THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

My first impression of the last record store at which I will ever work was, shall we say, not the best. When I moved to Petoskey in August '98 for my NCMC job, I looked around the town and found an actual record store downtown called Record World, which was pretty exciting for a music fan like me. However, while they had a decent stock and what appeared to be a solid staff, the prices were a bit on the higher side, so I ignored RW as a shopping destination and instead made periodic trips down to WHR #9 to work and buy stuff. (I also got the run-around from the RW folks when I tried to put up some point-of-purchase material for a Love And Rockets street team of which I was a part, so that didn't engender warm feelings and good cheer, either.) But when WHR closed their doors in '01, I bit the bullet and offered my services to Record World as a part-timer soon after. Record World was an outlier in my record store experiences, as it was just one store where the owner was the ...

When people ask me what I do (instead of who I am, because we often let our jobs define us), I tell them I'm a professor. And when that feels too pretentious, which is often, I usually just say "I teach at the college" and leave it at that. It is the family business, sort of -- my grandfather taught and coached at Roscommon High School for over four decades, my dad taught and coached at Roscommon Middle School and RHS for thirty-some years, and my stepfather taught at Kirtland Community College for about the same length of time. Between the three of them, that's over a century in education. As I was winding up my Bachelor's degree in the fall of '92, I was starting to think more seriously about a future in higher education. When I started my first semester of grad school classes in psychology at Central Michigan University, I asked my KCC Intro Psych professor if there were any part-time options, and he said there were. However, the next day, he let me know ...

Like most good things in life, the modern idea of a disc jockey (or DJ) comes from France in the middle of the 20th Century. When given the choice between an unpredictable band or the reliability of records to soundtrack a party, most nightclubs became discotheques ("record library" from the French), and discotheques needed people (or DJ's) to play the records. However, in the modern parlance of the DJ, there's a difference between someone who plays records and someone who manipulates records, especially in the world of EDM (electronic dance music), and there's a lot more esteem and money associated with one over the other. When I tell people that I used to DJ when I was younger, people tend to think of the current understanding rather than the historical, and they're often more impressed than they should be. However, I pretty much saw myself as a human jukebox, with little to no actual artistic input. Looking back, I see plenty of opportunities where I coul...

First, the name, as it was no small confusion back in the day -- Michigan WhereHouse Records (or WHR), the small chain of Michigan music retailers, is not to be confused with the national, primarily California based Wherehouse Entertainment. Except that both entities are long dead, for what that's worth. Second, the location -- I spent the large part of a decade with the Mount Pleasant branch of WHR (store #9, to be precise), with a few months in the summer of '98 at the Ann Arbor branch. Aside from those few weeks, I was part of the northernmost outpost, never to be as cool as the AA gang or as numerous as the cluster of Lansing flagship locations. We were in the hinterlands of culture, but at least we weren't WHR Jackson. Now, with those two items out of the way, what can I say about the best job I ever had or ever will have? How might I accurately convey the sheer fucking joy, day in and day out, of a situation where a skill set meets a set of challenges? It's be...

Way back in the 20th Century, millions of people used to buy physical media -- books, movies, and music -- at an amazing rate. And as a kid growing up who wanted physical media but couldn't afford the wants, I wished and wished to have all that media at my fingertips. (A motivation, sadly, that still drives me to this day.) So working at a record store was a childhood dream of mine, and for a few days in the tail end of 1988, I sort of did it. For a brief bit of context, after high school, I briefly lived with my uncle in Chesaning -- a small hick-laden burg sprinkled with camo and Confederate battle flags, positioned just outside of Lansing -- in the fall of 1988. I had been accepted to Michigan State University in my senior year, but I neglected to turn in a meal card for the dorms by the posted deadline, which pushed my acceptance from the fall to the winter. In the irrational haze of the age of seventeen, I ignored the fact that I didn't have the money to attend MSU and w...

When you are a fourteen-year-old boy whose mom and dad recently divorced and you are offered the princely sum of $2/hour to work as a bottle bitch and gas monkey, you say "yes" without much hesitation. And so it was in the summer of 1985 that I started my first job. I wouldn't say it was my most favorite job -- that was to come later -- but it rarely felt like work, I laughed every day, and I worked with great people. Most folks don't get to say that about any of their jobs, so I knew that it was special even while I was doing it. Evergreen Park Grocery in Higgins Lake, MI, is a short three minute walk from the north side of Higgins Lake. There's a bakery and deli inside, and a Dairy Queen is essentially attached. Three Associations and a marina are within a mile radius, which meant that every summer was an explosion of downstate expats and up-north regulars, all rubbing elbows and assholes as they enjoyed the seasonal fruits of northern lower Michigan. My dad a...