stores essentially
spun off from larger entities — Agapetus began Alien because he felt hemmed in
as the dance buyer at Waterloo, while Inner Mind started out with the
involvement of Sound Exchange’s former dance guy. Both stores employ, and sell
a good deal of their inventory to, working deejays.
Largely because of deejay culture, vinyl remains the dominant format, with
both stores’ on-display stock numbering in the thousands. These are the places
to get imports fast, and dancefloor hits six months before they’re on the
radio. They carry dance-identified, remix-sympathetic mainstream artists like
the Pet Shop Boys and Madonna, but Inner Mind’s Grant Stevens says they barely
sell any of it, at least not compared to the CD by Hardkiss, a Florida-based
production team who drew a hundred-plus people to an in-store in October. Inner
Mind has a mixing board set up on the counter for such occasions, which means
the staff can spin at leisure, too. There’s a case full of tapes by local
deejays, and a Fruitopia fridge that the employees empty quicker than they can
stock.
At Alien, co-buyer Chris Hernandez says new records come in every Thursday
and Friday, and on each of those days the customers show up around 3:30pm to
cram around the preview turntables, checking out new singles and white labels,
and remix b-sides. What’s fascinating about both of these stores is that within
the label of club music there are more than a dozen rhythmically or sonically
distinct sub-genres: trance, acid jazz, house, techno, ambient, trip-hop, dub,
and so on. This fragmentation enables the stores to complement each other (for
example, Alien carries more tribal, Inner Mind more Chicago house), and it’s
also what makes them special. Where the average store might have separate jazz,
rock, indie, dance, or import buyers, these stores have people who specialize
in only trip-hop or hip-hop or ambient. The depth of the inventory and the
involvement of the staff is that much greater. It would be like having an
alternative rock store with different people handling lo-fi, grunge, punk,
garage, and indie-pop.
Which, in a way, is what’s going on at 33 Degrees, a tiny little storefront
tucked away near UT’s campus, a few doors down from the Crown & Anchor.
It’s the combined effort of Dan Plunkett, who also publishes the magazine
ND, and Bob Coleman, who runs the indie label Over and Out and does a
garage show on KOOP Saturday nights. They’d been importing and distributing
records on their own for several years, and also working the record convention;
now they’ve put a roof over that process, creating a modest but thoroughly
unique collection of new and obscure indie 7-inchers, avant-garde jazz imports,
and experimental fare ranging from Krautrock and psychedelia to the current
wave of Amerindie “post-rock.”
“The idea is to offer what other people aren’t carrying, and also feature it
in a way that you can’t see in the other stores,” says Coleman. “I see some of
the titles that we have [elsewhere], but they’re all spread out.” 33 Degrees is
definitely not a store for everybody — “some people come in and it’s like
they’ve walked into an Albanian-only bookstore,” says Plunkett — but for the
right customer, it’s a place like no other. As with Stashus Mule’s Spanish
R.E.M. 7-inch, there may not be a huge number of Austinites in the market for a
tarot deck produced by a member of the German band Cosmic Jokers, but the day
that person walks into 33 Degrees there won’t be a happier customer in all of
Texas. n
Jason Cohen is a former Chronicle “Recommended” Editor and is now a regular
contributor to Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly
This article appears in January 19 • 1996 and January 19 • 1996 (Cover).