At the Beat Goes On, we had a lot of teachers as customers. Teachers were interesting customers. They were like sheep, all looking for the same thing. It was so bizarre the first time I was swamped by teachers all coming in looking for the same CD. A CD that was out of print, incidentally. That CD was TSN’s Jock Jams disc.
In the late 90s, teachers were told at a teaching convention that kids learn better to certain kinds of upbeat music. 1995’s Jock Jams was given as an example of the kind of music to play in class. Teachers were told to get a copy, play it in class while kids worked, and note the improvement in their performance. Jock Jams! That is what they were told to buy. They couldn’t get it at the mall, since it was out of print. So, they came to us, a used CD outlet. We were swamped, at every location, by teachers.
“Do you have Jock Jams?” asked the first one. I didn’t have one in stock, but I called one of our other stores who did have it.
“Can you get them to hold it for me? I’ll be right there,” said the teacher. That teacher would be the only one to score Jock Jams on that day. Shortly thereafter, a second customer came in asked for the exact same CD. That always raised my eyebrows when it happened. When multiple people came in asking for the same album on the same day, over and over again, it meant something had happened. Sometimes it meant an artist won an award. Other times it meant the artist had died. This time, much to my surprise, it because of a teacher’s convention, where they were told to buy an out-of-print and out of date CD.
“Do you have Jock Jams?” asked a second customer.
“No,” I answered in surprise. “We just sold our only copy. Literally just now, a guy came in and got our only copy.”
“When can you get another? I need it for my class. I’m a teacher.”
“Well, we are a used CD store, so we’ll get another copy when it is traded in. I can put you on a wait list,” I answered.
“How long will that take? I need it for September.”
“Impossible to guess,” I replied. “The CD is out of print. Someone has to have a copy, and trade it in first. I can put you on a waiting list. Or I could get you Jock Jams 2?” I offered.
“No no,” answered the teacher. “We were told to get Jock Jams 1.”
“Jock Jams 2 will have similar music, just newer songs that your students will know better than Jock Jams 1,” I mentioned.
“They said to get Jock Jams 1,” replied the teacher with zero initiative. And so, the customer left their name and number and I put them on a wait list.
Then the next customer came in.
“Do you have Jock Jams?” they asked.
“No, we sold our only copy this morning. Are you a teacher?” I asked.
“Yes, how did you know?”
Because of that teacher convention, we had 20 customers come in that day for Jock Jams, and added seven names to the waiting list. It took years to clear that waiting list. Notably, a few went for the more recent Jock Jams 2, but most were steadfast. “We were told to use Jock Jams 1,” they would answer.
“Well I can tell you that you’re not going to get Jock Jams 1 in this town, this semester,” I regrettably informed them. “Your students won’t even know the songs on Jock Jams 1.”
“We’re supposed to use Jock Jams 1,” they would reply. OK…lots of luck!
We ended up cranking our prices up on Jock Jams 1 any time they came in stock. They used to be $8.99. Now we would ask $19.99. Supply and demand, and there was very little supply and much demand. Teachers didn’t want alternatives to Jock Jams. “We were told to get Jock Jams,” they would bleat like sheep. This went on a couple years, every August.
Every time I see a Jock Jams CD, I think of that damn teacher convention that brainwashed these people into thinking that Jock Jams, and only Jock Jams, would improve their students’ learning. Only towards the end of the rush would teachers finally break down and buy something else that was similar in style, like a MuchDance album.
I lost a lot of faith in the teachers of the late 1990s during the week of that convention, and the rush on Jock Jams. No imagination, no flexibility, no originality. What was the world coming to?
My time in music retail was relatively long, considering how taxing on the soul it can be buying used music from the public on the wrong side of town. I started in July of 1994, in a small store in a small mall in Kitchener, Ontario, called The Beat Goes On. We sold some used, some new. In 1996, I began managing a new store that was a slightly different format: 95% used, with a small Top 40 chart of new CDs. I stayed there until early 2006. 12 years total, with 10 in management. Over those 12 years, I witnessed so many changes to the way we did business. Join me for a journey through time.
Ah, 1994. I had just start dating a new girlfriend. Motley Crue had come out with their John Corabi album, which was easily my favourite disc of the year. I wore cowboy boots to my job interview with the boss man at the Record Store. I was hired and nervously stepped behind the counter and did my first transactions.
We had a huge cash register, and still took cheques. Credit cards were processed with one of those imprint machines that made the satisfying CHK-CHK sound when you imprinted the card. Then began a long process of writing in dollar amounts and getting a signature. Today, one tap and you’re done! When we got a debit machine, it used the same phone line as the actual store phone. When someone called the store, it would interrupt your debit transaction if you had one going. You usually ended up with two impatient customers that way: one on the phone and one in front of you!
Our stock was part CD and part cassette, but tapes were on their way out and we only bought and sold used CDs. The reasoning was it was easier to check a CD for quality visually, looking for scratches. We carried only those two formats, until one day in November 1994. Pearl Jam came out with Vitalogy in 1994 on vinyl, two weeks before its cassette and CD releases. The first vinyl I ever sold. We only stocked five copies because nobody was buying vinyl back then. We probably should have stocked 15 or 20, because we were surprised with demand. People who didn’t even own a turntable wanted it for its collector’s value and larger artwork.
Boyz II Men were big. TLC were bigger. Soundgarden and Nirvana were dominating the rock charts. My kind of music wasn’t popular and wasn’t encouraged to be played in store.
Tastes changed rather quickly for some of these bands. Boyz II Men made their way into the bargain. Thence came Puff Daddy, Mase, and of course the posthumous albums by 2pac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. On the rock side, upstarts like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed and eventually Nickleback replaced Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on our charts. And then came Crazy Town, and by then, it felt like there was no coming back. Rock was a cartoon. A “fuck”-laden filthy cartoon.
The job behind the counter became easier. By 1996, our inventory was computerized. Cassettes were gone; it was 100% CD. You could look everything up with a simple search. Before, I had to physically search the shelves to see if we had inventory. Of course, we soon learned that just because something pops up on the computer as in-stock, that actually means nothing. Human error was a huge problem and I was as guilty as everyone else, if not more so! Putting the wrong disc in a CD case upon sale was so easy to do. Not every customer realized they bought something with the wrong CD inside, and we didn’t always get them returned. We ended up with many missing or mis-matched CDs, and also missing cases due to mis-filing or theft.
Soon customers wanted to look things up on computer terminals by themselves. They also wanted to see what our other stores had in stock, as the we franchised out and grew. These complicated problems were eventually solved with a little thing called the World Wide Web.
Having internet access at the store in the year 1999 was unimaginable to me of 1994, who had never even been on the internet yet.
Of course, the advent of the internet brought with it an unforeseen danger. Soon our very existence would be threatened. No, I’m not talking about computer viruses or Y2k. Those had little impact at all. Something else did: Napster.
Napster changed everything. Soon we were carrying so much more than just music, to make up for the decline in sales. Bobble heads, action figures, books, video games, headphones, and so so so so many CD wallets. Sometimes the toys and action figures wouldn’t have anything to do with music, like the Muppets or the Simpsons. (Those were carried because a certain regional manager personally liked those shows.) Osbournes merch was popular. Kiss had many different toy options available. Metallica had a cool stage playset. Macfarlane figures either sold out, or sat around forever. We stopped carrying blank tapes, but had a variety of CD-Rs available instead.
I recall the boss resisted carrying CD-Rs for a while, because he thought it was counterproductive to our business of selling music on CD. However eventually it became a case of a dam giving way to a flood. It was “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” and blank CDs were now being sold by brick or spindle. Remember bricks and spindles full of blank CDs?
We also sold CD cleaning kits and tended to stay away from snake-oil CD fixing “solutions”. Instead, we had a couple of guys who fixed CDs with a grinder and wax in their garage. Eventually we began fixing the discs ourselves using the same method, but actually improving upon the solution by using soap instead of wax. I’m not sure how the original guys took that, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pretty at all.
Competition was always fierce. We had an HMV store at the mall across the street from the store I managed. We had a Cash Converters pawn shop buying and selling CDs and video games in the same plaza as us. A few years later, a Best Buy opened next door, and their prices were often lower. DVDs began to take up a huge share of our sales, and we now had to make room. Additional shelving was installed. Then we ran out of space again. New formats like SACD and DVD-A started to infiltrate our inventory. Things became really, really complicated compared to the store I managed in 1996.
There are a million stories. I remember one guy buying an SACD, and coming back wanting to know why the “Super Audio” light wasn’t lighting up on his player. How the fuck should I know? I’d never even seen an SACD player at that point. The guy actually wanted me to write a letter to Sony and ask them on his behalf. Yeah, I’ll get right on that sir, after I serve you some fresh Grey Poupon on a charcuterie board.
Technology, transactions and inventory may have changed shape, but one thing never did: the customers.
When we first opened, we had a single disc CD player and tape deck to play music in store. There was a TV for MuchMusic, but it was usually on silent while we played CDs in store. If a customer wanted to hear a CD, we had to open it for them and play it on the store speakers. They’d signal me when to change tracks. In 1996, we have six five-disc changers, each with a dedicated set of headphones, for customers to list. We had another five-disc changer for store play, and eventually one for an outdoor speaker we had. The six customer listening stations took a dedicated person to serve on weekends. We had to retrieve the CDs from behind the counters and load them into the players. We often had to assist the customer in the operation of the machines. And they broke down, frequently. Some days towards the end we only had two working stations at a time.
Our first store was in a mall with a licensed restaurant. We had a few drunks. The other stores I worked at were in strip plazas. We had a few stoners, potheads, crackheads and gang-bangers.
Ahh, the good old days when it was just drunks!
One thing we never delved into in my time was selling CD players. We didn’t want to dip our toes into that kind of thing. Today, they sell turntables at my old store. We also, strangely, never sold batteries which people frequently asked for. I guess margins were so low it wasn’t worth it. I never lasted long enough to see the vinyl revival happen. We only sold a few things on vinyl in time. The aforementioned Pearl Jam was one. Soundgarden (Down on the Upside) was another.
The change that impacted me most had nothing to do with formats, or technology. It didn’t matter that I now had two shelves full of Sega and Nintendo games. The biggest change was in heirarchy behind the scenes. I started as a part timer with one boss. I was promoted to manager, with one boss, and several peers at other stores. Then, suddenly, I had two bosses. Then there were three, and the worst thing about the third is that we were all told “they’re not your boss, they’re here to help.” That was false. Three bosses, and there was now an in-house accountant and other periphery people that seemed to get yelled at less than I did. I’m sure it’s clear from this story that the winds of change did not bring me happiness. Instead they chipped away at the job I started with, and diluted the “music store” I managed into a music/movie/game/knick-knack store. I was attending manager meetings in big hotel board rooms. There were marketing people and franchisees, and nobody ever seemed truly happy on the inside. 110% was demanded of us, but we had no reason to be invested in what boiled down to a bad retail job that caused a lot of stress.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change, and there was one change I was happy to witness: In the late 90s, Black Sabbath reunited. It was a happy return, though they had their trailer hitched to a nu-metal Ozzfest which wasn’t my cup of tea. Music began to shift until one day in 1999, something truly remarkable happened. We didn’t know how long it would last, or what the new music would sound like, but Iron Maiden reunited with Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith. Judas Priest were a few years behind them, getting Rob Halford back in the band. Suddenly, classic metal was back in a big way. Bigger than ever. It was not waned since. I was happy that I got to see this process begin at the end of my days at the Store.
My boss used to say that I resisted change. I don’t agree. No sir. I embraced the good stuff. The computers, the internet, the website, fixing CDs, the abandonment of certain formats (cassettes and VHS) when they were fading away. The things I struggled with included the diluting of the store with all these other products like video games. I started there because I loved music. Fortunately I also loved movies, so when DVDs began to take over a large section of the store, I was cool with that too. When Grand Theft Auto was upon us, I had no passion. Then came the addition of more upper management, and increased demands on our personal time and investment in the Record Store life. Monthly manager meetings dragged on for hours. We’d leave scratching our heads why this wasn’t just covered in emails. We had zero autonomy and little say in what we did. I remembered a time when I loved my job. There was no love there anymore.
The happy ending is this. When I quit that job, I rediscovered my passion for music. Music was fun for me again, not just something playing in the background as I worked.
“There was one customer in Cambridge who hated selling to me, he always asked where “the regular guy” was. He asked my name and I told him it was Sanchez. When T-Rev came back, we had a laugh over the employee named “Sanchez” who was apparently low-balling this customer for his dance CDs.” –Record Store Tales #526: Location, Location, Location
The year 2000 wasn’t a particularly happy year at the Record Store for me. My good buddy T-Rev, who normally managed our Cambridge location, was also a talented guy with a hammer and saw. The boss sent him off to the GTA to build one of our new stores. This left his location unmanaged for several weeks that summer. Because I had a car, I was often the go-to guy to fill in for others. This meant pulling double duty, managing two stores at the same time. Sometimes I’d be working the morning in Kitchener, and the evening in Cambridge. I remember the boss promised to make it “worth my while” but never did.
Another manager had to do two stores at once, and thought I shouldn’t be complaining about my lot in life. My answer: “You do you!” I’ll complain if I like. It took them weeks/month to pay my mileage, so yes, I’ll complain.
Each location had its own quirks. Some stores had customers that were more into dance, others had customers that liked classic rock. Cambridge appealed to the lowest common denominator. We had just as many customers asking where the strip club was, as were looking for classical music. (An exaggeration, but a funny one.) Cambridge also had regulars who were used to dealing with T-Rev, aka “the regular guy”.
Here’s how it went one night in Cambridge.
Dude walks in with a box of crappy dance music. “Hey, is the regular guy in?”
“No, I’ll take a look at those for you,” I’d respond, although I really didn’t want to have a look at them.
“The regular guy usually gives me a good price,” came the answer.
“Well, we have a pricing scheme that helps us give you consistent pricing, so I’ll take care of that for you.”
“OK…” was the reluctant response.
I’d go through the CDs, which were often scratched and/or outdated, mixed in with a few things of higher value. I’d sort through. Put them in piles of things that were scratched vs. in good shape. Check to see if we had too many copies already. Check the scratched ones to see if they could be fixed. Price them accordingly. Call the guy back to the counter to show him what I found.
This particular guy wasn’t happy, of course, and was sure that the “regular guy” would have done better. (I would make sure I called “the regular guy” and tell him what I offered so this guy wouldn’t be doing any better when he returned.)
He passed on the offer. “When is the regular guy back?” he asked. I told him two weeks or whatever the answer was. He then asked my name, because of course he would complain.
“Sanchez,” I answered. It was my standard answer for when an asshole asked my name. I looked nothing like a Sanchez. I was as pale as a sheet of paper. I also had tried to bleach my hair, which came out kinda orange. Sure enough, this guy returned to the store and complained about “Sanchez, with the orange hair,” who low-balled him on his dance CDs.
I had already discussed this guy with T-Rev, and so when he came back, he didn’t really offer much differently than I had. But because he was the “regular guy” and not “Sanchez”, the guy took the money and we got the CDs. We had to do twice the amount of work to get them, since T-Rev had to repeat everything I did, but we were fairly consistent.
T-Rev called me. “Hey Mike! I just had a guy in here complaining about somebody named ‘Sanchez’ that lowballed him for his dance mixes? Said he had orange hair?” We had a good laugh about that.
I didn’t have to use the name Sanchez often, but I did use it!
Mixing friends with work is always a tough balancing act. When you work retail, it’s even harder. The friends come to you, and they’d like to do business with someone they are familiar with. Who wouldn’t? At the Record Store, it was particularly difficult to maintain a stable counterbalance when buying used CDs from people who consider you to be a friend.
One thing always said when training new staff on buying used CDs was that “every customer thinks their CDs are gold.” They don’t really understand why certain ones are worthless to you. When buying from the customer, we went into detail explaining the why’s and wherefore’s of the offer, breaking it down disc by disc. “These ones I can’t take because I already have two or more copies of each right now, and the other stores are well stocked too.”
When it’s a friend coming in to sell their discs to you, they don’t necessarily expect any special treatment, but they do expect you to “do your best” with your offer. And that wasn’t always possible.
Upper management really kept an eye on my interactions with my regular customers. They often complained to me that I paid too much for stuff when it was somebody I “preferred”. That may be true in some instances, but I believe that upper management were too focused on dollars and cents, and not maintaining good relations with a regular customer. A customer — somebody who spent money in our stores or supplied us with used stock that we in turn sold and made a profit on. The managers were always hammering us on COGS – Cost of Goods Sold. We had targets to aim for, and strategies for buying stock. Unfortunately, this ran contradictory to “doing your best” when buying stock from somebody who knows you.
Just because somebody considers you a friend doesn’t mean they won’t go somewhere else to sell their discs to get better money. They will. They did!
“Come on Mike, this was twelve bucks when I bought it from you! You can only give me three?”
“Fine, fine, I’ll give you four. Just don’t say anything. The bosses really hound me if they see me giving more than I should.”
Another factor is that every customer felt their CDs were in great shape even if the store didn’t. That was another source of conflict. We had a regional manager who was so picky that she would deduct money from a customer’s total for the lightest hairline scratches, even off the actual playing surface of the disc. When you answer to someone like that, it was hard keeping your regulars happy with your offers.
And they really did watch me. More than once they gave me shit for treating my regulars better than they thought I needed to. Conrad, for example. The guy bought in so many Japanese imports. I don’t know how he had so many, but I tried to give him the maximum. He could have taken them downtown, but he came to me. He chose me because we both liked heavy metal (especially Bruce Dickinson) and both understand the value of Japanese imports. He pissed off management because if I wasn’t working, the person who was usually offered him less, which he would complain about.
To me it didn’t matter that my COGS would take a hit by offering Conrad top dollar. What mattered more was keeping Conrad loyal. Where in Kitchener are you going to buy Japanese imports?
At Encore Records, that’s where, if Conrad thought he wasn’t getting enough money.
I’m sure, given the opportunity, the old management could run off a litany of reasons why I’m wrong. But the fact is they had their own preferred customer. They called him “Scottish Man” and only a limited number of employees dealt with him because he expected top dollar. Now, upper management would always tell you that “Scottish Man brought in better stock and was more pleasant than gum-chewin’ Conrad.” That sounds like a bias against heavy metal and chewing gum to me.
Just my opinion. Just my opinion from my position at the front counter.
Let’s just say that if Conrad was bringing in rare Van Morrison and Stones imports instead of Axel Rudi Pell and Helloween box sets, their opinions might have been different. With or without the chewing gum.
RECORD STORE TALES #902.5: Spoogecakes 2 – Electric Boogaloo
LeBrain HQ has eyes and ears everywhere! We are like Hydra: cut off one head and two shall takes its place.
If you recall, when I launched this site in 2012, I had one anonymous hater. Really nasty, too. You can read the comments yourself. This came right out of the blue. The identity of the hater was confirmed by one of her co-workers at the Record Store: an employee there at a location I once managed. I had barely begun publishing my stories. “Grow up or shut up,” went one of the kinder comments. This only inspired me to keep writing, with more energy and frequency. Obviously I had struck a nerve! I actually owe this hater a huge thanks. The drama she created catapulted me into another level, and the hits have only increased in the years since. She provided the launchpad, so I do owe her my gratitude. Craig Fee dubbed her with the nickname “Spoogecakes”, and I ran with that name for the Record Store Tales that followed. I turned her hatemail into a chapter of the story. Lemons into lemonade.
Hey, you wanna troll Record Store Tales? Then Record Store Tales will troll you right back. Some of my former co-workers there thought it was incredibly nasty of me exploit her vitriolic comments for views the way I did. (What they thought of her actions — my so-called friends who were groomsmen at my wedding — they didn’t share that with me.) I hadn’t planned on writing about her at all. She was a non-entity and completely unimportant to my story. She wrote herself in, as far as I was concerned.
Fast forward to the present: she’s still at the Record Store, and just as endearing as ever. A few months ago, I was just sitting here boppin’ through my day, when I got an email from a source bearing a tidbit of inside gossip. My source revealed that Spoogey has been promoted to a manager of some kind, and isn’t the kind you’d want to work for. I have obscured certain text to protect the identity of the informant, but the bones of their message are below.
“[Spoogecakes] is training someone, and that person has to leave home at 4 AM to get to the store, to suit [Spoogey’s] needs.”
Good luck with training someone after they’ve spent five hours on a bus. Hope that worked out for ya. Stuff like that never happened when I was training. I drove people to and from training if I had to. (Ask Shane.)
The training in question involves a box of used CDs that we would use to practice buying techniques. How to check the discs for quality, how to check inventory, and how to price them. The process of this training was previously detailed in Part 94: Staffing. (You can also watch a demonstration of me doing this in a live stream from last year.) In all my time at the store, I never made anyone get up at 4 AM for this. The story continues:
“In retaliation, the trainee wanted to leave a surprise for [Spoogey] in the box of used discs. I got the impression it was a used sex toy. The plan was for her to find it in the box with the other used items.”
My source said that the gist of the conversation was that “no one likes [Spoogey]. The manager of the store was in disbelief of her antics.” The source also suggested that the conversation would have been a lot worse and more graphic if there were not customers in the store.
I didn’t go to the cottage at all in 1994. I was busy with school, then in the summer met a girl, and finally got a job at the Record Store. That was all the distraction I needed to stay home. Girls trumped trees and water. Priorities!
The first summer at the Record Store was a brand new world for me. New faces, new names, new music. Lots and lots of cleaning. “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean!” went the saying. A lot of the job was tedious. Wednesday was “tape check day”. From A to Z we had to check every cassette in the store and make sure the magnetic security strip was firmly attached. If it wasn’t, we’d get some scotch tape and secure that sucker. My hands always felt so grungy after a day of tape checking.
There was always filing to do, and new stock to price. When we sold a tape or CD, we had to know to re-order them. How was this accomplished? Tapes had a little clear plastic sticker on the back. It had the artist, title and record label written on it. When we sold a tape, we had to file these stickers in a photo album, sorted by record label. Then when the boss was ready to order more stock, he’d flip through the photo album and read the stickers. When we re-stocked the tapes, we had to put the clear sticker back on. CDs were similar except they were in clear bags with the info written on them. The bags were used to re-order discs.
When something new was released, we had to make the stickers and bags for those items too. I remember when T-Rev was hired, he used to leave special releases for me to do the tags and bags for. Kiss Unplugged he specifically left for me, because it was the first Kiss album released during my tenure at the store. The first of many. I drew the Kiss logo on the tag and smiled. Small things like that meant something to me, though after waiting so long for a new Kiss album, it was quite anti-climactic.
We had also started selling used CDs. Some of the first I acquired with my staff discount were Sven Gali’s debut and Chronicles by Rush. Weirdly, I was still buying a lot of cassettes. Kim Mitchell’s brand new one Itch got the staff discount treatment.
In the early days the boss used to give us weekly homework. We had to come in with a current top 10 list every week. This was to ensure that we were familiar with the current hits that people would be asking for. T-Rev did his homework; I did not. I felt like I already knew it all. Before I started at the store, I used to keep on top of “everything the kids were listening to”. I guess the boss recognized that since he didn’t bug me for my homework every week.
I was glad to have this job at the Record Store when in late ’94 my relationship blew up in my face. I compensated by throwing myself into the store. I came in early every day so I could review all the new stock. Business was fairly slow most nights. We were not in a high-traffic mall. We had our regulars and we had our time-wasters. The drunks from the restaurant next door were interesting. Some of them even spent money! None of them were problems, just time wasters. “Tire kickers” as I call them now. Then there were a couple notable janitors. Trevor Atkinson from highschool was one. I wonder what ever happened to that guy? He was certainly a time waster. It’s my theory that he was the cause of the first customer complaint I ever received.
Working in that Record Store was pretty much my whole social life. I didn’t know anybody at school anymore. Through the store, I reconnected with highschool and neighborhood friends that dropped by to shop. Guys like George Balasz and Scott Peddle. The boss didn’t like his employees to socialize at work, but what could you do? It was the local Record Store and I was working in it. I knew lots of people. He socialized far more than I did, but he was “the boss” so nobody could give him shit for it. When one of his friends was in the store, he’d chat it up and get me to take care of everyone else. “Do as I say, not as I do” was another one of his famous demoralizing sayings.
But it was a good job. The boss used to say he was “firm but fair”. For the first few years that was true. For a retail job it was pretty good. We got to listen to music during the shift and we felt like part of a team. It was a special place during a special time. I’m glad I was there before we grew, because that’s when things changed for the worse, from an employment point of view. But for that brief period in the beginning, the Record Store was a part of my identity. I’m still really proud of everything that we did there as a team. I may be critical of some things, but I’m proud of being there on the ground floor when things were about to take off.
An unemployed 21 year old student not-yet-named LeBrain was having a particularly lazy summer. In a year I would graduate. I didn’t have a lot of spending money.
There was a CD store at the mall. The owner was a friend of my dad’s. It was within walking distance. I wandered in once or twice a week. but their prices were too high. They had a “buy 10 get 1 free card”, and I’d redeemed one of those (for cassettes) already, but in general I couldn’t afford to buy things there. Most of my music was coming from Columbia House.
July rolled around, but I hadn’t been to the mall in a while. There was a bunch of new stuff I was curious about. David Lee Roth had an album out, and the new Soundgarden was supposed to be incredible. Kim Mitchell had something new, and there were a bunch of 1993 albums I still wanted. I took a walk to the mall.
Something was different at the CD store. Where there were once these red wire clearance bins, there was now a display of…used CDs!? Quality guaranteed?! Woah! I could afford these!
I saw it immediately: a brand new release sitting there used for $11.99. Kiss My Ass. It was only out for about two weeks! I didn’t care why it was there, it was MINE! I hated spending full CD prices on a “various artists” album. In general I’d only get three tracks per album that I wanted. I preferred to buy stuff like that on cassette, just so I wasn’t paying 20 bucks or more for three songs. Twelve bucks for Kiss My Ass? Stop twisting my arm!
I remarked to the owner how excited I was to get this brand new album at such a great price! He told me they just started selling used CDs. I learned later the now-legendary story: it started with about 10 CDs that he brought in from home to sell. People wanted more, and so he began buying and selling. So far, it was working well. He had a few hundred on display, and there were already some great titles in there!
I ran home excited about my score. The three tracks I was interested in were Lenny Kravitz, Extreme, and Shandi’s Addiction. I got my required three songs. Over time, the rest began to appeal more, but I mostly played those three. When I learned that Kiss themselves played on the Garth Brooks song, I upped it to four.
About a week later, my dad came home from work and instructed me to go to the mall the following morning. The owner of the CD store wanted to talk to me.
What?
“He’s interested in hiring you,” said my mom.
“Nah,” I answered. “I ordered a Japanese version of Kiss Alive III. I bet that came in.”
“Just go to the mall and talk to him,” they both said, and so I put on some nice(r) clothes for what was in effect an interview. I wore cowboy boots because I didn’t have anything else but sneakers. He already knew me as a customer, and trusted my dad as well. We just chatted for a bit. He told me that his employee Craig would be leaving for school at the end of the summer, and he needed a replacement. There were only the two of them, so it was actually a bigger deal than just “working at a CD store”. Craig opened, closed, did bank deposits, and everything else that needed doing, and eventually so would I!
He told me the job was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Sure, sure, stop twisting my arm!
Therefore, the CD copy of Kiss My Ass (that I still own today) is the very first used CD I bought at the store I would eventually work, and also the last one that I bought before actually being hired! And he was right about the job. It was hard work, and it was fun. When I began working there, I used to show up about 30 minutes early just to flip through all the new arrivals. If something jumped out at me, I’d put it in the front row. If something was priced too low, I’d tell him. “This is really rare”. I impressed him by knowing the details of who was in what bands, and their different side projects. I told him I learned this stuff by reading the Columbia House catalogue every month.
What an awesome time to work! The used CDs were on the ground floor. Soon they’d be 99% of what we did. I was there for many releases of what are now classic albums. I’m really proud to have been there for those times, even if not everybody gets that. It was work and it was fun. Not everybody gets to have a job they can be passionate about. When I was there at the beginning, putting in 200% every day, it was simply an amazing time to be alive.
You’ve met new contributor Aaron, and as he begins his story, you’ll get to know him a little better. But how did he enter Record Store Tales?
It’s a funny story, but I very briefly dated his older sister. We all “met” online – a local electronic “BBS” or “Bulletin Board System”. My handle was “Geddy” and his was “Capone”. He still sometimes calls me “Geddy”! He must have thought I was cool or something. I wasn’t even working at the Record Store yet when we first met, but Aaron/Capone was big time into music. He loved Guns N’ Roses. It was 1994, and Guns N’ Roses were still big news.
When I started at the Record Store, it was like the floodgates opened! Suddenly, via me, Aaron had access to all kinds of rare rock. His favourite band was Nirvana, and a few months later I was getting in rare CDs like Outcesticide and Hormoaning. We continued to bond over music, and started hanging out on weekends. He was known to complain a bit about my “80s rock” in the car…my response was always “the driver chooses the music”!
Most weekends revolved around music in some way. We’d hit all the major local stores: Dr. Disc, Encore, HMV, Sunrise, and of course my store. I remember one Sunday shift: Aaron had nothing to do that day so he just hung out at the mall during my shift. It ended up being a great idea. He helped out some of my customers when I was too busy!
I couldn’t even begin to guess how many discs we bought on those shopping excursions, but I remember a few. I got Japanese imports of Kiss Killers and Judas Priest Unleashed in the East, at the Sunrise records at Conestoga Mall. I can recall one afternoon of introducing Aaron to Iron Maiden. Their home video Raising Hell had just come out, which was to be Bruce’s “final” show with the band. They had a “horror magician” on stage named Simon Drake and we enjoyed that video quite a bit. “Do all their songs sound like this?” asked Aaron, who was more used to the detuned rock of the 1990s.
I have one memory that happened a bit later on, after Aaron had his daughter. A lady came into my store with a giant box of CDs and almost all were shit. I had to pass on most of them for a variety of reasons. It was mostly dance music. They were in shit condition, they were shit titles, and we had too many of them already. The lady didn’t care; she just didn’t want them. “Just keep them,” she said. She took a few bucks for the discs we could take, and left behind at least a hundred worthless discs.
Worthless to the Record Store, anyway.
We didn’t really have a specific policy at the time regarding what to do with the abandoned discs in this situation. The store could not sell them. I’m not sure if the Boss Man would have been pleased that I took them, which is one reason why I’ve chosen to wait 20 years to write Record Store Tales and Getting More Tale. Aaron and I took the discs to a Cash Converters store, which was a pawn shop on the other side of town. They were the competition.* It was funny watching the guy go through all the CDs I had passed on, checking the discs inside and not caring about all the scratches.
One thing Aaron owned that I did not was a Super Nintendo. I skipped the Super. My sister had the original NES and I had the Nintendo 64. Aaron and I had played WWF Wrestling on his Super Nintendo, and I quickly became addicted to the game. So together we dumped the box of junk CDs at the pawn shop, where I bought a Super Nintendo and a couple games. Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was one, a great game that still rocks today. Unfortunately that Super Nintendo busted after two months. Rats!
At least we had fun. Whether it was watching shitty horror movies (Killer Klowns from Outer Space, The Stuff, Frogs), searching for rock and metal in record store racks, or pawning shit to buy more shit, we definitely had our fair share of fun. And that’s the long and the short of how Aaron fits into Record Store Tales.
* The Cash Converters outlet close to our store was managed by a guy that we named “Jheri Curl Man”.
In the spring of 1996, we opened up the big store that I managed. It was our biggest store to date. There were a lot of good times at that location, and hundreds of incredible musical finds. Around the same time, I began replacing my cassette collection with CDs in earnest. Cassettes don’t have the longevity or the sound quality of a CD. Most of my tapes were starting to sound awful, especially the ones purchased from Columbia House, who manufactured their own at a lesser cost.
Upgrading my Kiss cassette collection to CD was an early priority. Some of the first Kiss tapes I bought, like Asylum, had degraded so much they were unlistenable. The early (Canadian) CD releases had issues too; they were not perfect. Both Hotter Than Hell and Alive II (disc one) had severe problems with digital noise in specific spots. On Alive II it was “Love Gun” that was the issue. There was a terrible scratchy sound encoded onto the CD.
The differences between my boss and myself were obvious the day that Kiss Alive! came in stock, used. It came in one of those old “fat” CD cases. It was the first chance I had to buy the first Alive! at an affordable used price, in such great condition. The boss and I had very different personalities, almost opposites. I was a music obsessive who collected things and wanted to know all the obscure facts. He liked music but just wanted to sell CDs. I grabbed that copy of Alive! and handed it to the boss to ring in with my staff discount.
He sighed and gave me a look. “Don’t you already have this?”
He sounded like my dad. When I’d come home, he’d say, “More Kiss? Don’t you already have Kiss?” My boss had a lot in common with my dad.
I had the tape, but the cassette had the songs in a different order. This was a fairly common practice. Song order would be swapped around on cassettes, to keep sides one and two about equal in length. That reduces the amount of actual tape used to manufacture it, and therefore cuts costs. It would be cool to have a CD copy of Alive! to listen to the songs in the original order.
“I have it on cassette and LP,” I explained. “I listen to the tape, but this CD is different. The songs are in a different order,” I finished.
He looked at me again and responded in a mocking tone, “Hey Mike, look at my shoes. The left one is different from the right one. Do you want to buy it?”
“No because I don’t collect shoes,” I answered. “I collect Kiss.”
He shrugged with frustration. I really think he was more just pissed off that I had taken some good stock for myself.
Oh well.
Staff taking “good stock” was an ongoing issue, but because getting stock at a discount was one of the established perks of working at a used CD store, there wasn’t much that could be done. I’ll give him credit; the boss considered the staff discount to be part and parcel of the job for all of us. He eventually put a limit on how much we could buy at a time. Meanwhile, my dad would look at my collection and say “sell, sell, sell!”
He ended up getting that copy of Kiss Alive! back, when I upgraded to the 1997 remastered edition. And then he ended up getting that 1997 remastered edition back when I upgraded to the Kiss Alive! 1975-2000 box set.
He might not have understood my wants and desires as a collector, and he may have complained about me taking all the good stock, but he ended up making money when I sold back my equally good stock. No harm, no foul. Hopefully, I have bought Kiss Alive! for the final time.
RECORD STORE TALES MkII: Getting More Tale #401: SIGHTING! Rasputin & the Hobbit
A few weeks ago, Mrs. LeBrain was feeling generous and treated me to a rare breakfast at McDonalds. We don’t go very often, but our closest McDonalds has a “freestyle machine” allowing you to create any number of soft drink combinations, a really cool draw. It was my buddy Craig who hyped the machine to me – “The closest thing we have to Cherry Coke Zero in Harperland,” he says. Plus the egg McMuffin is only 290 calories; I know that because of the ad that runs endlessly every night on TV!
We sat down with our McMuffins and breakfast burritos, but as I was picking a table, something caught my eye. It’s not often that I recognize my old Record Store customers in public, but how could I forget Rasputin and the Hobbit?
T-Rev and I shared the story of these two gross individuals in Part 276 of the original Record Store Tales. “HH was known for her outrageous makeup,” I said. She was also known for riding a bike in a short skirt, on her way to sell us some crappy dance CDs. “The ‘Hobbit’ with ripped nylons and the short skirt with her ass hanging out…yuck!” remembered T-Rev. Rasputin was the silent type. He would merely nod yes or shake his head no, at whatever offer we had given them for their CDs. I don’t know if I have ever heard him speak.
It was actually Rasputin (“Razzy” for short) I spotted first. You just don’t forget a guy who looks like that. Shaggy unkempt black beard, same with the hair. It was him, which by process of elimination meant his companion was HH the Hobbit. She has changed a bit, but not entirely. The makeup and short skirts are gone, but she still possesses the gross-out factor. When I sat down, her bare feet were in Razzy’s lap, right in the McDonalds. It was like that train wreck that I couldn’t look away from. I noticed Razzy was wearing dress shoes with no socks. Just like the old days, Hobbit did all the talking. Her voice was unmistakable.
I managed to get a couple pictures. Not of her feet in his lap, but I did acquire photographic proof that Rasputin the Mad Monk, and HH the Hobbit, are still alive and well in Kitchener Ontario.
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