The Freshies, "I'm in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk"

At some point I’ll be able to put an end to all this nonsense and lawyering, and when I do, I think I’ll open a record store.

A year ago I would have told you the dream was to start an independent radio station. All-rock programming, and my like-minded employees and I would play whatever we wanted, without regard to focus groups, demographics, or hard lean-ins from industry execs. You know: in the old style. Then I went online to explore the feasibility and cost of securing a broadcast band allocation and radio transmitter. Forty minutes later I understood exactly why radio airplay is bought, sold, and mass-managed the way it is today. Just to get off the ground, you need a big pile of money—at worst a loan, and at best investors. And any investors worth their salt will ask sharp, slashing questions about the value proposition, citing this damning conventional wisdom:

1. A radio station needs to have the broadest possible appeal to be sustainable, and for this reason, its target audience should be casual listeners.

2. The gap between good music and popular music is as big as it’s ever been, and it’s growing by the day.

3. Discerning listeners already can choose their own songs on the streaming services, on either an ad-based (YouTube, Spotify) or a subscription (Apple Music, Spotify Premium) model. When they run out of their own ideas, the streamers’ algorithms serve up new music tailored specifically to their tastes.

Put more brutally, if independent rock radio were still an economically sustainable proposition, there would actually be indie rock radio stations in 2023.

Opening a record store, though—that’s much more in the realm of the possible. The startup costs are negligible by comparison: you only need to lease a storefront and start placing orders. And the end and means are identical to those of your Indie Radio Pipe Dream. You can still connect with people and build community, and you still do it by playing records and talking about music. You just do it more modestly, within the four walls of a small retail space.

And most importantly, there is actual demand for good indie record stores. Against all odds, vinyl has reemerged as a popular and meaningful alternative to the streamers.

I think I’ve mentioned that two Septembers ago, Kate bought me a turntable. When I first opened it up, it seemed like an extravagance. I have a million CDs, most of which I’ve ripped to the hard drive of my laptop computer. Those .mp3 files are copied over to my iPhone and two high-capacity late-model iPods. And we have a family subscription to Apple Music, and I have Spotify installed on my work computer. I’m gonna blow a lot of money on this, I thought, for music I either already have or can play for free on all my devices.

But that was exactly the point. Well, the blowing money wasn’t—isn’t—the point. The point is the searching. For the first time in, I dunno, ten years, I had a reason to go shopping for records, which was always one of my favorite things to do. And now is again.

Of course it’s true that with sites like Discogs you can order in records over the Internet at any time of day, from anywhere in the world, and you can track their passage from shipping depots in Washington State or Munich all the way to your doorstep. This is fine and good, but until the scientists declare otherwise, we’re still Homo sapiens sapiens and therefore still hard-wired as a matter of evolutionary advantage to crave The Chase. Dropped down on your knees in a hovel in Paris, dripping sweat in the 90-degree heat, you dig into a bin and pull out Amon Düül II’s Live in London. A day later you experience much the same thrill under more civilized conditions, strolling along the Seine. A riverside vendor’s cart houses a record inventory, and ripe there for the plucking are fine vintage copies of Thriller and Synchronicity. Mail-ordering these same three records wouldn’t deliver anything close to the satisfaction I felt finding them where I did.

(1) Traveling through space (2) into actual physical locations (3) to look for rare and hard-to-find artifacts that (4) stimulate your mind and (5) release endorphins, thereby offering the prospect of (6) repeatable, (7) pleasurable experience? Now that does sounds like a value proposition.

These days I arrive in a city and I’ve already mapped out a plan to hit one or more of its record stores. Over the past twenty-four months those cities have included, roughly in order, Columbus, Salt Lake City, St. Petersburg (Florida), Cleveland, New York, Bradenton, Paris, Amsterdam, Orleans (on Cape Cod), London, Northampton (Mass.), Sarasota, Phoenix, Philly, Princeton, Chicago, and Rome. Closer to home, I’ve looked in on locations in Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, Boston, and Brookline. Thus far I’ve hit only a few dozen different shops, but at each of them I’m not just buying records—I’m taking notes.

If I could build from scratch a record store perfectly suited to my sensibilities and tastes, it would look a lot like Hausfrau Record Shop on West 65th in Cleveland. Three times a year during baseball season I fly to Cleveland to see Guardians games: once early in the campaign, ideally for the home opener; once again mid-summer; and a third time in September, to give the team a last hug goodbye before the off-season. Hausfrau is my first stop now, on each of these trips. I walk off the plane, stretch, take the shuttle to the Rental Car Center, am always and inexplicably required to stand in the interminable line that I signed up for #1 Club Gold Status specifically to avoid—and when I finally do get hold of the car I reserved and am paroled from the lot, I drive straight to Hausfrau like my hair is on fire.

The store is boutique-sized. There are around 25 racks in total, each holding maybe 75 records. First time I walked through the door I was actually disappointed. I had a handful of stores on my Cleveland to-do list, and I’d read great reviews of this place, but it was tiny. What could I expect to find there? As it turned out, plenty. For starters, the store is just small enough that you can get in, finger-flick your way through the full inventory, and assemble your haul in under an hour. And it will be a haul. The selection is unreal, at least if you like what I like. It leans heavily into punk rock, post-punk, synth rock, psych rock, Krautrock—everything I’ve been chasing for the past half-decade.

• First Haul (June 1, 2022): Blondie’s Parallel Lines (vintage), Black Sabbath (vintage), Deluxe by Harmonia, and Neu! ’86.

• Second Haul (April 7, 2023): Ash Ra Tempel’s Schwingungen, Sowiesoso by Cluster, Treasure by Cocteau Twins, Ultravox!.

• Third Haul (June 9, 2023): Cluster & Eno, The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime. (Also Brainticket’s Cottonwoodhill for Carla—I already had my copy from a store in Amsterdam.)

• Fourth Haul (September 5, 2023): Killing Joke, Kaleidoscope by Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Perfect Prescription by Spacemen 3.

And every time I walk out the door I leave an armful of records I urgently need on the Hausfrau shelves. This last time it was In the Flat Field by Bauhaus; the Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys, Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar and E2-E4; Public Image Limited (first pressing!) … I could go on, but this post is barely on the rails as it is.

So let’s come at this from another angle. Most stores you go to are hit-or-miss with the vintage stuff. And this makes sense: you’re at the mercy of whoever drops by on a given day to sell off their—or more likely, their deceased relative’s—record collection. This means at any given moment your store will have at least five records by the likes of Asia, the Moody Blues, Jefferson Starship, and Molly Hatchet. Steve at Hausfrau is up to something altogether different. You don’t just happen to carry four secondhand German-issue Michael Rother LPs in your racks, or early foreign pressings of the three best O.M.D. records (and only those three), unless you’re aggressively curating your inventory like it’s your own collection. And he carries none of the usual dreck: he has no time, room, or use for it.

What fires me up about Hausfrau isn’t just that I go there and find great records. It’s the fact that it even exists. Consider the lousy Invisible Hand (see “My City Was Gone”) that, among other offenses over the years, has—

• Dumbed down the menu at Redbones in Davis Square.

• Scrapped the Taco Belgrande and Beef Meximelt and, until Dolly Parton intervened, even the Mexican Pizza.

• Canceled Arrested Development after three seasons.

• Turned MTV away from showing videos.

• Swapped in grape Jolly Ranchers for lemon.

• Decided the only movies we can have are sequels, prequels, remakes, spinoffs, reboots, 3-D reissues, and now live-action updates of other, better movies.

That the Hand should allow Hausfrau to open and (I hope) thrive signals to me that there is actually room in our craven, tasteless Economy for a goddam great niche-perfect indie record store.

Hauls aside, then, Hausfrau has an essential First Lesson to teach the wanna-be retiree record store owner: You can do this—and you can even go your own way in the process.

Another store that’s high on my list is Wanna Hear It Records, which has the advantage of being just up the road in Watertown. Their first focus is on hardcore punk and metal, but that’s hardly exclusive; it only means they’ll price a copy of Jesus Christ Superstar at six bucks (whoo-hoo!) to move it off their shelves in a hurry. And their secondhand inventory rawks. Last year they let me go down into their basement, where they keep new acquisitions they haven’t yet processed into their racks upstairs. Down in the catacombs that day I found a near-perfect original pressing of Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. The guy at the Wanna Hear It counter has a bit of a bad-ass Henry Rollins vibe, and on that score I was a little sheepish when I walked up last month holding a used copy of Spring Session M by Missing Persons. “That’s a great record,” he said. “Wow: I didn’t even know we had it in stock.” I skipped away feeling even better about the buy than I had previously thought.

Second Lesson: Love what you love, but keep an open mind and open ears.

Cheapo Records in Central Square, Cambridge has a very strong selection, but the guy at the counter will suck all the joy out of your day, if you let him. I asked him once if he had the Faust box set. “Sorry—no” would have been an adequate answer, but instead he went off on a five-minute rant about how much box sets suck for record stores, he’s trying to make a living here, and you’ll never see anything like a Faust box set in his shop. Uh, okay. On another visit I found two vintage copies of the Go-Gos’ Beauty and the Beat. They were priced differently, so I pulled the vinyl out of the sleeves to have a look for dings and scratches. You should have heard him barking at me over that. Really: you’d have thought I was in Cartier juggling their Fabergé eggs.

Third Lesson: Don’t be a clown.

There’s a place down the Cape called Instant Karma Records. The prices are sky-high, but on the other hand, in my travels to date I’ve only seen one copy of One Nation Under a Groove, and for that the guy could basically name his price. You’ll pay a premium to buy records here, but in the process you’re guaranteed a wide-ranging and lively conversation with the owner, who is simply delightful. And crazy knowledgeable. Five to ten dollars extra, to shoot the bull with Instant Karma Dylan about Lee “Scratch” Perry and Funkadelic? That’s absolutely a fair price.

Fourth Lesson: Put care and attention into your inventory, and embrace the customer.

There’s surely more to this life than I’ve written out here. And for that matter, these four lessons would seem to apply broadly to anything you might decide to do in life. So clearly I have more work to do to suss out the particulars of record store management. Thankfully I’ve got plenty of time—at least until the kids are through college—before Take Take This Noise Records opens in Belmont Center and I let my Massachusetts bar admission lapse for good. In the meantime I’ll keep shopping.

Today’s song is “I’m in Love with the Girl at the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk” (Apple Music, Spotify), by the Freshies. It’s not perfectly on point, as it hearkens back to a time—1980—when record chains were largely in control of the market. Still, it’s a fun listen: I turned it up on the Manchester: North of England CD box set a few years ago. The singer is a wanna-be rock star. His band is on the come but hitting walls at seemingly every turn. Nevertheless he holds onto hope … because everything he does, he does for the girl working the counter at the record shop down the road.

In the biz, you get to meet the top people. Trouble is, they never seem to be the sort we pull. Now we’re on our way …

On the box, you get to see all the best women. When we hit the top they’ll be falling over us, but I’ll stop their advances, ’cause I’m in love with the girl at the Manchester Virgin Megastore checkout desk.

She takes money. She gives change. She sells records—and that’s special!

Selling records is special—maybe even more so four decades later. Here’s hoping it’s just as special ten years from now, when I’m signing my name on that commercial lease.