No Depression blog about National Record Store Day

Record Store Day and the new music industry
View Kim Ruehl's blog
When I was in college, I was half of a singer-songwriter duo. People called what we did "folk music," and I'd never considered that phrase before. It was 1995 - incidentally the same year No Depression printed its first issue. There was an internet and a Yahoo! search function, but it wasn't where you went to find information. The internet, at the time, to me, was essentially a tool for chatting with strangers and emailing the couple of people I knew who regularly checked email.There was no music online, as far as I knew. That came later.I probably could have typed "folk music" into Yahoo! and found a few random articles from reference journals, or something, but it didn't even occur to me. Instead, I went to the place where music was kept, collected, categorized by genre: the local record store.There were a few I frequented back in the day. The main one was Specs Music. I had been shopping at Specs my entire life. I knew the people that worked there. They sold me tickets to concerts, helped me find the best seats. They had seen my musical tastes evolve from Billy Joel to Debbie Gibson to Babes in Toyland to Ani DiFranco and beyond. They had suggested up-and-coming, unknown artists all along. They didn't have much of a folk music section, though. For that, I had to go to Daytona Beach. I don't remember the name of the store, but they sold mostly used CDs.It was from that store that I discovered and purchased albums by everyone from Concrete Blonde to the Pixies, Greg Brown and Danielle Howle. It was the kind of store into which you could walk with ten bucks and the staff would turn you onto something you never would've considered on your own.Record stores like these two shaped me in my formative music-consuming years. They took me by the ears and stretched my tastes in new and exciting, unexpected directions. By extension, they inspired me and motivated my songwriting engine - that very thing that drove me for years from city to city, opening my eyes to regional styles and songwriting traditions, giving me stories to tell and more words to write. It's the same thing that has brought me here today to recall those influences.On Saturday evening, after a long day of watching music critics talk about criticism at the annual EMP Pop Conference, I wandered a few blocks away to Easy Street Records - a mainstay of the Seattle music scene. (Everyone has a story of the artist they discovered while perusing Easy Street's voluminous shelves, or the band they saw just as they were about to break onto the national scene, performing for a small group of locals on the Easy Street stage.)I beelined for the listening station and typed in a random assortment of numbers. I listened to the new Marianne Faithful disc, songs one through five. Then I switched to Lady Sovereign. I pulled up Animal Collective just to see what that's all about. I could have done all of this online, but I didn't. It felt good to be in a space among music fans, all of us searching for essentially the same thing - a song, an album, an artist who could change our minds. You don't get that experience online, you can't feel that energy. Searching for music online is a solitary, intimate act.For a moment, standing in the telephone booth (another antiquated item) that had been converted into a listening station, I felt sad that I - a person whose life has, for 32 years, revolved around my musical tastes - can't recall the last time I purchased an album in a record store. I stood there enveloped in my giant headphones - the kind that go over your ears, not in them - listening to throwback beats on Lady Sovereign's new album, thinking there were only three or four songs I loved on it. I couldn't stomach spending the special Record Store Day sale price of $8.99 when I could get those songs online for $0.99 a pop.I left Record Store Day with zero purchases and a sorry feeling in my stomach.Later the same night, I went to the Tractor Tavern to watch a celebration of recorded music. Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs - one of the best bands emerging from the incredible roots music scene we have here in Seattle - just released their second album. I'd been listening to Star's record all week long, trying to determine how to fill 400 words worth of space in a magazine with my opinion on the disc, which could be more adequately summed up with a single three-word phrase, "I love it." By Saturday night, I was intimately familiar with these songs, but it still felt good to see them come to life.I stood there watching this incredibly tight band weave their way through a set of songs that lay lifelessly on plastic-wrapped discs stacked on a table in the back of the room, waiting to be inserted into someone's stereo and, by extension, their life. I thought about my experience at Record Store Day. I thought about the panel discussions through which I'd sat at the Pop Conference - one panelist talked about how the emergence of record-making brought the listener intimately close to the musician, and another about how the relationship between music reporter and laptop has changed the way we listen to, interpret, and report about music. I thought about how I received Star Anna's new disc - via digital download in an email from the Laughing Dogs' drummer - and wondered about how all these things could exist in concert with one another.But this is our world. Times have changed and this is the way the music industry operates now. Where my musical tastes were built, shaped, and fed years ago by strangers behind a counter in a room full of shelves and discs, they are now ignited by typed conversations with strangers I may never meet - but whose opinions still matter simply because they choose to share them - in Australia and the UK. They are ignited by emails from friends, friends-of-friends in bands, artists I've met at photo shoots, colleagues who post links to MySpace pages via Twitter messages that go out to hundreds of anonymous strangers. And still, even more often, despite all of these digital means that seem to exist to pull me further and further from the people behind the music, I find what I'm looking for in a packed bar where people with instruments stand on a crowded stage, close their eyes, step to the mic, and let go.

I went to record store day....avoided the listening stations at all cost because they lie to you. Sometimes you gotta let the music lay on you for awhile. 45 seconds of listening to some tracks and you move on? There's often layers on things that hide the center of what you're looking for and you're not going to find it standing in a store too often.I left national record day with some records, hopped on my bike and went home and man o man they sounded good.
I hit two shops on Record Store Day and I'm planning on hitting two more this week on-line. (One has a respective brick and mortar halfway across America and the other is on-line only, but all four have mailing list, fortunately for me.)I hear you about accessing new music. I'm still as hungry for new bands as I always was. (I feel very fortunate that my favorite records of all time do not solely consist of records I heard as a youngster.) Yet, I've been turned onto exactly one new band in the last year or so. (The Airborne Toxic Event)I don't hear as many new bands as I once did. The radio doesn't play them, and lacking a good record store, I'm not hearing "incidental" music in the background that suddenly makes my ears perk up.I still long for that moment when you suddenly realise that the music in the background is F**CKING AMAZING and you HAVE to walk out with that album. The list of bands that hit me like that comes off like an all star roster of albums for me. The Rain Parade, The Hangdogs and Radiohead are all "accidental" finds. I got turned onto Whiskeytown at a record store when one of the clerks there who knew me, and knew my tastes told me, "There is this new 45 by this band that you really will love. It's perfect for you." I walked away with the first Whiskeytown 45 that day.Having access to youtube is great. Being able to preview music over the web is a wonderful source, but there is NOTHING like hearing a tune for the first time and feeling that bolt of lightning. I miss having a great local store and I feel like music is lesser for it.

Since we're up in the not-so-high desert, it takes a drive of at least 45 minutes to get to Lou's Records in Encinitas or twice as long to Amoeba in Hollywood. Since we had other plans on Saturday, the kids and I played hooky last Monday and cruised to Sunset Blvd. in order to show our support to indie record stores.If you've seen past posts of mine you may know I'm an exiled music industry weasel, who lost his livelihood to the changing technology but embrace's the accessibility and possibilities of it. And on the other hand, I also miss the record store experience I grew up with and mourn the passing of an era that we'll never see again.The indie stores that are still left these days are barely hanging on. They do it less for the love of money and more for the love of music and a sense that once they go away, we'll never be able to get back to where we once were before. And although I have seen many things come and go through my decades, independent record and book stores are those that I truly cherish and miss the most.Like Kim, I find it hard to afford (and justify) spending ten bucks or more for a CD these days, when I'm able to access more for less via the internet. I'd rather have twenty-five tracks from ten artists than two CD's from two artists. That aside, I picked up a couple new CD's at the full price (like $13-15.99 each) to support the artists. And then I bought 23 CD's off the clearance racks of artists I'd never listened to before because the store makes more profit on those than the new CD's and after all, it was in support of the store that we were there.This might seem like a left hand turn, but in the weeks leading up to Record Store Day I've been thinking a lot lately about Angela Easterling and the new release that she's been working on. She's a ND and Facebook friend, and I've been reading her daily (and sometimes hourly) posts about the problems with her her album graphics, trying to pick out a name for her band and booking gigs during the summer. Aside from being talented and very energetic, she's an artist who is completely immersed in her project from top to bottom. Because the old model is clearly dead, and the new model is still evolving and not quite there yet...it's the personal connections she's cultivating that makes me think she will be more successful than most.Kim senses it's the emails and posts and blogs and communities [and the live performances] that are the drum beaters for new music these days, and I would agree with that. I don't suspect any of it will ever replace the feeling I get when I walk into a music store full of passionate people who mark their success not from the money they make, but the thrill of taking something they have discovered and passing it on. So before it all goes away...if you pass an indie record store and it's not Record Store Day: stop, go in and buy something.But damn, I sure do miss having a local indie store to walk into where the clerk knows me and what I like, and turns me on to new stuff.