By Working at a record store taught me a tragic truth; no matter how much you love your favorite albums, they’ll never be as popular as they deserve to be. Each month at Merry-Go-Round Magazine, I dust off some long-overlooked records, revisit my pretentious past, and explore how this music forever etched itself into my history. Eventually, all your memories get marked down and thrown into The Bargain Bin.
Act I: Brawlers
I attended my first mixed-gender party in eighth grade, which was also the first year of school where I felt like I had found “my people.” I’d like to call us the cool nerds, except that wasn’t really a thing then. In 1999—the year of our lord (Prince)—nerd shit hadn’t fully hit the mainstream consciousness. It wasn’t exactly cool—jocks still gave nerds wedgies, theories had yet to be Big Banged (Thursdays at 8/7c on CBS), and I got picked on for liking STAR WARS, and not because THE PHANTOM MENACE sucked. These cool kids all played instruments in the school band, though more importantly to me, they loved bands somewhat adjacent to what I liked. I finally had friends who appreciated a weird mixtape handed off in the hallways between Social Studies and English Lit. They were my people, or a close enough approximation.
At this party, some less-nerdy attendees convinced everyone to sit in a circle to play Spin the Bottle, a teenaged pop culture relic straight out of an episode of SAVED BY THE BELL. I hung outside the circle with a few others who were too nervous or uncomfortable with letting an empty Gatorade bottle decide their fate on which random classmate they’d have to lock lips with. I was a romantic, imagining my first kiss would happen “at the right time” with “someone I truly loved.”
Awkward moments like this come straight out of the movies, and I wanted no part of some weird teen movie fantasy. I snuck off to check my email on Laura’s family’s computer to avoid all of it. I typed out an email to my uncle asking for some music recommendations. My uncles have always been an incredible source of life-changing music. I would parasitically absorb songs from the mixtapes they’d play in the car. The Cure, R.E.M., Pixies, Billy Bragg, They Might Be Giants, Ben Folds Five, Soul Coughing… I devoured them and made them my entire reason for living.
It wasn’t long before the disembodied voice of America Online shouted, “YOU’VE GOT MAIL” out of tiny speakers on either side of the monitor:
You should track down a copy of Tom Waits’ RAIN DOGS. It’s a creepy, beautiful album by a guy whose voice sounds like he gargles gravel every morning. Enjoy!
I logged out, grabbed a Mountain Dew from the fridge in Laura’s kitchen, and wandered outside to look for my friend Shellie. She was easy to spot even at night; her frizzy hair gave her a distinct profile lit only by the backyard porch light. I walked over to where she and some of the other girls crowded around a rusty swing set. They all looked nervous and were speaking in hushed tones. “You know she broke up with him last week,” I heard through whispers. Shellie turned to me and pointed to the darkness under the wooden deck that jutted out the back of Laura’s parent’s house.
“Ty just pulled her aside and took Julie under the deck,” whispered Shellie. “He said he wanted to talk to her. Alone. He looked distraught.”
I could see Ty in the darkness, his gangly body awkwardly blocking Julie’s minute frame from walking away. He’d been a kid I’d known since first grade, forever an asshole and a bully despite him also calling me one of his close friends. I couldn’t make out what he was saying to her other than the unmistakable warble and cracked voice of a preteen boy who grew up in a suburban home full of white privilege, being told by his father that “boys don’t cry,” instead of being taught empathy or how to deal with his emotions.
None of us knew what to do. We were still just kids, still too young to drive a car but old enough to be dropped off at the movies on a Friday night. This type of interaction was new ground for us, a problem larger than note-passing lunchroom drama. Even only knowing a few of the details, I knew in my heart what he was doing was fucked up. Humans deserve kindness and respect.
As much as I always did my best to avoid conflict, I couldn’t just sit back and watch this mess unfold. I felt a fire burning in my chest, the desire to protect my friend and break the tension emanating from the place in the yard where Laura’s family kept their bikes.
Without giving it any thought, I lobbed my half-full can of Mountain Dew at Ty’s back. As the can soared through the air, my body chose flight as I jogged towards the front of the house. My face was beaming with the power of friendship, or maybe it was just the adrenaline pumping through my veins. I looked back and saw Ty barreling towards me, his face twisted and red. I tried to run but felt his fist hit me between the shoulder blades. The next thing I remember was tasting grass and dirt.
“Fuck you, Jack!” he screamed. “She told me she didn’t love me. I can’t catch a break! I can’t catch a fucking break. I can’t…” His voice trailed off as reality set in. He mumbled under his breath and walked down the street into the dark.
I picked myself up, brushed off the dirt, and checked on the circle of friends around Julie. She was a bit shaken but otherwise felt okay.
The next day, I convinced my dad to pick up a copy of RAIN DOGS on CD from a Borders bookstore. He seemed to enjoy the record, but it eventually went from his living room CD racks to the box I kept mine in.
Act II: Bawlers
For the last semester of my senior year of high school, I decided to take an acting class as one of my electives. Not because I was interested in acting but because I thought it might force me to shake off the anxiety I felt when performing in front of a crowd. At that point in the year, I knew I had enough credits to graduate despite failing Algebra II. I only saw acting as a throwaway class. If it didn’t go well, I could just move on with my life.
I had always been terrible at studying for tests. I struggled to focus on the words, and memorizing facts and dates about the past didn’t interest me in the slightest. Unfortunately, as it turned out, memorizing lines was an awful lot like studying. On performance days, I would stand in front of the class filled with shame, looking down at the script in my hands the entire scene. It was worth taking the point deduction over reading the same thing a hundred times outside class.
My default scene partner was Sarah, a gal I briefly dated and stayed good friends with. She was utterly obsessed with the flute-rock band Jethro Tull. If I had to describe her musical tastes, it would be “lame rock bands active between 1969 and 1988 that alienate you from your peers.” She burned me CDs of every Frank Zappa album she owned. I lied, saying I listened to each one. I found Zappa’s whole thing too corny and embarrassing, but I kept my mouth shut because that’s what friends gotta do sometimes.
I tried describing to Sarah what I pictured my character in our scene before admitting I just wanted to do my Tom Waits impression. I would say my lines with a lot of vocal fry and give my movements a little swagger like I’d been sipping bourbon all day. I had no clue what that was like, but I figured it involved swaying back and forth like I was walking home from the bar by the pale moonlight. We ran through the scene a few times, my movements exaggerating more with each subsequent practice. Something felt off, though. Holding the script in one hand meant it was flapping around like I was trying to grip a flopping fish.
“What if I rolled up some paper to look like a cigarette?” I asked Sarah. “It might give me something to do to keep my hand steady. It feels more accurate to the character. He’s the type of guy that smokes three packs a day.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Loafers is going to let you get away with that,” she said. “She wouldn’t even let me pantomime pouring a glass of champagne in that New Year’s Eve scene last week. I had to pretend I was opening a bottle of soda instead of popping a cork.”
When it was time to perform, I put the cylindrical paper between my pointer and middle finger, using my script to try to obscure it from Mrs. Loafers’ vision. I swagged in and sat next to Sarah.
“Molly,” I said, making my words gruff and crackle at both ends. “Molly, Molly, Molly… You’re gonna be a star, doll.” My thumb gave the faux cigarette a flick beneath the script to knock the imaginary tail of ash off the end. “All you gotta do is stick close to this piano and yours truly, and you’re gonna go far, my dear. You’re talented, so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye. Soon, your name will be up in lights…”
Mrs. Loafers handed us an index card with her critique a week later. On the top right corner was “B+,” circled in red marker, with a note scrawled beneath:
“Points deducted for use of script for the full scene and your ‘hidden’ prop. See me after class!”
Act III: Bastards
The 2006 holiday season was fast approaching and was quickly becoming my least favorite time of year in record retail. It was an uncertain time for record stores. CD sales were way down due to big box retailers stocking music, file sharing, and the rise of iTunes. The vinyl resurgence was still a few years out, but we were mostly getting by thanks to mail order. Come November, new release lists get boring and start to fill up with best-ofs and box sets, the perfect gift for the dad in your life.
As a clerk, holidays meant I was often stuck helping customers who only ever set foot in a record store when they were holding a Christmas list scrawled on a scrap of paper by a teen with the penmanship of a five-year-old. ‘Twas the season for elderly women asking where they could find CDs by Dying Fetus or Rotting Christ or any number of bands you should never ask your sweet, innocent Gamgam to buy you for Christmas.
The hot item our middle-aged skewing customer base hoped to find under the tree was the newly released Tom Waits box set, ORPHANS: BRAWLERS, BAWLERS & BASTARDS. A mishmash collection of 56 B-sides, collaborations, and other rare odds and ends from his decades-long career spread across three discs and housed in fancy hardbound packaging. Its cover featured a sepia-toned photo of Waits in front of a garage full of clattering junk. Ghostly images of old-timey folks fade into the background like oft-forgotten memories. It embodies how I imagined Waits looked in real life, a faded photo of a forgotten man who no longer exists.
Our distributors claimed that demand was extremely high, forcing them to reduce allocation of every store’s orders. The warehouse sent five copies of the thirty we ordered, which customers scooped up immediately. It was frustrating to turn away customers because we were out of an album you’d expect to be in an indie record store. Ever a completest, I was also a bit peeved that I couldn’t even pick up a copy for my collection. It was the first time I had witnessed this type of supply not meeting demand in our store, an issue I’d only heard stories about from the lifers on staff. I found it baffling. How could a colossal record company underestimate the demand for a legend like Tom Waits, a man whose catalog we constantly restocked? Oh, how naive I was.
I was at my stoner peak, a lost 21-year-old wandering life without a clear goal beyond hanging tightly to the meager bit of indie cred the store provided. With iPod as my co-pilot, I spent my free time smoking and getting lost in the backroads of St. Louis County. It was reckless rebellion, and I found it more satisfying than sitting around in crowded bars hoping to meet that special someone. I was single and not ready to mingle, content to blow all my money on cult TV shows on DVD to sustain what little bits of happiness I could.
As I drove through an area of the county called Sunset Hills, it started to snow lightly. It had been years since I last replaced the wiper blades on the old Ford Windstar. The loose rubber on the wipers went thump-thump-thump-screech as they skidded across the snow-kissed windshield. I pulled into the parking lot of a Borders bookstore in hopes of waiting out the weather.
I took a final hit from the swirling blue and peach glass pipe a friend had christened “P.I.P.,” an acronym worked out in stoned ramblings to stand for “Please Insert Pot.” I was always game for window shopping, but it often turned to spending money I didn’t have on things I didn’t truly need. Fuelled by the intrusive desire to collect media and a drug that made life feel less overwhelming.
I lived for flipping through racks of CDs in the music section, even though I would see so many of the same titles we had at the record store. Finding a diamond in the rough, usually an expensive import single from a band I loved and had to own everything they ever released, was thrilling. Sure, the tracks were B-sides deemed not good enough to make the proper record. And yeah, it costs three times as much as a regular album with three times as many songs. I couldn’t look at my collection without seeing all the holes I could fill with the skinny spines of the UK single of Ben Folds Five’s BRICK with the Japanese language version of Ben Folds Five’s “Song for the Dumped.”
I rounded the corners of each aisle in alphabetical order, ensuring I’d leave no CD unflipped. That was until something in the W section stopped me in my tracks. Under the Tom Waits header card sat twenty copies of ORPHANS. I couldn’t believe they had so many copies, each priced 10 bucks more than we would have charged. Borders was holding these discs ransom, just waiting for our regulars to come to snatch them up after they struck out at their favorite local indie stores.
It felt like I was reading about another legendary store’s brick-and-mortar crushed by corporate greed across the country daily. Standing among the racks between the Kid’s section and the cafe of the enemy, I felt sick to my stomach. Record stores were an institution. A place where music lovers, obsessive weirdo collectors, and obnoxious guys could bring their unimpressed girlfriends in the search to find the next soundtrack of their lives. At least I knew I couldn’t survive in a world without places to dig for treasure.
Borders locked most of their CD inventory into clunky plastic anti-theft cases. Each magnetized to set off an alarm if anyone tried to waltz out of the store without paying. Box sets, however, were too thick to jam into a double-sized case without destroying the packaging. Instead, a white magnetic strip stuck to the back was the only soldier guarding this treasure, which the clerk deactivated during your purchase.
With the weed lowering my inhibitions, giving way to increasingly terrible decisions, I decided the best way to “stick it to the man” would be to liberate a copy of ORPHANS from this retail prison. I would be the record store Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the store. Or maybe more like James Dean, a record store rebel without a cause, ready to casually lean against a brick wall under a streetlamp. I was Tom Waits, washing down cigarettes with burnt coffee in a poorly lit diner, dreaming up dingy fairy tales about lust and longing and the terrible decisions we make while exploring the dark tunnels of the soul.
And really, what was the worst that could happen? Worst case scenario, I’d have a good story to tell my co-workers during my one phone call at the Sunset Hills Police Station down the road. A good story was always worth raising a bit of hell for. Fueled by capitalist angst, THC, and the promise of something to write about in twenty years, I would set aside my morals and take some power back.
I picked up a copy of ORPHANS, looked on the back at the vast tracklists, and gave a performative nod of approval. I imagined this was the best way to show purchasing interest in case an eagle-eyed employee or security camera watched me. “Ah, yes,” my face would say. “This is definitely worth spending some of my hard-earned money on.” I carried the box set with me as I continued to mime a shopping experience throughout the store.
As I browsed the almost ceiling-high shelves of books, I carefully picked at the magnetic strip with my fingernail to test the difficulty of the task at hand. It seemed like it might be challenging, but I’d delicately peeled enough hype stickers off CD cellophane to know I could pull it off with time and sheer willpower. I wandered through the store at a tortoise’s pace; slow and steady wins the race. Occasionally, I’d pick up a book and flip it over to pretend to read its description to keep up the illusion that I was a decisive shopper.
I browsed the music section of the magazine racks, flipping through the pages of Rolling Stone and Magnet, trying to look normal and law-abiding. I realized that if the alarm went off when I left, I had a greater chance of being waved on if I had just purchased something. I grabbed a copy of SPIN with The Killers on the cover, using it to hide my criminal act.
An unfortunate side effect of the adrenaline pumping through my blood was sweat. Being in an anxiety-induced, constant state of cat-like readiness, my hands were often slightly damp and clammy. As a kid, shaking hands was always followed by the other person stating the obvious: “Your hands are wet.”
I was, and still am, very aware of my overactive sweat glands—but I always appreciated the reminder that everyone probably noticed it. But that night, wandering the aisles of my retail nemesis, I used it to my advantage. The light moisture helped combat the sticky adhesive clinging to the back of the security tag. I could feel it start to give way, bending itself upward and away from the cellophane. I was almost home free, saved by what I always perceived as a flaw.
After an hour and a half, the security tag was barely hanging on. I found an empty spot in the Religion and Spirituality section that seemed less visible to the cameras. I dropped the security tag on the store’s grubby carpet and slid the box set into one of the front pockets of my puffy winter coat. I continued to meander around the store, gradually working my way to the register.
I placed the copy of SPIN on the counter, which now had a slightly notable warp to the cover caused by my damp palm. While the clerk scanned the barcode and asked if I found everything I was looking for, I thought about the times when I reacted without thinking. Whether it was defending the friends I loved or giving a silent “fuck you” to a teacher, these were stories that became a part of my internal lore. Maybe they weren’t worth retelling, but they felt like times when my purest self reacted. The moments of minor rebellion felt like I was moving mountains with my bare hands. It was me ripping up the rules I usually followed to a tee. It was me stuffing down the neverending fear of fucking up that held me back from enjoying the world. The clerk handed me my change, threw the magazine in a bag, and said, “Have a great rest of your day!” I mumbled a response without making eye contact and made my way to the exit.
There was one final test: make it past the two security gates on either side of the doors without its alarm screeching at me, its lights flashing to get the attention of the entire store—the moment of truth. I could feel my muscles clench like my whole body was being squeezed by a boa constrictor. I took a deep breath, held it in, and without slowing my pace, exited the building. And then…
Nothing happened. No alarm or flashing lights or clerk yelling, “STOP! THIEF!” Nothing but the sound of the wind and traffic. The snow had stopped, and I was home free. The adrenaline had swallowed my high and left me feeling a bit light-headed but sober. Walking out of Borders without getting caught felt like beating a boss level in video games. I had conquered a corporate monster and, ultimately, the intense fear that had always kept me in line.
For a brief, shimmering moment, I felt invincible. I climbed into the driver’s seat, packed another bowl to calm my nerves, hit shuffle on the iPod, and took the long way home.
Comments