Record Store Gems

Some famous customers I actually enjoyed waiting upon

Given how well my Record Store Chafes post was received — and given that I would generally rather put positive stuff out into this oft-troubling world than weigh it down with my complaints — I thought that piece deserved to be balanced out with some fonder memories from my days as a record store clerk…

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First of all (and I think this holds true for the majority of people who have held down record store gigs at one time or another), I had the immense pleasure of working — both at See Hear in Chicago and the Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood — alongside some truly fantastic folks, many of whom I proudly call friends to this day. There were also numerous regular customers that I was always happy to see (I’m still friendly with a few of those as well), as they were genuine music lovers and/or just cool people. As much of a music snob as I was in those days, I’d still have cut you slack for buying just about any old hunk of shit if you happened to also be a nice person.

Now, if you’d have asked me for my opinion of the CD you were buying, I would probably have been pretty honest (albeit with some diplomatic wording) — but I would’ve also at least tried to alert you to a record in the same vein that I thought was much better. Unless it was part of a genre that I knew nothing at all about, in which case I took my cue from Ken, See Hear’s owner.

Despite the fact that he owned a record store and was behind its back counter nearly every day, Ken was not a music fan — “I just like the business,” he would tell people — so it was always fun to overhear the conversations that ensued whenever a customer asked his advice about a particular artist or title. My all-time favorite was when someone approached him holding two Zamfir CDs and wanted to know which one was better. “Well, I don’t really listen to pan flute per se,” he dodged, “But we sell a lot of the one in your right hand.” I loved how much heavy lifting the “per se” did — allowing him to remain sufficiently non-committal and non-judgmental while also pretending to be seriously considering the question — and I promptly adopted that somewhat effete adverb for use in similar situations.

Customer: Should I get Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares or this one by Trio Bulgarka?

Me: Well, I don’t really listen to Bulgarian vocal ensembles per se, but…

Among my favorite record store tales are memories of the handful of famous folks I waited on, at least the ones who were surprisingly cool and/or completely devoid of any star-trippiness. Friends of mine who worked at Tower Sunset in the 80s and 90s have some real-mindblowers along these lines, but I have four stories that immediately come to mind — two from my four years at See Hear and two from my six-month tenure at the Megastore.

Vernon Reid

I wasn’t at all surprised that the lead guitarist of Living Colour and co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition was cool, but I was very surprised to look up and see him strolling into See Hear on a dull weekday afternoon in November 1990. See Hear had a fairly limited selection of mostly major-label product, and it definitely wasn’t the sort of “destination record store” that famous musicians from out of town would typically make a beeline for. But Living Colour were in Chicago that week to perform a string of shows at Cabaret Metro, and Vernon had apparently found himself with some free time for record shopping.

Unfortunately for him he chose to visit See Hear, and thus I had the depressing task of informing Vernon Reid that no, we did not carry anything by Curtis Mayfield. I would have loved to engage him in some guitar talk, but I was so acutely embarrassed that we couldn’t hook him up with anything by one of the greatest songwriters ever to come out of the Windy City — who had grown up mere blocks away in the Cabrini-Green housing project — that I simply clammed up after recommending some other record stores he should try. He was very nice about it, though.

Pat DiNizio

While the frontman of The Smithereens would have been far less instantly recognizable to the casual music fan than Vernon Reid, I’d loved the band’s first two albums when I was in college and thus would have known that hat-and-chinfuzz combo anywhere. And unlike Reid, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see him show up in the See Hear aisles one day in 1992, since I’d heard he’d recently moved into one of Wicker Park’s grand old piles.

Pat was looking for some Mose Allison, whom we actually did carry, so I pointed him in the direction of the appropriate section. He quickly found the CD he was looking for, and brought it up to me at the counter. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the display case where several copies of “Uncle John,” the new single by my band Lava Sutra, sat waiting to be purchased. Like most “new” record retailers, See Hear had completely phased out vinyl several years earlier, but Ken kindly allowed me to keep some copies of my vinyl debut on the “impulse purchase” shelf. At four dollars a pop, they were easily the cheapest thing in the store.

I explained to Pat that this was my band’s first single, that we were influenced by The Kinks, AC/DC and Neil Diamond — references I knew he would appreciate — and I proudly showed him that the record’s labels were designed in homage to legendary 60s Chicago imprint Dunwich Records. “Sounds pretty cool,” he said. “But I don’t have a turntable.”

I just busted out laughing. “Oh come on, man,” I said. “I literally just read an interview where you were talking about your gigantic record collection. You expect me to believe that you don’t actually have a turntable to play it on?”

I’m not usually one for the hard-sell, but I knew I had the guy dead to rights. He knew it, too. “Fine, I’ll take one,” he chuckled, peeling an extra four dollars out of his wallet. Who knows if he ever played it — but at least I made a sale!

Bernadette Peters

I’d had a massive crush on Bernadette Peters since I was ten years old (it was probably her appearance in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie that did it for me). So when she appeared the front counter at the Virgin Megastore in early 1994, you’d best believe I dropped everything in order to be of assistance.

“Can you tell me where I can find The Band?” she asked. “It will be easier for me to just show you,” I replied in a rare moment of smooveness. When we (as in me, her, and some dude she was unfortunately accompanied by) arrived at The Band’s section, she asked which of their albums had “Whispering Pines” on it. I expertly plucked their self-titled second album from the bin and handed it to her as if I’d just picked a gorgeous rose in her honor.

“Isn’t it just the most beautiful song?” she asked me, looking directly into my eyes while visibly tearing up at the mere thought of Richard Manuel’s heartbreaking vocals, and tenderly clutching the CD to her bosom as if it were a favorite teddy bear. “Blabdbbldblybddbybdayb!” I replied idiotically, melting into a gibbering pool of garlic butter.

Bushwick Bill

Celebrities shopped at the Virgin Megastore all the time, and I had many completely unremarkable encounters there with folks like Ben Stiller, Judge Reinhold and Patrick Stewart. (Okay, Captain Picard was kind of a pain in the ass, insisting that we should be able to give him a gift card in pounds sterling instead of dollars, since Virgin was a British company. Alas, we couldn’t “make it so.”) But it wasn’t every day that everybody’s favorite one-eyed rapping dwarf made the scene…

“Where yo’ BONNIE RAITTS at?” he growled. I wasn’t sure which threw me more — that one-third of the Geto Boys was there in my store, or that he was actually asking me for Bonnie Raitt CDs. “Any album of hers in particular?” I asked, leading him over to her section. “Yeah, I want the one with ‘Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Talk About,’” he replied excitedly. “I want to sample that one for my next record!”

I thought it was a brilliant idea, actually, and told him so. Bill had been the center of controversy for some time, both due to the Geto Boys’ lurid lyrics and because his girlfriend had shot his eye out a couple of years before while he’d been raging on a winning combo of grain alcohol and PCP. Giving ‘em something to talk about was what Bushwick Bill did, you know?

Sadly, at least to the best of my knowledge, no Geto Boys or Bushwick Bill solo track has ever been released that’s employed a sample of “Something to Talk About”. Maybe it never came together, or maybe they couldn’t get clearance for it. Bill himself died in 2019, so there’s no way to ask him about it. But I can still hear what it might have sounded like in my head, and can hereby attest that it would have been damn cool.

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