Retail Nostalgia

Sometimes, I can't help but reflect on those good old days of retail, where no one ever talked about adult stuff like "collective bargaining" and "health care." (More on those topics later.) I had two wonderful retail jobs in my life: Evergreen Park Grocery and Michigan Wherehouse Records. Evergreen Park Grocery is on the north side of Higgins Lake, and I spent the mid-to-late '80s (and even some early '90s) there as everything at one time or another: bottle bitch, gas monkey, deli douche, bakery gent, and ultimately behind the main counter, selling booze and condoms to the rich and poor alike.

But the bulk of the '90s were spent at Michigan Wherehouse Records, first in Mt. Pleasant and then in Ann Arbor for a few short months. Those were amazing times in record retail, especially in the early '90s, where a midnight sale by INXS (!) could draw crowds out the door. But as other pursuits took time and bucks away from music, the sales evaporated. And I can't find a better long-term snapshot of the boom and bust of music retail than here. There are even some sweet-ass charts, in case you hate to read.

Do I still pine for those days? Well, it was six years ago this week that Record World in Petoskey closed the doors forever, ending my long reign at music retail, so I would say that it still holds a piece of my heart. But you can't argue with the numbers, and it would be foolish to think that music retail, outside of niche markets, could ever be the cultural force it once was. But man, it rarely felt like a job, and that's something to cherish.

Comments

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

"Lost" pre and post

So the season five finale of Lost came and went last night, two hours of riddles, questions asked and posed, and a few genuine "WTF?" moments here and there. In other words, it reaffirmed Godhead status for me, and now I'll have to wait until 2010 to see the sixth and final season wrap up some of the mysteries. Here's what I wrote before seeing last night's capper: My assumptions are that the atomic bomb will detonate, causing the flood of electromagnetic energy that the concrete slab at The Swan will attempt to contain. Furthermore, the energy will push the time-displaced people ahead to the future, where they will band together to save the island from the newest plane crash survivors, who are most likely connected to the original '50s military presence in some fashion. People will die and stay dead, and some people will die and stick around. And there's a great possibility that everything I've conjectured won't happen, either. The fifth seaso...

THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Search This Blog