Overture

It was at some point around the end of 1981 that I'd suddenly found myself starting down the road that would eventually turn me into a full-fledged music geek. Before that point, I'd been through countless intense streaks of interest dating back to my childhood: the kind of 1-2 year fixations that completely seize the imagination, dominate all free-time, and temporarily reset all of the goalposts in your life. Whether it was general medicine, herpetology, meteorology, astronomy, or paleontology (the latter was the one my parents thought was the most adorable, judging by how often they asked me to recite the word to their friends), these new studies would usually have me completely under their spell only until the next -ology reared its head, usually after a trip to the local public library.

With music, however, it was different: instead of simply reading about the subject as was largely the case in any field of interest I had come across before, I could also experience it firsthand simply by turning on my parent's stereo and listening. A couple of years (and hundreds of hours of listening time) later, my adoration for the form had grown by leaps and bounds, superseding every other interest I'd ever had before. By the time I'd graduated high school, I knew I had to work in the business, somehow, even if it was only a temporary stop until I found a "real" career. After a few months of trying, I finally got a break and started working at the Record Den. 18 1/2 years later, despite a couple of points where I was halfway out the door, I'm still there.

In the middle of the 1990s, I was presented with the chance to write about music professionally on a part-time basis, and I jumped at it. For the nearly three-years following, I was employed at the Cleveland Scene, which covered all kinds of music on a national and local level every week. I had a great time seeing shows, listening to CDs and (in a handful of instances) talking to artists either on the phone or in person. While the pay was even worse than working retail (even for a “senior writer”), I could at least say that I had a job doing two of the things that I was best at in high school: listening to music and writing.

One problem with being born when I was is that I often get the distinct impression that I just managed to grab the tail end of the good times, right before they gave way to the bad. With Scene it was no different: the paper was bought out at the end of 1998 and transformed overnight from the best music paper in town to the kind of corporate owned, sensationalist faux-alternaweekly you can (and do) find syndicated in every city across the country. The central editorial core of Scene made a go of starting up a new replacement paper, but our financial support disappeared a few issues into our run before we'd even had a chance to figure out what the new paper was going to be. Disheartened, I reluctantly let writing go and concentrated on my burgeoning responsibilities at the recently-independent and re-launched Record Den (our original mall location had also been the victim of a faceless corporate takeover, but this is a long story for another time).

A few more years passed, my personal life changed almost completely around me, and one day out of the blue, a friend and ex Den co-worker of mine e-mailed to ask if I'd contribute to his just-launched music blog, 45 RPM. As I quickly found out, I had never lost my hankering for this kind of thing, and following the site big put on ice only a few months afterward, I had started thinking about setting up another foray into writing about music, this time in my own forum. After a hell of a long time dawdling about and re-thinking the original concept, you are now looking at the final result: The Cantaloupe Machine. The idea for this place initially was really nothing special: just another of the seemingly million mp3 blogs that exist on the net. Over time, that idea began to change from simply putting up songs willy-nilly into more of an ongoing essay kind of project, with the subject centering on music and life and how the two have uniquely intertwined in my case.

As the title of the previous post may have indicated to you, there will likely be an editorial bias or slant here or there towards all-things Pink Floyd, and since that band more than any other sealed my fate as a music dork forever, they remain an inescapable force in my life. Rest assured, however, that The Cantaloupe Machine will also concern itself with everything and anything else that strikes my musical/writing fancy. Whether it's heavy metal, blaring techno, towering walls of dissonance, or twee indie-pop, The Cantaloupe Machine is all about the tones that make me tick, regardless of their origin or whether they happen to be distributed by a soon-to-be-extinct multinational conglomerate. As they say at the home of the immortal Queensland Salad (the closest to culinary perfection that man has yet achieved), "no rules, just right."

Welcome To The Machine

While thinking about this project during idle moments over the last couple of weeks, I've found myself wanting to play about three decades' worth of catch-up instead of simply jumping feet first into modern music itself. If I'm going to write about what I feel is good, bad, and ugly with music (both new and old), I feel that some explanation is needed on where I'm coming from and how I got here before I simply start bashing away at Big City Rock or 3 Doors Down.

If there is one key component that keeps my sense of time and place organized, it's music (popular or otherwise), which has for two and a half decades now provided both a soundtrack and series of touchstones to my life. I suppose, in effect, that The Cantaloupe Machine is going to start life as something not that much different from an autobiography (though my experiences in life outside of music aren't really the focus here unless they explain why I gravitated towards this sound or that band over time). Who knows, someday this blog may come in handy as a dry run for such a project: if I were ever to write such a work, music would certainly play a major role in jogging my memory and remembering times and places and people that might stay nearly forgotten otherwise.

Of course, this is no great revelation to anyone who knows me, and I'm sure this association-by-song ability is common to many people, as millions are obviously touched by the power and beauty inherent in most forms of music. For me, the assembly of notes and chords and the employ of production can be every bit as striking and world-altering as a great book or a galvanizing speech. At various times in my life, music has been a soothing voice to lull me to sleep, a balm to ease heartache, a doorway to joyous release, and a swift kick in the ass to get my lazy butt into gear. You could almost call music my religion of choice, as there are a handful of artists out there whose careers I follow with the kind of passionate fervor that often enters into realms of stubborn, unyielding faith that is utterly resistant to logic and reason.

Aside from the biographical bits, we'll also discuss (when applicable) the changing of the business itself. Particularly after 1987, we're going to trace the last great rise and then the final tailspin of of the music industry as we once knew it. At some point, maybe in a decade or so, or perhaps a lot sooner, all of this is going to sound awfully weird to someone born after 1991 or so (which is right around the time when the record companies quietly started the practice that, more than any other, would eventually set off their downward spiral). If you are one of those people, maybe some of those posts will help them understand just how this whole thing unraveled.

With all of that said, I think it's best that we start this blog from the beginning: we're gonna head back as far back in my memory as I can go to try and dig out the roots of this obsession and move forward from there. For those of you born anywhere around the year 1969, we're going to be dishing out some hardcore nostalgia and thoughts about times now long gone and never to return. Thanks for coming along. Hope you enjoy the trip.

(Tribe 2008): Opening Day!

Following months of anticipation and breathless counting down of days Sarah and I took in the opening game of the 2008 Cleveland Indians season down at The Ja... er, Prog this afternoon. Luckily, there were no snow-outs at this year's opener (amazing, considering Cleveland was wrapping up its snowiest March on record), there were even had a few moments of actual shadows on the playing field, and the forecast rain showers thankfully never appeared.

The extended opening ceremonies, starting off with a big "Best Of The 2007 Season" clip anthology playing on the scoreboard, were pretty cool. A few moments later, "The Voice Of The Indians" himself, Mr. Tom Hamilton, appeared at a lectern in front of home plate and introduced the entire Indians lineup, right on down to the strength trainers. While all of this was going on, a flag nearly the size of the whole honkin' outfield was unfurled, along with a color guard presentation and some other people holding giant stars at hip level, looking like they were about to start blanket-tossing people at any second. The singing of the National Anthem that capped off all of this was, of course, sung in that American Idol contestant "Hey, I Can Sing Like Mariah Carey, Too!" style (you know, stretching the word "light" into about 6 syllables) that never ceases to drive me up the wall.

Sarah and I attended a game against the Chicago White Sox last September, and while that one was mostly a depressing snooze (Cleveland was completely blanked by Jose freaking Contreras, for chrissakes), today's contest was far more interesting on all levels. At times more of a sloppy shootout than the pitcher's duel we had hoped to see, the game certainly managed to keep your mind on the field as Chicago quickly staked a two run lead that would switch hands three times before the end of the day.

Staff ace C.C. Sabathia was not exactly in Cy Young form, and a rather underwhelming effort from the Cleveland bullpen eventually left the big lefty with a no-decision. As it was, Sabathia was lucky in that respect: while the Indians did ultimately manage to win the contest by a final score of 10-8, most of the team's runs were scored in the second inning, during which the Tribe inflicted a ghastly 37.8 ERA on normally formidable White Sox starter Mark Buerhle.

Sarah was delighted as her hero, the indomitable Rafael Betancourt, not only managed to stop the defensive bleeding by walking one hell of a tightrope through that bizarre eighth inning, but was also finally awarded the win, though a typically dramatic ninth inning tightrope walk by Brodzoski (The Close) briefly made hearts skip a beat around the Indians Nation.

1 down, 161 to go.

Headline News

It finally feels like the winter of 2007-2008 is winding down at last (or at least the worst parts of it). That means baseball season is right around the corner ... hell, tomorrow, now that I think about it. Thus, with the 2008 Cleveland Indians season about to kick off at last, followed hopefully by a rare early spring (hey, spot me some optimism once in a while, ok?) it feels like a great time for a long-promised full "life update."

First things first, as I mentioned in my previous post, I have me a new toy: the apparently already-outmoded Sony Cybershot DSCW-200: a combination treat to myself and a needed accessory in the wake of our last camera's unexpected demise right before the end of baseball season last year (and just before the Central Division clinching game, to make matters worse!). This new guy is a leap forward from our old Cybershot, offering a whole range of shooting and setup options which I am still figuring out as you read this, not to mention far more detailed picture and movie quality than what we were used to before.

In addition to providing all kinds of new pix for this here blog, my new little gadget will also be contributing heavily to my recently-created Flickr site, where I've been busily editing and assembling photographic galleries for your viewing pleasure. A couple of Tribe games that Sarah and I attended last fall are already up on the space as you read this, soon to be joined by tomorrow's contest, some pix of the kitties, the store, and whatever else I get in the mood to shoot over the coming months.

While we're discussing all-things internet related, there will be some big changes pretty soon around these parts, and I suppose now would make for an opportune time to hip y'all to what's coming up. First off, this blog will very soon be known instead as The Cantaloupe Machine. Some of you may remember this to be the name of a music-only blog that I started to mess around with a couple of summers ago and never really kept up with as simply creating content for one of these things (let alone two) was eating up more time and thought than I was willing to invest at that point. Since I always liked that name "The Cantaloupe Machine" much better than I Am A Bug, I've decided to resurrect the name at this location rather than simply wipe it out. Thus, the original Cantaloupe Machine has been deleted and the posts that were hosted over there will be reverting back to this space in re-edited form over the next few months once I finish wrapping up the Twenty Years series (which is about 1-2 posts from completion as of right now).

Going along with the renaming of this blog will be a re-formatting to change up the basic look of this place a bit. Don't worry, I'm not looking to drench my content in day-glo yellow with pink polka dot highlights or anything like that, but I do want something just a bit "busier" looking than the rather austere design I've been using here since late 2004.

Sarah's new job seems to be progressing pretty well, though by dint of her working environment alone, it's certainly a far more stressful affair for her than Case had been. As she is fond to quote from Ghostbusters: "Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

Stress has been a shared element around here ever since last summer, when Sarah left Case and spent some time on the dole and I was finding myself with an evaporated bank account (again) after my root canal and crown. For her, many recent headaches have been due to her car's recent systematic breakdowns as nearly every possible thing that can go wrong has done so over the last few months. This puts much more stress than I'd like on the aging Beretta that I've been driving as she needs to use it to get to work, being that we live about six times farther from her place of employment than mine. Conveniently, the Beretta is now developing some issues that will need attention shortly ... assuming I can do so after my own maintenance dues are paid, and that is a situation that is also developing in unpleasant new directions lately.

I've already paid up on the first of two crowns I'll be getting this year from my dentist (the prep for this one was a couple weeks ago now, the completed crown will be in next Monday), which is no big issue as these procedures were part of my financial plans for this year since last fall. However, some new discomfort has been nagging at me over the last couple of weeks from beneath the site of my crown from last year, which has me worried that something about the root canal (done by an endodontist at Aspen Dental in Mayfield last summer) that preceded the placing of that crown may have gone wrong.

Now, if the above is indeed the case (and I hope to figure this out after my next crown placing via. an x-ray or two), I have no idea what to do about it or how to proceed with possibly un-doing and re-doing all of that work from last year. I do know that my dentist plans to send me back to that endodontist if the discomfort fails to improve by next week (on the assumption that this might be some kind of late-breaking infection, I've been on Amoxycillin for a few days now), but unless the x-rays show something is demonstrably wrong beneath that crown, I have no idea what to even ask the endodontist to do about it. If the procedure was done wrong the first time around, I get the funny idea I'm not going to get much of a break on having it done over again ... and if doing so also involves creating and placing a new crown afterwards, my slowly recovering finances will spin right out of my control yet again.

There have been a couple of new developments on the money front lately that have greatly helped with the bills and getting myself back to being caught up (which is basically where I am now). Knowing I'd be facing a couple grand more in dental work this year, as well as needing to start seriously setting aside some kind of money for a possible replacement for the Beretta, I decided back in January to open a store on amazon.com in order to start generating some side income to get me over the coming springtime hump. After a couple of weeks of absolutely nothing happening, suddenly I started selling some of my older CDs and movies right and left. A few weeks later, I mentioned how my little operation was doing to Greg, and he started selling some items through my store as well (and paying me a generous commission for it at the end of every Amazon payment cycle).

By the middle of March, through a combination of my own sales and a portion of his, I'd made enough after expenses to wipe out the first crown prep and placement, and that more than anything else is what allowed me to catch up with bills after over six months of being behind. With another crown (and whatever else awaits) still on the horizon, I'm not out of the woods just yet, but I'm definitely optimistic that keeping my little online operation going a few more months will help make the worst of the expenses yet to come a bit easier to handle.

Work itself has been a bit touch and go from a numbers standpoint, though business overall seems pretty steady compared to last year. The big problem we have is that blizzard a few weeks ago in particular gave us one hell of a black eye, landing on one of the busier non-holiday weekends of the year. Thus, in the space of two awful days, the month March instantly became a lost cause.

Obviously, we're looking to make that lost business back over the rest of the year, but with the other two months of this year so far coming in at "flat" or "just off by a hair," and the general shaky state of consumer confidence and the economy as a whole, those two days might actually become the difference in our year unless we can catch a break. Then again, in modern music retail, flat is the new up, and Greg is still confident enough in our ability to lure business that we're in the process of negotiating our next five-year lease.

Finally, in perhaps the one shining ray of truly good news I've had so far this year: I actually made back a handful of money on my tax returns at both the state and local level (which in all likelihood means I did something wrong, heh heh). Sure, the combined amount I made back won't even fill my gas tank, but hey, a small victory sometimes means just as much as a big one.

Go Tribe!

One Last Arctic Blast (?)

Ok, this is getting a bit silly.

Weather-wise, March has been a complete bitch of a month around here. Exactly two weeks after the biggest snowstorm I can remember since I was 8 or 9 years old slammed into the area (and gave our sales figures a serious black eye that might take months to make up for), one more late season snow storm crept into the area Friday night and wound up dumping another foot of snow all over Lake County.

If nothing else, this gives me the opportunity to introduce you all to the imaging powers of my new Sony Cybershot DSC-W200 digital camera. As I write this, we are only 8 days from the first game of the 2008 baseball season at Progressive Field (which is half the reason I bought this new toy in the first place). I am becoming more and more sure by the hour that I'll be watching this game in a scarf, gloves, two sweaters and a winter hat. :-\

Happy Easter from Northeast Ohio!

Intermission

If last week's Ice Storm From Hell wasn't enough to make me sick to death of this endless winter (hacking through the 1/8" thick sheet of solid ice covering my entire car after work last Tuesday took a week's supply of brute force), then an epic blizzard on Friday and Saturday sure as hell was. We all knew it was coming, and it showed up right on schedule and dumped something like 2 feet of snow all over the place by the time it was over.

The shittiest part of this, predictably, was that I had to be at the store on Saturday morning in order to squeeze whatever blood from the proverbial stone that could be squoze out of that day, and what a complete freakin' disaster that was.

Business-wise, I suppose the workday itself could have been worse as far as people were concerned: generally, the folks who show up at the store on days like that are not the bright bulbs you'd care to be snowed in with ("WOW, MAN! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU GUYS WERE DUMB ENOUGH TO BE OPEN TODAY!" they typically exclaim, perhaps not catching the irony in their own words). With only, uh, eight customers in the store the entire time I was open, it was a pretty peaceful day all things considered. I got some shelving done, shoveled and salted the front walk, caught up the orders, et cetera. As the afternoon wore on and the visibility actually worsened (it was maybe 250-500 feet on the way in that morning), I was given the green light to get the hell out of Dodge before sundown. We closed a bit later with a pathetic sales total, about three grand short of where we were shooting for. That was pretty bad, and on top of an abbreviated (and dead) Friday, and an abbreviated (and dead) Tuesday (a lot of Tuesdays recently have sported pretty terrible weather, come to think of it), the month of March is already looking like a lost cause unless we can turn this boat around in a hurry.

While the day itself was tranquil, the drive home (in the middle of a Level 2 Snow Emergency, whatever the hell that is), was a complete nightmare. I closed the store at 5 P.M. and waded into the parking lot drifts to get my car warmed up, and let it idle while I re-shoveled the front walk. When everything was finally ready, I jumped into the car, popped it into reverse, and floored it, going about five feet or so backwards before getting hung up in another drift (the snowplow guy had just showed up as I was leaving, and he had a long way to go before he reached my part of the lot). After some gunning of the engine, I headed back into the store to retrieve the shovel and dig myself out, openly cursing our decision to open up that day.

By the time I had finally burst out of that drift, it was nearly 5:30 and I was so happy to finally be moving that I neglected to realize I still had the shovel in my passenger seat until I was more than halfway home. Ugghhh... HULK SMASH.

No, wait! My co-worker (Brian) lives on my way home now! I can just drop by his place and leave the shovel with him since he is working on Sunday anyway!

Wooo! Great idea!

Oh wait ... back up. Hold it right there.

Whaaaat?

When you went back into the store to grab the shovel to dig yourself out, you didn't remember to lock the door behind you when you left, did you?

Awwwwww shit!

Yeah, thought so.

So, I turned around angrily and returned to the store, taking care this time to stick to the plowed areas of the parking lot (and very nearly getting stuck again anyway). Luckily, I had indeed left the door unlocked, so the trip back was certainly worthwhile, if aggravating.

It was about halfway home again when my mind chirped again: hey, uh, didn't you intend to bring home a bag of packing supplies?

You know what? Screw the goddamned packing supplies.

Roger that.

Right now, the roads are clear and dry, and snow is piled up in conical sight line-blocking hills all over the place. Perhaps it's me, but I detect a bit of a bias towards SUV drivers in the way snow piles are arranged at the front entrances of plazas and driveways, completely blocking your car-eye view of oncoming traffic. Getting out of our plaza at work has become a pretty dangerous proposition since Saturday afternoon. Here's hoping the melt-off hits quickly before someone gets killed.

Anyway, the suffering is only in the here and now. Three weeks from today (and, hopefully, about 20 degrees-and-change north of our current temperature), Sarah and I will both be in attendance down at the Jak ... uh, Progressive Field for Opening Day 2008. With a bit of luck, we'll soon have a bitchin' brand new digital camera with us in order to take plenty of slick pix of the day's events, followed with mucho footage of the kitties, the condo and points all around the area (and I'll soon be putting up a link to the Flickr account you can scope 'em all out at).

Courage.

(Twenty Years) Part 12: The Dead Walk!

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

We'd been privy to random strokes of luck (both good and bad) over the years, but this one just might have topped them all: Record Town had royally fucked up. Big time.

At odd times over the month of December, Greg and Deak would discuss the new store we had been promised in exchange for working that Christmas season at Great Northern Mall. The news from Deak was, at first, discouraging: it was a foregone conclusion that a non-compete clause in the sales contract that had been drawn up for the Great Lakes Mall store would keep us out of the city of Mentor for good (or long enough that it might as well be). In most cases, the terms of these agreement keep you from operating anywhere within five-miles of the place you sold your property to, which would mean that if we wanted to call ourselves "Record Den," we'd have to open somewhere in Willoughby, possibly Painesville, or maybe even Mayfield Heights.

Before we started scouting out locations, we'd need to know exactly what our legal options were, and Greg asked Deak to verify what we could and couldn't get away with. A few days later, the word came back from Deak's lawyer: not only was no such "safe distance" spelled out anywhere in the agreement, but there wasn't a "non-compete" clause in the contract at all.

We looked at each other, stunned, as this news was relayed to us: this was better than we ever could have hoped for. Deak set about looking for a vacant location in Mentor and eventually settled on a half-empty strip mall that was located within sight of Great Lakes Mall which, for our old customers, would make us a cinch to locate. On the negative side, however, we would also be about 500 feet from the front door of the local Best Buy location: certainly not the most desirable new place to set up shop, but it was the best option available.

With the opening of the new Mentor location set for early February, we had to play out the string at Great Northern just a little bit longer. For me, this was easier said than done: the standard post-Christmas slowdown that had always driven me to distraction in Mentor was far worse in North Olmstead, probably because I was now driving about 40 miles to feel bored instead of 5 and change. I tried to let the promise of a new store forty minutes closer to home give me the energy to withstand the grind out there for a couple more weeks, but by the middle of January, with the Fiero continuing to run erratically and real winter weather finally starting to arrive in the area, I couldn't take it out there anymore and requested a week off, timing my first day back at work to be the day we started fixing up our new location.

Our new digs had previously been the domain of a waterbed emporium and had been vacant for some time. Most of the preliminary work our District Manager had done was centered around removing some old drywall slabs that had once sectioned off the floorspace for display purposes and replacing them with two new (and slightly leaning) walls that sectioned the store off into a sales floor and a back room. The dimensions of the new back room were quite large, giving us room for a rear manager's office and nearly thirty feet of open space opposite that space for ... a whole lot of storage and a lunch table, I guess. It seemed like a lot of space was being wasted back there, but the sales floor itself was more than big enough to suit our purposes for the time being, so we didn't really mind.

One of the first things we did was relocate a freakin' huge two-level counter squatting uselessly in the back room area to the front of the store. That behemoth was absolute murder to move (and will likely never move again without busting), but we figured (correctly) that Greg would positively flip over the all the open space he would have to place piles of CDs, blank tapes, lighters, patches, incense, key chains, and whatever else he could think of in people's faces. To this day, the front counter remains the center of the action, if you will: all regulars who drop by make it a point to stop there first and scope out what is new, noteworthy, or on special.

It ultimately took us the better part of a decade to fully utilize all of the room we had available in this new store: early on, we were far more spacious than we are as I write this. While the basic layout of the new Record Den is still pretty much the same as it was in early February 1998, this location was stitched together slowly, as pieces and parts from the old "Traveling Road Show" arrived whenever another location closed down, and it was this haphazard fashion of acquiring displays (and product) that allowed us to shape and re-shape the store over time.

By the time we opened the new location on Saturday, February 14, 1998, a conga line of mis-matched CD bins stretched down the entire middle length of the store. The east wall was dominated by cassette display cases, while plastic and metal shelving occupied the slat boards arranged from head-to-toe level everywhere else. As a final touch, we hung up dozens of rock-themed black tapestries from the acoustical tiles in the ceiling (a little display trick we'd picked up from Great Northern) to try and eat up some of what felt like an ocean of open space.

With a little spit and polish, we had made ourselves look presentable for the public, but a few new issues were already presenting themselves by Opening Day, with a few more coming up over our first few months of operation that not only dulled our early euphoria, but also made us begin to regret our decision to stay within the Record Den corporation.

The first issue we had was the new sign for the store: done on the cheap (surprise!), it was a two-piece red-on-yellow design printed on lightweight corrugated plastic that tended to bow and vibrate in the wind. While it was big, bright and clearly visible from hundreds of feet away, it was also a major pain in the ass to deal with. None of us liked the sign from the day we set it up (we had to use transparent packing tape to hold the damn thing together, for crissakes), and it often came loose from its mooring, even blowing halfway down on a few gusty (and embarrassing) occasions.

Far more worrisome to us was the product situation, which was in flux once again. While boxes of CDs and tapes had been shipped our way the instant we started setting up shop, there were nowhere near enough of them for our liking. Despite loading up the TELXON with stock orders, very little was appearing from the warehouse, and a lot of what was appearing was obviously being shunted our way from other stores in the chain. To our mounting irritation, it had become apparent that we'd be opening with only a skeleton inventory: our initial plan had been to overwhelm people from the instant we opened, in effect saying "we're back and nothing is changed!" but that was just not to be.

Basically, two things had happened:

1. The money from the sale of the Mentor store was already nearly used up, and Deak was in the process of selling off the rest of the chain piecemeal. One of the stores he sold that spring was the Great Northern Store we had just refurbished over the previous Christmas break. It's only business, of course, but I felt oddly cheated to have spent five weeks of my time getting that store back on its feet only to have it sold to NRM the minute we were finished.

2. Deak was in the process of completely screwing over every single major supplier he did business with. Playing shell games with his money (largely as a result of his divorce settlement), he cried poverty with the major labels, declaring himself bankrupt and forced the labels to either accept reduced payments (say, ten cents on the dollar) or nothing at all. The labels, having no choice, took the reduced amounts and zeroed out their Record Den accounts for good. It was stunts like this that left the chain saddled with an absolutely horrendous reputation at the wholesale level: a reputation that would be tripping us up for years to come as we'd search for new or alternate suppliers as the need arose.

Then came the worst news of all: with the Record Den chain being chopped up and sold off to the highest bidder, Deak obviously had no further need for a warehouse. With only one or two remaining stores left to worry about, he also had no need for his support staff. Paring down the workforce to two (both of them largely secretarial positions), Deak shuttered the warehouse/headquarters complex in Mayfield and relocated his office ... to the "mysteriously" over-sized back room of our new store.

To say we were horror struck by this development would be underselling it: things had been tense enough around the store when we dealt with Deak face-to-face only once or twice a week during the transition and opening, but now we'd be dealing with his presence every day for the foreseeable future. Once we realized the real reason the back room was so large, it became obvious that this move had been in the cards from the day this new store had been picked out. Moreso than ever before, I thought we should have bolted when we had the goddamned chance. I felt like we'd been had.

Greg wasn't at all pleased with this development either, but he had also been developing a fair degree of bargaining leverage with Deak ever since the selling of the Great Lakes Mall store and the refurbishing of the Great Northern Mall location. Thus, an understanding of sorts had apparently been reached between the two of them: no matter what, he knew what he was doing and Deak was to step back and keep out of the way and let us run the store as we saw fit. Incredibly, this understanding seemed to sink in, and Deak largely stayed out of our hair over the next three years. It wasn't always easy having him back there, and there were a few occasions when Greg would deliberately play the loudest, most obnoxious CD he could get his hands on (Deak's office was positioned directly below one of the massive speakers at the rear of the sales floor) as a measure of revenge for being second-guessed or micromanaged.

It took a while for our new location to become viable: business had started off very wobbly (our gross total for the month of February, 1998 amounted to less than a current week's total business), but by the fall we'd started to hit a respectable stride upon which we could base our expectations from month to month. We also changed greatly in character as a store: following many years of being a "Top 40" kind of outlet in composition and sales, competition with the Evil Empire across the street had started us down in a far more overtly college rock/underground direction. Within a year or so, we had started figuring out how to flank Best Buy and eke out an existence batting clean-up on some mainstream titles while delving farther into independent, deep catalog, and import product.

As time passed, and the effects of the music industry's short-sightedness became more apparent, we began to realize just how lucky we had been in the long run that Deak had sold the Great Lakes store out from under us. It's funny to write this now, but Deak's desperate, ill-fated attempt to save his own floundering company ultimately resulted in what we have now (though certainly not by conscious design). We now depend heavily on used vinyl, CDs, DVDs and even some VHSs to generate the profit margins that are now a near-impossibility with contemporary hits, and this reliance would have been impossible in the mall (who frowned on the idea of anything used being sold anywhere on the premises). We have no dress codes, no silly restrictions on window displays, no enforced sidewalk sales, we can set our own opening and closing times and we play whatever music we like. Perhaps even more than our original run-down, cluttered J.J. Newberry's location, this is truly our own store.

Oh, one more angle to follow up before we move on: not long after we opened, a gaggle of Record Town execs stopped by for a visit and oh, were they pissed. No longer was it all smiles and "glad to have you aboard," but instead a lot of veiled threats, banging of shoes on tables and cries of "vee vill crush you!!" I sometimes wonder if one of these guys (or, more likely, some poor schmuck in their legal department) eventually lost their head for neglecting to dot their i's and cross their t's when they drew up that sales agreement for the Great Lakes Mall store. It didn't matter much in the long run: within a year, they had quit fencing with Camelot Music and opted to simply swallow them up instead. In time, this newest subsidiary of the Record Town empire changed their name to FYE (For Your Entertainment), and their massive, sprawling "lifestyle"-themed superstore was cut down to less than half its old size and refitted into a typical mall record store. C'est la vie.

(Pictures of the store taken by Dave M.)

Sci-Fi From My Wonder Years II

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching these things at a more accelerated pace (say, more than one every few weeks) for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condominium into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

Trancers falls into that low-budget 80s sci-fi subgenre inhabited by such peers as The Terminator and Wavelength in that all of these films seem to be set in the shadier areas of Los Angeles after dark, all of them feature score music almost exclusively provided by "futuristic" synthesizers and whose characters live in neon-lit, austere living spaces that look like they were previously used in a Missing Persons video.

While it starts off wobbly establishing the 23rd century world where we first meet Jack Deth, Trancers gets into motion the instant Deth is sent "down the line" to 1985 in what plays almost exactly like an R-rated episode of Quantum Leap. Thomerson is tough as nails and impossible not to like, as is a pre-stardom Helen Hunt who plays his 20th century love interest. A complete treat, and a joy to rediscover again all these years later.

That said, I must pass along a buyer beware on the DVD edition, which seems to follow the same low-budget chic as the original feature, but with a few even cheaper quirks: I'd swear this was transferred straight from VHS. The website linked off the main menu doesn't appear to exist anymore. There is a also TRAILERS option on the main menu that when accessed tells you that over 40 trailers are available to view the moment you flip the disc over. Problem is, the other side of the DVD is coated in artwork and, of course, has nothing on it. How can I not smile at such lame authoring technique?

On the other extreme of the budget scale from Trancers sits what is, in my humble opinion, one of the all-time greats of any genre: Ridley Scott's bleakly futuristic film noir epic Blade Runner.

Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan

By Ed Christman Sat Mar 1, 9:14 PM ET

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The major music companies have been resistant to lowering their price on CDs, but now they may be dragged to that point: Wal-Mart, the largest retailer of music with an estimated 22 percent market share, has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

According to sources, the Wal-Mart proposal would allow for a promotional program that could comprise the top 15 to 20 hottest titles, each at $10. The rest of the pricing structure, according to several music executives who spoke with Billboard, would have hits and current titles retailing for $12, top catalog at $9, midline catalog at $7 and budget product at $5. The move would also shift the store's pricing from its $9.88 and $13.88 model to rounder sales prices.

Executives at the Bentonville, Arkansas-based discounting giant wouldn't comment on the specifics of their promotion, but Wal-Mart divisional merchandise manager for home entertainment Jeff Maas acknowledged the proposal. "When you look at sales declines with physical product, and you have a category declining like it is, you have to make decisions about what the future looks like," he said. "If you have a business that is declining and you want to turn it around, it really takes looking at it from all angles."

Maas referenced the DVD business as a model for tiered pricing. "(It) has been around for years and has worked very well," he said.

While Wal-Mart's negotiations with the labels have yet to take place, the proposal is already causing agita at the majors. Some consider the proposal a non-starter, others say further negotiations might eventually yield a workable solution, and a few see it as appropriate, given the big picture.

"I don't think this is a Wal-Mart discussion," one top executive at a major label said. "I think this is a future-of-the-business discussion. Right now everyone is paralyzed."

Some executives raised the question of whether the Federal Trade Commission would take issue with such a program were it rolled out only to Wal-Mart. But one executive said, "Making it legal is not the difficult part. The difficult part is coming to terms with it."

Another top executive said, "The decision might come down to: Do we give up 20 percent of our business (i.e., Wal-Mart) in order to not lose the entire business?"

That question assumes that Wal-Mart would either penalize or stop doing business with a major that decides not to participate in the pricing program. Moreover, if all majors take a pass, some speculate that Wal-Mart could pull music entirely from the store.

This type of speculation abounds, although the Wal-Mart proposal was presented only as a starting point. One label executive said, "This sounds like the Hail Mary pass, and if it doesn't work, they could be out of the music business; or maybe they reduce music down to a couple of racks" from the 4,000 titles carried by Wal-Marts with larger selections.

Maas declined to rule out those possibilities, but said he'd rather look at how Wal-Mart can help a declining category. "The customer votes every single day in our stores, and based on what they want is how we merchandise our stores."

Reuters/Billboard

Ruh roh, Raggy ...

Dear Music Industry,

Don't you just love it when the 800 pound gorillas you helped create start throwing their weight around and now have you bent over the proverbial barrel? Looks like your biggest customer is gonna start a whole new game of hardball and dictate terms to you, the very people whom they pay to supply them with their music stock. Funny old world, isn't it.

I can see you all sitting in the meeting rooms, throwing up your hands and crying poverty and maintaining to anyone who will listen that Wal-Mart is asking for the moon and stars, yet at the same time I can hear the wheels turning upstairs as you try to think of how this idea might .... just might ... bail your asses out of the frying pan, at least for the short term. We all know how seductive short term thinking is for you guys, but before you pick up the pen in desperation and sign on to this agreement, try just for once to think beyond the next quarter and walk this thing through. I'm not saying "NO! DON'T DO EET! EET'S TOO SEXY!!", but asking in effect how you're going to handle the rest of your business if you give in to your rampaging pet monster once again. What next? Will an almost certainly enraged Best Buy get the same pricing consideration when they angrily demand it? How about Target? One-stops? Independent accounts?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how all of this falls into place. Depending on how serious Wal-Mart is with this idea (and whether they use it as a "either you are with us or against us" tactic to get their way), I get the impression this deal will not get off the table in its present form, but I can't rule out the idea of a compromise reached by all parties, especially as Sony/BMG and Universal are already experimenting with deep-discounting their lower-priced catalog tiers in a pricing fashion similar to what is in this article. If these new promotions are tied into the proposal reported above, it's not very difficult to imagine WEA and The Company That Was Once Respectfully Referred To As EMI falling into line.

I'd be delighted to see an across-the-board re-figuring of pricing strategies from the label, but I want to see these new prices offered to everyone, not just the one or two companies who can scream louder than all the others combined. That said, remembering how Universal caved in to these guys in the wake of the JumpStart kickoff, I'm also bracing for bad news.

I guess this is where Matt Drudge would say "developing ..."

Not The NY Times Book Review, 2008 Edition

The Road

World War Z

My Bass And Other Animals

The World Without Us

The Mad Scientists Club

The Assault On Reason

ILM

A Rough Guide To Pink Floyd

The Buzzard

Mind Over Matter 4

Taken By Storm

(Twenty Years) Part 11: Over The River And Through The Woods ...

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

It was the Monday of Thanksgiving week, 1997 when Brian and Greg and I drove to Great Northern Mall to start another Christmas season working at the Den, only this time about 40 miles from home. This wasn't a completely new experience for me: I had worked a Saturday at this location in July of 1989 to help cover for the manager's wedding day, and I had also been stationed there for a week in late October 1995 while considering an offer from our buyer to manage the location. Both experiences had been pleasant enough, but this time we were going to be based there for at least two months, displacing the crew that was already in place at the store (even canning them if necessary), and getting the place back on its feet and in fighting shape for the holidays.

I was apprehensive with this operation right from the outset for two reasons: first (as I mentioned in the previous post), I was not happy to be offering Deak a helping hand after the way the Mentor store had been yanked out from underneath us. Secondly, Great Northern Mall was located on the other side of Cleveland in the southwestern suburb of North Olmstead, and the idea of making a 90 minute all-freeway round-trip to work five or six days a week for two months or more in my already-temperamental Pontiac Fiero was not exactly filling me with optimism. My concerns about breaking down (or more likely overheating) in the middle of I-71 or I-480 in the dead of night competed with the idea of also having to deal with Cleveland's notoriously terrible winter weather. Luckily, the weather turned out to be a total non-issue: aside from a freak October snowstorm that had dumped over a foot of snow on the east side, the rest of that winter stayed remarkably mild (at least into late January).

While the Mentor store was, at the time of its closing, the most successful outlet in the Record Den chain, the Great Northern location was at one time the real jewel in our crown. I'm sure a large part of this success derived from the store's unique placement in the sprawling shopping center, looking out directly into the middle of the food court, located between two restaurants, and within sight of a major mall entrance. During its peak, Great Northern was soundly besting us numbers-wise, but the departure of its original management team followed by years of ineffectual leadership and the collapsing of the Record Den financial infrastructure had left it a shadow of its former self.

I suspect the current crew of the Great Northern store weren't exactly pleased with our arrival, and I'll bet they were even less happy with the way we took over operations and promptly started making the place over in our image. I don't recall many blow-outs between anybody, but there were constant little battles were being silently waged over how to stock product (to mask the utter lack of catalog in the store, the racks were flooded with dozens of copies of the same CDs and cassettes, for instance), how to efficiently merchandise the front counter (this was a particularly amusing battle front as Karen, the Great Northern manager, hated the way Greg front-loaded the counter with product and was constantly undoing his displays on his off days), and the overall lackadaisical, carefree manner absences or below-par work was dealt with there (we canned one person for basically vanishing into thin air for a month after we showed up, only for Karen to re-hire the guy behind our backs).

While Brian and Greg had their hands full dealing with store politics, I did my best to stay out of the way, learn the buying ropes, and place massive daily stock orders in order to rebuild the store's skeletal inventory ASAP. It may not have been what I'd call "fun," but those few weeks between Turkey Day and Christmas week were definitely an interesting challenge in that we were given a time frame in which to make a noticeable difference in the store's fortunes, and we set about our task with relish (and I tell you, it can be a lot of fun learning how to spend someone else's money). Now that the chain was once again flush with cash in the wake of the Mentor sale, we were able to get the Great Northern store into something we considered reasonable in a relatively short time, and we looked at the experience of doing as a practice run for opening our proposed new location in the new year.

While the task of re-creating the Mentor store in North Olmstead managed to keep me occupied most of the time, working with some of the other people at that store had its ups and downs. I didn't really care much for Karen or her snotty assistant manager, and none of us liked Andy The Invisible Clerk very much. Then there was Nick, who the only person at that store who was actually fun to work with, and not even so much for his streaky work ethic as his Spicoli-by-way-of-Suge Knight approach to life. Nothing ever really bothered Nick: he just kinda rolled with the flow and went about his white-boy gangsta existence, occasionally making hilarious observations in that permanently-stoned, laid-back drawl of his. We might have been from completely different worlds, but Nick was a hoot.

Now comes the really bad part: within a couple of weeks of starting at Great Northern, my worst fears going into this season were soon realized as the Fiero started behaving erratically. I'd tried car-pooling with Greg or Brian when possible, but the way the schedule worked out didn't always make that solution workable, and eventually the Fiero started to make getting to and from work into a daily cliffhanger. Finally, one frigid Saturday night close to Christmas, the god damned thing chose to not start at all.

I was supposed to give Nick a ride home that night (he lived a few miles up I-71 from the airport, which was on my usual route), and after the Fiero proved completely unresponsive due to some kind of electrical/ignition issue, he called up an alternate way home while I sat in the office at the back of the store, fuming and wondering what to do about this situation. Going home was definitely my desired option, but it was already nearing 11:00 P.M. (we closed at 10 that night), I'd have to be back there again at 10 A.M. the following morning and any ride I might be able to get back home would take nearly an hour to get to me, then nearly another hour to get back home, and then another hour to get me back here nine hours after that. It wasn't worth the effort. I was stuck.

With a furious sigh, I called home to report my situation and set about spending a cold winter's night stuck at work. To ease my fury a bit and make some constructive use of the evening, I put on some music at low volume and set about doing some cleaning up and arranging of stock for an hour or so until I figured it was time to duck out of sight, retreat into the back room (I didn't feel it would be a good idea to call attention to myself as I had no idea how mall security might approach this situation) and try to get some sleep.

This was going to be the hard part: the carpet in the store was nearly flat and had no padding underneath, so I threw a bunch of old t-shirts down on the floor and tried to make some kind of bedding that at least approached the idea of "comfortable." My shoes would have to stay on, since even with the heat going, the floor of the office was cold thanks to the shipping door not being flush with the ground (I stuffed a couple more shirts along the bottom to get some rudimentary insulation going). For a blanket, I would have to use my winter coat ... and I wasn't wearing a long coat that year. Figures.

Now, what to use for a pillow? My gaze fell on the display of stuffed animals lying by the office door and I selected the Tasmanian Devil, which at least looked like it would offer some comfort and support ... that is, until I lay down, rested my head on it and it growled gibberish at me in a shitty approximation of Mel Blanc's voice. Oh, it talks. Of course. Jesus F. Christ. Exasperated, I tossed Taz across the office, removed some more t-shirts off the rack, rolled them up into a pillow-like shape, and used them instead. Zzzz.

Needless to say, I slept pretty horribly that night, with every toss and turn bringing me fully awake thanks to my then-bony shape poking uncomfortably through my makeshift nest. At 5 A.M. I awoke and realized I had made the terrible strategic mistake of forgetting to use the public restroom in the food court hours before (and this was probably the one Record Den in the whole chain that didn't have an employee loo). I tried my best to go back to sleep and ignore the pressing need to take a piss, but that window had already closed. I got up, irritated and wondering exactly what the hell I was going to use as a makeshift urinal. A quick scan revealed only one option: an empty Taco Bell cup standing on the desk. I then learned a bit about human bladder capacity: a medium-sized soft drink cup ain't enough for an early morning leak, folks. Luckily, by the time the cup was full, I had relieved myself enough that I could get back to sleep and worry about the rest when the rest of the mall was open.

I was awake for the day by 9 A.M., and shortly after I had covertly disposed of the Taco Bell cup in one of the disposal units outside in the shipping dock, Andy The Invisible Clerk actually showed up for a change, which was a nice surprise. Despite my absolutely evil mood, I had to smile as he took an extended look at my bleary-eyed, disheveled countenance while he punched in and said "Jesus, man, you look terrible."

Oh, it gets better: I made a few phone calls that morning and managed to set up an appointment in the early afternoon to get my car looked at by a local repair shop. Before I called for a tow, I walked out to the Fiero and decided to give it a whirl just in case, feeling an odd certainty that it was going to start up with no problems at all.

Guess what? It fuckin' did.

(Twenty Years) Part 10: The End Is The Beginning Is The End

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

Looking back from now, what happened in November 1997 wasn't exactly a surprise, but how it happened certainly was.

There had been numerous discussions over the years in the store about Greg getting out from under Deak once and for all, opening his own place and running it exactly the way he wanted. This scenario made for a nice pipe dream, and it was all one could cling to when Deak was showing up unannounced at the store and spending hours honking at us to wear slacks instead of jeans while compulsively re-arranging boxes of screeching Elmo dolls or Co-Ed Naked t-shirts or anything aside from, you know, music.

Even Greg was running out of patience dealing with the deteriorating situation: the closest he had come to leaving was during the month or so that he seriously entertained the idea of working as a buyer for a local one-stop that was being run by an old acquaintance of his. He wound up sticking around instead, but it was becoming clear that he was starting to reach his wit's end. Perhaps the most infuriating affront to Greg was our inept buyer showing up at the height of the Christmas rush a couple of years in a row and ransacking our inventory for product to redistribute to the rest of the stores, none of which were run by people able to do their own holiday-week buying anymore.

While Deak played with toys, Rome continued to burn merrily away. A veritable mobile juggling act was in progress for our district manager as Record Den locations opened and closed right and left, creating what we called "The Traveling Road Show" as it seemed like we always had a full store's inventory on the road headed somewhere from another location that Deak had closed in the dead of night without any employees aware of what was happening until the next morning. While shutting down operations and packing things up on the sly cut down on soon-to-be-canned workers ransacking the store as a parting gesture to management, this was only an incidental benefit as these commando-style closings were actually done in order to sneak out early on lease agreements. Typical.

I think it was sometime in October when we started to hear some whispers from little birdies in the know that Deak was setting up a deal to sell off parts of the dying chain in order to obtain some desperately needed cash flow, but we could never have guessed that he would, in effect, cut off the patient's head in order to save the rest of the body. Early in the afternoon of Friday, November 7, he and our district manager appeared unannounced at the store, and the looks on their faces telegraphed that bad news was coming. Greg and Deak took a walk in the mall to have their discussion, and while they were gone, the DM laid it all out for Brian (then the assistant manager) and I: we were being sold to the Record Town chain, effective in about nine days. Bam. It felt as if we'd been flattened by a train we'd never even known was approaching, like something that might happen in a Wyle E. Coyote cartoon.

The rest of that day was spent in deep discussions amongst ourselves, largely dealing in the subject matter of "well now what the fuck do we do?" Greg was in a state I'd never seen him in before: some indeterminate area equidistant between shock and fury: he'd made many offers to Deak over the years to buy out the store in the event Deak decided he wanted out of the record business, and even considering that they were never the best of friends, to have the location sold out from underneath him without any warning had taken him completely by surprise.

While my immediate knee-jerk reaction from all of this was to just walk out the door and start writing full-time (I had been freelancing for Scene on the side for a year and half by that point), I calmed down enough to entertain the idea of at least hearing out what Record Town had to offer. One thing Greg suspected was that our new masters were not going to be anything like our current regime, but that was also not necessarily a Good Thing. A major part of our success to that point in time had been dealing with imports (either legitimate and otherwise), and while we knew the boots would certainly have to go when Record Town took over, we also wondered exactly much autonomy we would be given in import buying (or any buying, for that matter).

I think it was a day later that a gray-suited regional manager/drone appeared in our store to welcome all of us to the wonderful world of Record Town and give us a little added background as to what was going on. As it happened, the purchase of our store was not much more than a chess move in the grand game Record Town was playing against Camelot Music (their nemesis on a national scale). While they initially weren't that thrilled with the size and location of our store relative to theirs, they were astounded at the sales numbers Deak had supplied them and that factor more than anything else had sealed the deal (nevermind the fact that those amazing numbers were all sourced from our 1996 sales year, before Best Buy and Circuit City had moved in across the street, and before the mall entrance nearest to us had been closed off: the combined effect of these had knocked our 1997 expectations down considerably). Their thinking, essentially, was that if a Mickey Mouse local chain could mount a serious challenge to a Camelot Superstore in a little shoe box-sized mall outlet store, then imagine what could happen with the amazing buying might and superior brainpower of Record Town behind us!

Inadvertent condescension aside, the regional manager drone didn't seem like a bad guy, but he addressed our concerns about how things would go under their ownership a little too easily (and vaguely) for our comfort. It felt like we were being told pretty much exactly what we wanted to hear, and we knew a lot of it was probably complete bullshit. This was confirmed a couple of days later when Greg sat in on a conference call with some company bigwigs, the results of said chat were enough to steer him away from staying when the switchover happened. Surprisingly, he opted instead to appeal to Deak to relocate us elsewhere in the company, if at least for the short term. Deak, maybe feeling more than a tinge of guilt (or perhaps eager to have Greg aboard in his effort to right the ship), agreed to let anyone who wanted to stay the opportunity to work at the chain's Great Northern Mall store until a long-term solution (namely a brand-new Lake County store) could be found.

I remember that I had some serious reservations about this idea at the time, and I discussed them with Greg during that last week we were open. Central to my misgivings was the feeling that we might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by hanging around with Deak (not that working for Record Town sounded like any more charming of an idea, granted). I asked him if this might be the opportunity we'd been talking about for years to get away from this guy at long last, but Greg answered that he was just not ready to open up a new store from scratch and that Great Northern was only a short term solution, one way or the other. Reluctantly, I stayed aboard, hoping I wasn't making a terrible mistake by doing so.

Deak's next move was easy to predict: Record Town would be buying our store lock, stock and barrel, including (hopefully) any product that was in it at the time of the inventory that would be conducted before the sale was finalized. With nine days before that happened, Deak dumped nearly half the warehouse on us over that final week as box after box of deleted and inactive product arrived at our shipping door and was dutifully packed away in understock to be absorbed by our new owners (who, I am told, wound up bouncing a hell of a lot of this garbage right back at Deak. Hee hee.).

Greg was also playing a couple of shell games of his own with the imports, shipping all of the bootlegs and the cream of the legitimate product to Great Northern and directing all the outlying Record Dens to transfer their dead import stock to Mentor at once so that they would be also be absorbed into Record Town's inventory. We also shipped hundreds of the hard-to-find/specialty domestic CDs that gave our inventory its distinctive character to Great Northern as well to kick-start the process of rebuilding that store's stock and reputation.

Fridays and Saturdays were always our busiest days, but that last weekend we were open at Great Lakes Mall felt a lot more like a funeral wake than a couple of days at work. Between a notice I had slipped into the Scene's local news section about the transition, an interview Greg had done with the Lake County News-Herald about the store's closing, and word traveling around, it was a sad two days of goodbyes and well wishes from many of our core regulars.

Melancholy as they were, Friday and Saturday were a parties in the park compared to Sunday, which was a miserable slog. Jim and I worked that day (as usual), and we were joined by a Record Town manager from the Euclid Square Mall store who was slated to take over our store first thing Monday morning. The new manager set up a table at the front of the store and started immediately badgering everyone who walked by to fill out a job application. While I found this irritating on its own (particularly in the way she went after people like some kind of used car salesman), I started getting snappy when she also decided to start playing store manager a day early, bossing Jim and I around to do random tasks as the day progressed, constantly on us to lower the volume of the music and castigating me directly at one point for daring to have a cigarette in the back room during a typical afternoon lull in business with an annoyed "you're not supposed to be back here!"

By about five o clock, even the normally easygoing Jim was staring daggers at Record Town Woman's back: he was as annoyed as I that our planned send-off for the old Record Den was instead a sneak preview of the kind of obnoxious, scolding dicketry that awaited us if we'd opted to stick around instead of heading to Great Northern. Any doubts we might have harbored about jumping ship were put to rest for good that day: both of us had been there too long to have someone new march in and act like we'd been shipped in from the temp agency last week. As a little parting shot to the new regime, I selected a closing theme, Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The Machine," played at the highest volume I could get away with while the inventory team started to assemble in the store a few minutes before closing. Jim grinned: he got the point. That was all that mattered.

Greg came in as we were closing up shop and the Record Town inventory drones were getting their counting machines revved up. I was actually kinda curious to hang out for a while and watch the process, but I had to review a KMFDM concert that night, so I had to meet up with an old friend and ex co-worker after finishing up the deposit and phoning the sales to the office one last time. We stopped back after the show a few hours later, and the counting was still going on, with members of the team frequently expressing consternation and exasperation at the esoteric titles they were scanning. Just a few minutes of listening to them was giving me a headache: Greg had been there for the better part of five hours enduring their blather. He was as weary, bored, and as ready to walk away from that store as I had been earlier that evening. It felt completely wrong to end this chapter of our lives this way, but at the very least there was the promise of a new beginning (maybe in Willoughby or Painesville) sometime in the new year.

We had all decided to take a week long vacation/break before starting at Great Northern to decompress a bit before heading straight into Thanksgiving Week and the subsequent holiday season on the other side of Cleveland. A few days into that break, my curiosity got the best of me, and I headed to the mall and walked into what had only a few days ago been Record Den. The change was already dramatic: the imports had been rounded up, marked down, and unceremoniously dumped into a bin near the front of the store, the old "RECORD DEN IMPORT" tags obscured behind much larger white bar-coded sale stickers. The back window, which we had used to keep an eye on things while eating lunch or having a smoke in the back room was completely obscured by a wall of portable tape cassette racks (since no one was ever to be in the back room anyway, there was no need for that window). Best of all, there was some god awful crossover R&B crap being played on the stereo that was so overwhelming the damaged speakers we'd left behind for the new tenants (I had helped blow those cones out a year or so before doing a particularly loud airing of disc 2 of Pink Floyd's P.U.L.S.E.) that it kinda made the whole enterprise feel pathetic and fake. I didn't feel any sorrow or anger, just an amused kind of contempt: the twenty-some-odd years of work put into that store's inventory and image had been undone virtually overnight, and walking into that Record Town that evening felt no different at all from entering NRM or Camelot.

We were told a few months later that the manager of that store had taken a lot of abuse over that Christmas season from customers who didn't know what had happened: many of them voicing displeasure with the new store, and nearly all of them asking where the hell the old stock and the old crew had gone. For a short time, I actually felt kind of bad for her as I wondered how I'd handle continually being subjected to that kind of grilling. Then I'd remember how that final Sunday at the old Record Den went and feel my face stretching into a mean-spirited, pitiless grin. Welcome to the machine, indeed.


P.S.: During our spring 1997 inventory, I returned from a lunch break spent in the food court and was told by our rascally District Manager that my mother had called, wanted me to call her back ASAP, and that she left the number she could be reached at. The DM had written the number down and left it by the phone in the back room. I gave him an "ok, thanks," headed back to the phone, dialed the number, and was immensely surprised when a throaty, breathless voice immediately started spelling out a number of sexual acts she wanted to perform on me right then and there. A free phone porn line!! Kick ass!!!

Of course, this little stunt was then perpetrated numerous times over the following weeks on other employees and store regulars when applicable. Towards the end of that awful final Sunday at the Den, in a fit of malicious pique, I wrote that same phone number down on a slip of paper in black magic marker and added the words MALL SECURITY on top of it. After a moment's hesitation, I taped it up on the wall at eye-level next to the phone line conduit as you see in the picture above. God, do I wish I could have been there to see their faces the first time they had a shoplifter. Ha haaa.

(Record Den pictures taken by Dave M.)