While walking home to my Airbnb from the Record Store Day “Summer Camp” conference this week in New Orleans, I got a taste of the southern city’s slower pace, and the beauty of its slow decay in the face of relentless humidity and tropical storms. I got absorbed into the big leafy butter burs, elephant ears, and giant agaves while avoiding potholes in the sidewalk, and indulged my enduring love of the ubiquitous Creole cottages of the neighborhoods sprawled along the Mississippi, away from the cacophonous (and crazy touristy) French Quarter where the conference is held.
Despite the conference I came down for, the walks between my rental and the conference hotel are what grabbed my mind more. The mumbles of the older fellas sitting on chairs outside their favorite watering holes slowed my roll and sidetracked my mind into more existential thoughts than what the next George Harrison re-issue might be.
The speed of things down there is a good contrast to my normal life. Becoming the second-generation steward of a store that so many people depend on as a representation of Denver is both humbling and stressful. Many of my stratagems are to stave off the decay of our building, or to ward against the possibility of external forces that may overcome our walls (like Lake Pontchartrain continuously threatens to do to folks down here), or to simply put a burnish on all of the store’s best aspects, many of them as charming in their decay as a New Orleans side street, railroad shack, or patch of muti-colored mold.
New Orleans at a side glance is eerily similar to the basement at Wax Trax, falling apart in some places but also full of gems (maybe).
What this city’s pace and lovely decay also reminds me of is that I’m King of Nuthin. Actually a patron of Markey’s Bar in the Bywater was loudly berating an ex-boss of his in precisely that way…
“Who are you man? You’re the king of nuthin! Just relax man,” he said to his tipsy pals as I sat sipping on a cool beer on a surprisingly not-as-hot-as-yesterday July night. That could easily be said of me, I thought. I’m an actor in a field of unpredictable forces, and though I may improve things here and there, I am basically the King of Nuthin. In little ways like this, the trip was a good reminder that it is often better to influence things in small and gentle ways that might even go unnoticed rather than run headlong against any force that may be obstructing your path. “Be like Water,” as Bruce Lee put it.
It’s a hard lesson to remember sometimes, particularly when all of our excellent staff and a handful of my family members depend on the store for their survival. I can get pretty fixated on a goal when all that’s resting on my shoulders.
One of those goals has been chasing better prices on new records and there’s one distributor (SONY) who won’t give us access no matter how nice we are, how much history in the biz we can cite, or even how much we buy. But rather than to continue banging my head on that firmly closed door, we went to New Orleans this year to try and work through the distributors and the labels to get to the artists, and to bring those artists closer to you, our customers. More specifically, we’re trying to get in the artist’s ear to get them to come to the store for more great in-store events. Many of these events really brighten up the shop and remind us what it’s all about.
Our obsession with doing more in-stores is also a restoration project, to get back to the glory days of the shop that took place in the 1980s and 90s, when bands like The Violent Femmes, Husker Du, The Bangles, and X all came through and either signed autographs or strummed their guitars at the counter to packed crowds of kids. (Check out the new postcards on display at our Capitol Hill store to see some photos of these great moments).
Some of you may have already recognized that the store is hosting more of these lately. In addition to hosting a local DJ once a month at 13th and at Broadway, we had an incredible in-store performance from Orion Sun in May, Denver’s Dead Pioneers signed records for fans back in April, and just last week, CAAMP taught a packed shop how to play a song on their own banjos/guitars. Not to mention Wax Trax Broadway Bazaar’s parking lot hosted about a dozen bands last weekend as part of a UMS sideshow called Secret Garden.
We love these kinds of experiences and we love seeing the store packed with ecstatic people. So we’re looking to do as much of this as we can without pissing off the neighbors (too much). And also, even more than trying to sell records, pay our staff a fair wage, and stash cash for future potential disasters, pandemics, freaking tariffs, and who-knows-what that could threaten the store. These kinds of events are a big part of what really defines the store as a great place, and a place that will be remembered. Which is all we can really ask for after we die, as that same patron at Markey’s Bar coincidently put it:
“All you can ask for is that they will say ‘That guy was good. He told some good stories.’”
“Oh yeah, I was in the merchant marine for five months and they gave me a free burial at sea,” one of his pals said, segueing awkwardly. But that is a different story.
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