by John Demont
“Hey, Jim, it’s Stu. I’ve got the new Bat for Lashes … thirty-four ninety-nine … Well, it’s a double album.” … “Hello, is Shawn there?” … “Is Mark there?” … “Hey, Scott, it’s Stu at the Vinyl Diner. The new Swans has come in and you can come pick it up.” … “Hey, Josh, it’s the Vinyl Diner calling. Bonnie Prince Billy has come in and you can pick it up.” … “Hey, Garnet, it’s the Vinyl Diner calling. Yeah, hey, the Buddy Guy album Skin Deep came in and you can pick it up.”
Stu speaks softly at about a hundred-words-a-minute pace. If customers don’t pick it up their orders in two or three weeks, he calls again. If they haven’t shown up in another two or three weeks, he puts the album out on the racks for sale—as per the warning on the wall. That happens, he says, about 4 percent of the time. It’s such a low number because his people have true commitment. They have staying power. They may also live alone in their parents’ basements.
Stu really has no idea how many of them—Saskatoon’s vinyl-buying public—there are. He can, however, pinpoint the shop’s primary demographic, ages fifteen to forty, and the secondary market, the crowd from forty to sixty-five. “Males outnumber females at least two to one when it comes to record buying,” he says. I’m not remotely surprised. No one, at least based on my perfunctory research, is quite sure why. But the obsessive need to collect—whether beer cans, porn or Pez containers—simply seems stronger among males. Interestingly, he says, CDs are more evenly split between males and females, at least in their store.” As a general rule, single people buy far more music than married folk do, and married folk who have eschewed the joys of parenthood buy more than those with kids. “When kids come along, priorities change. Sometimes after the kids grow up the parents become kids again.”
I look around. At precisely 1:30 p.m. there are six customers in the shop, five of them guys. I could go ask them what their stories are. But I’ve had three hours’ sleep in the past thirty-six. So I just sink into the sofa, as some kind of weird but enticing rendition of an old Stephen Foster minstrel tune imposes a narrative. I imagine the silver-maned guy with the down vest flipping one-handed through a bin, looking for a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon that will somehow revive memories of a girl, a summer night and a lime-green Ford Pinto cruising Main Street somewhere. It’s entirely conceivable that the poppy-eyed fellow in the toque and leather jacket who took the stairs two at a time and headed with laser focus for the stacks at the back of the shop is a medical resident who just finished an ER shift in the province where medicare began. Eyes closed, earphones clamped to his head, he’s sampling something on a turntable. Swaying, grooving, he likes, I imagine, British Wave. But what he loves in my little story is vinyl.
I’ve done my research. I know that LP sales, which peaked in this country in 1977, declined in the 1980s and then were virtually obliterated by the advent of CDs. (Which have since been replaced by MP3 players and digital downloads.) To put things in context, American record stores saw sales slump by 76 percent from 2000 to 2010, a period during which the number of record-selling establishments fell by 77 percent. We’ve no reason to think the trend in Canada is any different. More than ever, vinyl is for the aficionados, the artists who like to use actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments, the listeners who want something more than computer-generated sounds. In the long run, that may be its salvation. By the early 2010s, vinyl was experiencing a mini-revival thanks mainly to those young hipsters. To Stu and Dayna, it makes perfect sense.
Neither is a vinyl purist. They love their iPods and dig their CDs. It’s just that they adore their vinyl records. “For starters, I like the size of them. Thirteen inches by thirteen inches is a much nicer size for looking at artwork and reading liner notes than five inches by five inches, which is what CDs are,” Stu says. “Imagine if all books came in a CD size … that would suck!” Like Dayna, who “loves the crackle and pops vinyl makes and the warmer, less sterile, tones compared with CDs,” Stu believes that a properly pressed piece of vinyl in nice condition has a “warmth” or “presence” or something harder to pin down that makes it sound superior to a CD.
He even thinks the ritual of playing a record—removing it from the jacket, taking it out from the inner sleeve, raising it to the light for appraisal, brushing the dust off and flipping it at the end of a side—lends itself to a more involved listening experience. “There’s a nostalgic feeling about playing vinyl,” he says. “It has a warm and fuzzy association for me.”
For Dayna too: “One of our favourite things to do when it is a cold winter night is to go through our vinyl, drink some wine and listen to one record that leads to a discussion about another. Pretty soon Stu and I are surrounded by vinyl, and it is three or four in the morning.”
CUSTOMERS come and go. Stu knows most of them by name. A woman named Susan walks over to the cash, lugging some Joy Division along with other stuff. Stu writes up a receipt for $69.54. When a male with the patchy facial hair of an indie music lover quips, “How do you feel about losing your title”—a reference to the latest ratings in the city’s alternative weekly for Best Vinyl Store—Stu laughs and says, “That will be $12.48.” A well-dressed stranger comes in the door looking for help with the turntable she recently bought for her daughter. Luckily, the shop has two record players. So does Stu and Dayna’s home. “It’s always good to have a spare,” he tells her. He fiddles around for a few minutes. Then there is sound.
Some people wave and head for the stacks. Others plop down on the couch, now that I’ve vacated it to talk music. Stu is happy to oblige. He can also gab knowledgeably about the Detroit Lions and the Toronto Blue Jays. (“The only way life could be better,” he tells me at one point, “is if I owned a baseball team as well as a record shop.”) He’s fond of the graphic novels of Seth and Chester Brown. He admires the detective novels of George Pelecanos, who gets props for his ability to “get it totally right about music.”
Conversation with him does tend to come back to that subject. Like any self-respecting music nerd, he’s got his list of favourite artists—in order: The Replacements, Neil Young, Tom Waits, The Ramones and R.E.M.—and desert island discs: Pleased to Meet Me by The Replacements, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Some Girls by the Stones, Loaded courtesy of The Velvet Underground and The Kinks’ Something Else. (So, of course, does Dayna. The amount of crossover underscores how simpatico their tastes really are. Her most-wanted artists in order of preference are Elvis Costello, The Replacements, Talking Heads, The Ramones and Nick Lowe. The albums she could not do without are Life’s Rich Pageant (R.E.M.), Tim (The Replacements), London Calling (The Clash), Dear Catastrophe Waitress (Belle and Sebastian), and Get Happy (Elvis Costello).
“Going to see Neil?” a young guy asks Stu. He and Dayna are. They go to see a lot of music, in Saskatoon and in more promising venues like Austin, Texas. The big touring acts. Also the locals they like to support by selling their discs on consignment and by giving them shelf space. While I’m lingering near the front, a smallish rocker in a hoodie enters. He’s got what to me sounds like a crazy proposal: he wants to pre-sell his next CD to the Vinyl Diner and the smattering of other shops in the city. Then, when it’s made, he’ll hand-deliver it to them. By bicycle.
Stu listens patiently without a trace of judgment in his face or posture. After the guy has said his piece and left, Stu steps out from behind the cash to rearrange the stacks, flipping idly through the merchandise as he goes. There are dollar records and others for fifty cents each. He’s got the usual categories—country, jazz, soul and rock ’n’ roll, the clientele being primarily a rock ’n’ roll crowd—and more esoteric fare like doo-wop. Spaces on the wall racks indicate pilferage. Occasionally Stu catches someone shoplifting. He doesn’t call Saskatoon’s finest. He just asks for the merchandise back and tells them not to bother coming back. “I fire them as a customer” is how he puts it. Then he returns to the front of the store and a stack of discs, which he keeps around for when things are a little q
uiet.
Stu reaches down, picks up an album—George Thorogood and the Destroyers—and pulls out the disc with his right hand. He looks at one side in search of nicks and scratches, flips it over and eyes the other. If everything looks okay, he puts it down on the glass. Stu picks up a plastic bottle of isopropyl mixed with sterile distilled water, gives a barely perceptible shake, then lays a little circle of liquid on the vinyl like a Michelin chef doling out raspberry coulis. He picks up a soft rag, wraps it around his hand and begins cleaning the surface in a gentle counter-clockwise motion. Trouble spots receive particular attention. Then he flips it over and repeats the procedure on the other side.
When Stu is satisfied with the record, he holds it up to examine his handiwork. He spins it in his hands to consider the other side, blows off something, then flips it back for one last look. Stu lays the record down. He picks up the cover, opens it and slides the vinyl back in. He runs a hand over one side of the cover and then the other to ensure that everything is smooth inside. If the record is well enough preserved or widely enough sought, it goes in one of the cellophane sleeves he buys a thousand at a time. Then he affixes a sticker, on which he writes a price with a Sharpie.
“It’s a formula,” he says of the pricing. “An X markup, but I’d rather keep that to myself. The price depends upon how common the record is, how much demand there is for it and what kind of shape it’s in.” I ask him what best stands the test of time. “Led Zeppelin. They just transcend every new generation. I’m all out now, but once I get more they’ll disappear as fast as I get them.” Aerosmith “sells like Bieber.” Neil Young and Leonard Cohen are also hard to keep in. Ditto Saskatoon’s own Joni Mitchell (“If I get a copy of Blue, it will move right away.”) and contemporary acts that could already be history as you read this.
Two women in their twenties appear. “You have the new Mumford and Sons?” The phone rings: a woman named Diane asking if the new Mother Mother has arrived. “Okay, I’ll give you a call when it’s in,” Stu says, hanging up. A fidgety dude in a hunting jacket sticks his head in and asks if Stu is still buying records. “It depends,” Stu says with a half smile. Encouraged, the guy hustles off. Stu knows enough not to get his hopes up. “People get rid of all their records because they’re not into them anymore. They’re broke or divorced. Or somebody is dead and there’s an estate sale.”
We’ve all seen those forlorn collections. “Trash, curb fruit, the bitter residue of yard sales,” novelist Michael Chabon calls them. “Orphaned record libraries called out constantly to the partners from whatever fate had abandoned them.” Stu collects lots of genres, so every disc calls out to him, promising something potentially great. He and Dayna scour the Internet and eBay. After work they go over to people’s homes to look at old collections or they prowl defunct record shops to check out inventories.
Stu has bought collections of a thousand, even two thousand records. Once a guy showed up with a bag of records that Stu bought cheap. Among the dross was a copy of Meet the Residents, which, he tells me, was a parody of Meet the Beatles! by an avant-garde group called The Residents. Stu sold it on the Net for four hundred dollars, his biggest haul ever. Usually, though, the treasure hunting doesn’t pan out that way. “I try to ask people quietly over the phone, do you have any Led Zeppelin, any Hendrix, any Stones. If they’re from the eighties, any R.E.M., Clash or Joy Division. If they do, I’ll know that there’s probably some good stuff. If they say, ‘I’ve got everything,’ usually that means they’ve got nothing.”
The guy returns, breathing rapidly from climbing the stairs, lays the first box on the floor with a thunk and says, “It’s just been lying around the house. But I think there’s some good stuff.” I think I see Stu’s shoulders sag a little at these words. However, the first few the guy pulls out—Waylon Jennings, ZZ Top, Nancy Sinatra—aren’t a total writeoff, so Stu starts the appraising and inventorying.
Since this looks like real work, I stroll around and peruse the stacks. There’s a pattern. Up front: the cool stuff like Son House, Uncle Tupelo, The White Stripes and The Miles Davis Quintet, along with the local heroes—the merchandise surest to appeal to the customers of a store like this. There’s also rare material: the Rolling Stones’ homage to the Ingmar Bergman movie Through a Glass Darkly in a cool die-cut album cover, the score to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s crazy El Topo, the complete Jack Kerouac collection, the Beach Boys’ Smile sessions.
The merchandise is predictably low on lame-ass pop. It’s sweet to see some Gil Scott-Heron (Midnight Band) for $12.75 along with Canned Heat (Cook Book) and The Zombies (Best Of)—both for $15, which I guess makes them marginally more valuable than Jimmy Smith (Paid in Full) and Blues Magoos (Psychedelic Lollipop), both going for a penny less. The free market is clearly doing its thing, in my opinion, if no work by Elton John fetches more than $10, the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You goes for $4.25 and Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty a mere $2.25. On the other hand, the Beatles’ Help! is $30 and a fine copy of The Clash’s big deal London Calling gets $31.99.
I wander around, rifling through racks until some piece of cover art, or a nifty phrase in a liner note stills, for a moment, my undiagnosed ADD. The most expensive piece of vinyl I find in my quick perusal is South Saturn Delta by Jimi Hendrix at $43.99. I am not fit to judge whether Dock Boggs’s When My Worldly Trails Are Over is worth $22.99, I Want to Hold Your Hand by The Buggs deserves to fetch $20 or the untitled album by “America’s Famous Song Stylists” The Diamonds is a steal at $30. But when I go in search of some of my favourite soul and R and B recordings—Curtis Mayfield’s Back to the World for $18.99 and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for three bucks less—the pricing seems dead-on.
Stu and his man settle up. Rockabilly courtesy of Wanda Jackson, who once apparently dated Elvis Presley but was now, incredibly, back on the comeback trail, fills the high corners of the room. Closing time looms. Dayna’s on her way. The Vinyl Diner—which has had twelve paying customers, which Stu calls “a little slow for a Thursday”—is empty except for a tired man far from home, momentarily regretting his vocation, and a tall, unhurried guy who plainly does not. “Owning your own business means the work doesn’t end when the door closes,” Stu says. “This just happens to be work that I like. I never don’t want to come in.”
He says these words, with their stripped-down John Lee Hooker splendour, on an evening when it must be a hundred below zero outside, in this shop celebrating bygone glories, where the classic albums still live. He understands that the world of listening to music has forever changed, and that on this winter night many people who love a good tune will be hunkering down with their iTunes list. For all he knows, when I leave here, I will turn up my collar against the cold, put the ear buds attached to my MP3 player into my ears and disappear into the driving snow.
But Stu says retail is forever, and that there will always be a need for us to go and interact with a human being when buying the things that make life worth living. That may be just the opinion of a man who likes the look and heft of album covers and dreams of what they hold inside. It could be the wistful hope of a man who has found a way to spend his days doing exactly what he wants in the company of the things and the woman he loves. Sitting nearly horizontal on his sofa again, I really cannot say.
Yet I do know this: moments ago I held a cardboard sleeve in my hands. The dudes on the cover, lapels wide enough to land a Sea King helicopter, are baaaaaaad. Booker T. Jones and the MG’s, crossing a tired-looking stretch of Memphis road in single file. The album, McLemore Avenue, is named after where their recording studio was located, in the same way that the Beatles named Abbey Road after EMI’s address in London. I flipped it over and ran a finger down the back. It was, naturally, a bunch of instrumental Beatles covers. No sign anywhere of the tunes I bought for my best buddy at age twelve. He’s dead now anyway. But I swore for a second I could see him. I could hear that Hammond organ build.
CHAPTER
FIVE
EVE
RY JESELLY ONE OF THEM
IT’S the bleak January of 2010, and in the town of Montague, Prince Edward Island, a middle-aged man wrapped in a blue sweater and sipping a medium Tim Hortons black coffee folds his long body into an office chair. Paul MacNeill’s fingers dart across the keys of his MacBook Pro. After a burst of frenzied typing he pauses, thin wrists resting on his cluttered desk, broad Hebridean head angled toward the screen. He has things on his mind.
A day earlier the premier of this tiny province shuffled his Lilliputian cabinet, dumping the washouts, shifting the underperformers and axing a whole government department. Somehow the rest of Canada went on with life. In Prince Edward Island, though, the very ground tilted. The smallest province in Canada is also the most political. One anecdote, to me, illustrates this fact: in 2003, Hurricane Juan, a category 2 hurricane, swept through Prince Edward Island, leaving two-thirds of its households without power. The next day 83 percent of the province’s eligible voters still managed to cast a ballot in the provincial election. Many of them did so by candlelight.
So yes, you could say that elections are serious business in a province when a couple of dozen votes here or there can swing an entire election. Politics does matter on an island where to the victors customarily go the good jobs, nice sinecures and other assorted spoils. And so—as he has done 670 or so times since 1997—the publisher of the weekly Eastern Graphic lifts his hands from his desk and types the introduction to his column:
Robert Vessey was barely sworn in as PEI’s Minister of Tourism and Culture when he signaled he has no intention of making long needed changes to actually increase the level of service offered tourists to the Island.
