Platinum Tour

Flashing back (again) on my first visit to a used record store

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

I originally had something else planned for today. But when

Brad Kyle

of Front Row & Backstage and

PeDupre

of The Twelve Inch teamed up last week for an awesome and edifying look at underrated seventies disco maven Michael Zager, it inspired me to re-run this piece that I wrote about a year and a half ago.

As mentioned back when I first launched Jagged Time Lapse, one of my original intentions with this Substack was to motivate me to get cracking on said memoir — and to share bits of it with my paid subscribers whenever a chapter (like this one) feels ready for an audience.

I don’t yet have a working title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence — a period of my life which coincided with some of the greatest music ever heard on AM (and FM) radio, as well as some of the absolute worst.

The chapters I’ve completed for the book (like the one about why Nigel Olsson’s “Dancing Shoes” makes me think of Mormons and Chief Dan George, or the one about or the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high, or the one about how a Bee Gees B-side helped me nab a starting position on my Little League baseball team) have mostly only been available to my paid subscribers, a policy I will largely continue with going forward. (Gotta serve up something special for the paying customers, doncha know?)

But I also really loved reading this particular chapter again, and I’m hoping that making it available for all readers just might tempt a few more of you to throw five bucks a month (or fifty bucks a year) into the JTL tip jar. Paid subscribers also get full access to the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which also contains a number of other chapters from this memoir-in-progress, other exclusive “content” on a wide variety of music-related subjects, all 11 full episodes of my CROSSED CHANNELS podcast with

Tony Fletcher

, and basically all the Dan Epstein writing you can handle — none of which, I hasten to add, is ever generated by ChatGPT or in any way assisted by any kind of AI bullshit. It’s the real deal here, baby, and always will be…

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“Are you sure this is legal?” I asked Devin as we walked east on Melrose. It was the middle of May 1979, just a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday.

Devin looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown a second head. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t know, man — it just seems kinda weird to me that you can just go out and buy used records. Like, don’t the record companies get mad?”

“Who cares if they get mad?” he laughed. “I buy most of my albums at this place. It’s way cheaper, and sometimes they even have records you can’t find at Tower.”

We arrived at our destination — Rene’s All Ears Records, on the corner of Melrose and Spaulding, right across the street from L.A.’s Fairfax High School. The outside of the shop looked funky and rundown, a far cry aesthetically and geographically from the glitzy retail beacon that was Tower Records on Sunset. “Welp, no turning back now,” I thought to myself. “I just hope we don’t get in trouble for this…”

I don’t know exactly what I expected the place to be — a den of iniquity? A “fence” for stolen goods like the ones I’d seen on Baretta and other TV detective/cop shows? But once we were inside the store, Rene’s mostly just reminded me of Bonzo Dog Records, a University of Michigan-adjacent establishment I’d ventured into a few times with friends back in Ann Arbor. The walls were haphazardly papered with posters, the record bins were constructed from raw, unpainted wood, and the general vibe was relaxed and casual in that seventies L.A. post-hippie way. There were no “pushers” bullying me into buying used records, no undercover cops lying in wait to arrest me for bringing a promotional LP stamped “Not For Sale” up to the register. There was only a hairy twenty-something dude lounging behind the counter, idly flipping through a magazine while spinning Sheik Yerbuti, the latest album from Frank Zappa. It was just… a record store. Huh.

However, unlike at Tower and other stores that dealt in new, sealed product, divider cards with artist names on them were few and far between at Rene’s, unless it was an artist who had a ton of releases — for instance, they must have had about 30 Zappa LPs in his section. This meant it was kind of a free-for-all under each letter of the alphabet, and I wasn’t exactly sure where to start. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I headed for the “C” bin, in hopes of finding Commodores Live!, a record I’d put on my birthday gift wish-list but hadn’t received. (I had received the Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974-1978, both Boston albums and Chic’s “I Want Your Love” 45, though, so it’s not like I was complaining.) And that’s when I saw it.

Over the next forty-plus years, I would experience countless “Holy shit — I can’t believe I actually found this!” moments in used record stores around the world, but this was the very first time I ever felt that particular life-affirming surge of excitement coursing through my system. Why was I so stoked to find this promo-only album that featured six older Commodores hits on one side and four tracks from 1978’s Natural High on the flip? Let me try to explain…

During the couple of months I’d spent with my mom in L.A. during the summer of ‘78, I’d listened almost religiously to KRLA. The station’s mixture of oldies with pop hits of the day was completely intoxicating to me — hearing Buddy Holly’s “Maybe Baby” and The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” mixed in with Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City” and “Close the Door” by Teddy Pendergrass was my version of AM radio heaven, and I simply couldn’t get enough of it. But my favorite thing about KRLA that summer was “You Be the DJ,” their evening call-in request program where listeners would phone in a song request and get to set it up on the air as if they were actually there at the station and about to drop the needle on the wax.

One evening that summer, I heard the station announce that all “You Be the DJ” callers that night would receive a free copy of The Commodores’ Platinum Tour album — “A record not sold in stores!” they promised. I loved the handful of songs I knew by the band (“Three Times a Lady” was a huge hit that summer), and I’d been wanting to call in with a request, anyway… so now it was on. I went into my Aunt Geri’s room. where our apartment’s extra phone extension was, and began frantically dialing the station.

After about 45 minutes of trying — and after my finger had been worn completely raw by the rotary dial — I finally got through to the station. The person who picked up asked me what song I wanted to introduce, and I told him “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry, a favorite of mine from a few summers previous. He then explained that I would be recording my dedication, rather than doing it live, which was cool because that meant I could listen back to it when it went out over the air in an hour or so. Once I got the go-ahead to start recording, I gave it my pre-teen Wolfman Jack best, introducing myself as “Lil’ Dan Epstein” and growling that I was dedicating the song to “all the FUNKY people out there in KRLA land”. The guy on the other end of the line, who seemed mildly amused/taken aback by how hard I went for it, then asked me for my mailing address “so we can send you the record”.

Score! Having bought my very first LP — a Beach Boys greatest hits collection — just a few weeks earlier, I was now about to be the proud owner of two albums!

Well… sort of.

When the tell-tale cardboard mailer arrived a few days later, I tore it open with excitement… only to find the soundtrack from that summer’s Faye Dunaway dud Eyes of Laura Mars inside. I was completely crestfallen. Why hadn’t they sent me the Commodores record?

“Call ‘em up and ask ‘em to send you one,” my Uncle John suggested. “It’s not like they pay for those records, anyway.”

I knew he was right, but I was also pretty sure they would just laugh at me at the station if I called up demanding a different prize. And not really being the confrontational type, I just decided to keep the album and see if maybe I’d enjoy it after all.

This would be the first time I ever tried to convince myself to “like” an album, though it sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. After about two spins, though, I had to admit defeat — aside from Michael Zager Band’s “Let’s All Chant” (which I thought was kind of a jam) and a weird medley of Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker” and KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty” (both of which I would have far preferred in their unabridged forms) the record was all boring instrumental music, dialogue from a film I didn’t care about, and Barbra Streisand’s shrieking theme song. Plus, I was kind of embarrassed and weirded out by the sub-Helmut Newton photos in the album’s gatefold; though I was old enough to dig photos of half-undressed women, there was something about the studied “decadence” of these models, their grim expressions and their awkward poses that was a complete turn-off for me. I hid the album away somewhere in my aunt’s record collection, and moved on.

It was nearly a year later that I suddenly came face-to-face with Platinum Tour in the bin at Rene’s. My desire to possess this holy grail completely overcame whatever squeamishness I had about buying a used record, and I quite happily plunked down five dollars of my leftover birthday money for the album. I also threw down another four for a used copy of Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits; if I was grilled about the legality of my purchases when I got home, I figured, that record might at least serve as a distraction and/or justification to my household full of Linda fans. I can’t remember what Devin bought, but I do remember us pooling our leftover change for some French fries and cokes at the Jack in the Box on Fairfax on our way home.

Once I got back to my family’s house, I pulled out my Commodores prize to play it and was surprised and stoked to discover that it had been pressed on “platinum” colored vinyl! Actually, it was more like “model battleship grey,” but I still thought it was cool as hell, having never seen a vinyl record that wasn’t black before. The album’s contents were even cooler, especially the songs on Side One. I already knew and loved “Easy” and “Brick House,” but the side’s other tracks were new to me, and just as delightful. I was especially taken with the funky instrumental jam “Machine Gun,” which sounded more like cop show music than anything I’d previously heard by the band, and by the uplifting ballad “Sweet Love”.

Along with its soaring harmonies and spacey synth squiggles, there was a warmth and positivity to the latter song that I really responded to. I remember being especially moved by the lines, “I wish the world had all happy people/Then there’d be no more wishing to do.” Which on the one hand seemed an obvious point; but on the other, I did sincerely wish happiness on everyone that I knew. Why not extend that wish to the entire world?

As it turned out, no one in my family seemed particularly bothered by my walk on the wild side to a used record store. And while visits to Tower Sunset would continue to thrill me for decades to come — especially the nighttime ones, which always involved driving up and down Sunset and looking at the glowing billboards — used record stores would increasingly become the retail spaces where I felt most at home. And much to my great relief, I still haven’t been arrested for shopping at one.

(Click HERE if the embedded video doesn’t work for you.)

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