Looking back on it, 1977 was a banner year for Punk. Albums by punk and punk-adjacent groups like the Sex Pistols, The Jam, Dead Boys, Ramones, The Clash, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Wire, Talking Heads and Television all had fresh vinyl in the racks. Having a record in the stores, of course, didn’t mean it was selling. For context, Debby Boone’s sappy ode to puppy love, “You Light Up My Life” was Billboard’s #1 song of the year and the Grammy’s were hosted by fading Silent Generation paleo-crooner Andy Williams.
But change was in the air. In June of 1977, Elvis took the stage for the last time at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, Indiana (and would leave this earthly building permanently a couple of months later) and in that same month, June 1977, right here in Denver, a fledgling indie record store called Wax Trax Records received its first city wide attention when long time Rocky Mountain News columnist Jackie Campbell featured an article on the store in the June 7th issue of the daily paper.
At that time Wax Trax was still in its original location on 14th and Ogden, and Jim Nash and Danni Flesher were the principal owners. Jackie gamely tries to capture some of the energy and excitement that was edging into Denver’s budding punk scene but the real focus is on the Wax Trax love and commitment to rock ‘n’ roll from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. If it was rock, Wax Trax knew it, loved it, had it.
Jackie refers to the Wax Trax of that day, now nearly a half century ago, as a nostalgia record store. And, sure, ‘Oldies’ were already a cultural phenomenon (American Graffiti had slid into the theaters a few years earlier in 1973), radio mainstay and record collectors obsession–but the heart of the store and the music that mattered was always harder, more dangerous, riskier than mere nostalgia. Gene Vincent and Johnny Rotten were birds of a feather – and you wouldn’t leave your daughter alone with either of them.
Rock ‘n’ rollers get old. Rock ‘n’ roll itself is eternally young, loud and snotty.
WAX TRAX RECORD STORE EXPERIMENTS WITH PUNK ROCK
By JACKIE CAMPBELL
(Originally printed in June 7, 1977 issue of the Rocky Mountain News)
A car was parked under the streetlamp at E. 14th Avenue and Ogden Street with all four doors open and the stereo blasting into the night air. It could have been Flatbush or South Philly, but it was Denver’s Capitol Hill. About 20 people stood or sprawled on the sidewalk by the car. They were young and absorbed in just hanging around in the noise and litter and the general air of boredom.
It was 10 p.m. and they were waiting for the arrival of a punk rock group called the Nerves from Los Angeles. The police had stopped by earlier and frowned at the noise level as a Denver band called the Ravers pounded out loud rock in a dance hall upstairs.
The street corner people were made up from some of the clientele of a little store called Wax Trax next to the entrance to the dance hall. And the dance that night was a promotional toe-in-the-water for Jim Nash, one of the owners of the Wax Trax nostalgia record store.
Nash calls it the “new wave,” the music press calls it punk rock. It’s a safety pin through the cheek and a stick in the eye to the big recording companies who thought they had co-opted the Aquarian Age with record contracts.
A single 45 record in the glass case at Wax Trax is priced at $75. It has the name of British rocker Jimmy Paige on the label and predates Paige’s Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds associations. A sun label 45 record of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” or “Milk Cow Boogie” by Elvis Presley would be tagged at $300, although Wax Trax doesn’t have a copy of either at the moment, Nash says.
Nash’s store is about as big as an old time candy store and its contents are mouth-watering if your musical taste goes back to any year since 1950.
“WE DON’T GO-BACK into the 1940s because that gets into the big band era,” Nash says. “We also keep out of middle-of-the- road music. But we have people coming in here for country, rhythm and blues and ‘fifties rock and roll. Almost everybody has a stack of old records in their attic. All kinds of people come in and sell them to us – kids, housewives. I keep a card index of requests. When a record comes in and I give the person a call after six months they’re usually surprised and really appreciative. And we always have a stock of guaranteed, secondhand LP albums at $2 apiece.”
Wax Trax has all the other exotica of record collecting like posters and back issues of music magazines and point-of-sale art. Some of the most rare and out-of-print albums are sealed in clear vinyl and displayed on a wall behind the cash register.
Right now a new album of an old bootleg Rolling Stones tape with a four-letter word title is selling fast.
And since the collecting bug usually bites deep, no scrap of music memorabilia is too trifling. There are Beatle souvenirs, back issues of Melody Maker, concert programs and rock encyclopedias.
The Wax Trax business card lists Jim’s brother Tom Nash, Dannie Flesher and Mike Smyth as owners along with Jim. They are all from Kansas and they can tell you as though it were yesterday about the first Yardbirds concert they saw in Topeka or the 1968 Kinks appearance in Kansas City.
It was Jim who organized the dance in the hall up over the store. “The concert promoters like Barry Fey are concentrating on sure bets. We wanted to bring in some new bands and some local bands and open things up.” Since that dance a couple of weeks ago, he says, there’s been increased activity in the shop and a lot of interest in the new wave.
“RICK (Editor’s Note: this should be Roky) ERICKSON IS ONE of them. He was with a 1960s group called the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Gene Vincent is popular all over again. In England they’re willing to do a small pressing of a record, maybe two to five thousand. United Artists over there has just issued an Eddie Cochran interview, with music, done with a Denver disc jockey at the Albany Hotel in 1957. It’s an LP called ‘On the Air.’
“The big record companies in the United States are probably not going to press fewer than 50,000 to 100,000 copies of anything. In France and Holland and Germany there are companies who issue small pressings, just like there were here in the 1950s.”
The interest in old and new punk rock and the new wave of rockers came out of Europe and England. “Great Britain is a small place, really,” Jim Nash points out. “There’s a young generation with nothing to rebel against and no future that they can see. It’s different from the old hippie mentality or the glitter rock of a few years back. They are into punk rockers like the Sex Pistols or Blondie and they have picked up on some of the bands that got lost in the 1960s.
“CBGB’S, a New York punk rock club, issued a record on their own label and it took off in sales. A big record company has since bought it up,” he says.
The kids on the street corner that night had seen Jim Nash “Nerves and Ravers” flyers tacked up on poles and trees all over town and when The Nerves were two hours late showing up it put a fine edge of alienation on the evening. The punk rock fans wore scuffed leather and an air of world weariness. There were Freddy Mercury look-alikes and thin Lou Reed faces.
When the Nerves started playing about 11 p.m. the members of the band came on wearing the neat suits and the ’60s haircuts of the four mop-tops from Liverpool.
If it were easy to pin down the new wave or punk rock phenomenon, it would probably already have lost its appeal for its fans. Last month Women’s Wear Daily had a full page of English punk chic with photos of British kids wearing lips painted purple and hair dyed orange and clothes torn and ripped and held together with pins and chains.
SOME OF THEM WORE bondage clothing, trimmed with the buckles and straps from straight jackets. The British punk rocker Sex Pistols were such an outrage on the BBC that their record company reportedly dropped them. As Jim Nash points out, it’s an unfocused rebellion.
It’s an unfocused audience as well here in Denver. But they know what they want musically and they find it at Wax Trax. According to Nash there’s a very popular nostalgia record shop in Los Angeles and one in London called Rock On. He made a trip to London recently and brought back some of the small-label records with him.
Wax Trax will be moving in a few weeks to a new location at E. 14th Avenue (Editor’s note: This should say 13th Avenue) and Washington Street. At one point last fall Nash had considered moving his nostalgia record shop out of Denver. but he says he found a sudden surge of interest in the nostalgia record business that kept him here.
Right now the store is cluttered and cozy. It’s often crowded with people poring over the record bins and exchanging trivia. Jim cues up records on the stereo behind the counter and everybody stops to listen to a scrap of “New York Dolls” or “Pretty Things.”
More than just a business, Wax Trax seems to function as a warm haven in a cold plastic world.
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