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.
It’s likely easy for you to remember exactly where you were the first time you heard one of your favorite songs. They are the melodies that get etched into your brain for infinity. Ballads you won’t be able to escape even after your mind stumbles into old age. It’s the music that becomes your golden oldies. The words you’ll sing to your loved ones long after you’ve forgotten their names as you lie in bed waiting for the clock to stop ticking.
But when was the moment when you truly heard it? The moment your mind expanded, allowing you to feel the echoes and reverberations of every note plucked, every chord strummed, every beat thumping and bumping. The first time you noticed hearing the singer take a breath between lines of their sung poetry. When you notice the way the piano intertwines with the pedal steel’s warbling. It was when you first split apart the sounds, seeing how the bass muddies along with the tip-tapping of the drums. Where were you?
For me it was the winter of 2004, and I was lying on the carpet at Stoney’s house.
Stoney was one of the managers of the record store I’d started working at towards the end of my senior year of high school. She was tall and had short, spiky blonde hair, piercings up her ears, and a hoop through her left nostril. Her eyes were often only half open in a perpetually unavailable state. She was snarky to customers and always smelled of cigarettes with just a hint of Patchouli. I thought she was cooler than cool. She was closing in on her mid-20s, which felt decades wiser than the 19 years I had under my belt.
Stoney would quote Vonnegut and wax poetic about the films of Harmony Korine and regaled me with stories about ringing up famous customers, including a couple of the non-Thom Yorke members of Radiohead. She was the most confident woman I had ever met, and I looked up to her tremendously. I also developed a little crush, even though her Ani DiFranco t-shirts should have signaled to me that she would never reciprocate that infatuation. The crush itself probably should have told me something about my own sexuality much earlier than I figured out. So it goes.
—
Stoney invited a few of us over to the place she rented in Maplewood after things wrapped up at the store’s annual Xmas party. Though she had tendered her resignation by the end of summer, she still dropped in for hugs from her former co-workers and to score a few drinks on the bossman’s tab.
I was confused when Stoney told me she was leaving. The bossman hired me right before I graduated, and it was shocking to see someone leave the record store of their own volition. Why would she want to leave such a low-paying gig with zero benefits beyond access to an endless supply of music and the occasional guest list spots at concerts? How could she give up the inflated sense of music superiority, pretentious mocking, and general snobbishness? Why did she want to stop being cool?
I dreamt of working in an indie record shop for years. I came in with such naïvety, wanting to embrace even the most annoying record store tropes. I wanted to be surrounded by mountains of CDs and LPs, knowing I’d literally never have enough time to listen to them all. I wanted to know obnoxious guys like Jack Black’s character in HIGH FIDELITY. I wanted to hear cool jerks confidently spew bullshit opinions like how everything sounds better on vinyl and make promises to see their shitty bands perform at some dive bar, even though I never intended on showing up.
The aughts saw a massive shuttering of independent record shops, meaning these tropes were fading away. Big box retailers like Best Buy started putting CDs on deep discounts, hoping customers would stick around to spend big money on new TVs and refrigerators. SPIN Magazine named “Your Hard Drive” album of the year just a few years prior, showing file sharing wasn’t just another fad, and it was here to stay whether Lars Ulrich liked it or not. Independent stores like ours were once the center of popular music culture, and they were struggling to stay afloat. It left the old guard, who had been slinging records since before I was born, without many employment opportunities, which meant turnover for my dream job was extremely low. I felt fortunate to get the gig, and there was no way I would ever let it go.
—
A group of us—the employees under 50—sat in a circle in Stoney’s cozy living room. She dimmed the lights save for a few candles left flickering on the walls. Music played in hushed tones on the stereo soundtracking stories about the revolving door of strange customers who regularly shopped at the store. Stoney leaned towards the coffee table, pulling open a drawer in the middle that housed lighters, little scraps of white paper, a glass pipe, and a baggie full of what appeared to be oregano. Somehow, I’d made it through four years of high school, and this was the first time I’d ever seen actual drugs in person.
Stoney sprinkled the dry-looking green crumbles into the pipe, its bowl covered with swirls of yellow and blue spiraling within the glass. I could imagine my mother’s disappointed look, her brow furrowed, as I saw the pipe pass around the circle of my new adult friends. “No, thank you,” I said to Stoney when she tried to hand it to me.
“Whoa,” she smirked, her eyebrow raised quizzically. “I never thought I’d meet someone who works in a record store and doesn’t smoke weed.”
“Yup, that’s me,” I replied with a shrug. The group chuckled for a second but quickly moved on to talking about an odd customer they had dubbed “Schlep Rock.”
It felt a bit embarrassing to be the odd one out, even though it was apparent no one else cared one way or the other. There were drugs at a party and none of the “cool” kids were pressuring me to smoke them. The D.A.R.E. program hadn’t prepared me for this scenario.
I drifted into my head for a while, constructing a list of possible pros and cons of trying weed for the first time:
- Pro: My friends are very cool, and they do drugs. If it is not a big deal to them, maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I did it.
- Con: If Mom found out, she’d worry I’d become a burnout and ruin my life.
- Pro: Life is hard. It might help me relax.
- Con: It might make me more anxious and I could emotionally freak out.
- Pro: I might enjoy it.
- Con: I might enjoy it too much.
- Pro: I’m an adult and can make my own choices.
- Con: Huh. That’s a good point.
I shook myself back to reality as the bowl passed by me again. At a volume too loud for the room size, I said, “I THINK I WILL TRY SMOKING THIS TIME.” The group laughed again; this time harder, better, faster, stronger than before. Stoney handed me the pipe and lighter before touseling my hair like I was her kid brother. I looked down at it; half its contents were singed black and gray, the rest still green and waiting to be incinerated.
“Can someone maybe walk me through the process for this?”
“Okay, so, you hold the flame here,” Stoney said as she positioned my hands with her own, sending a chill that ran straight down my spine. “You flick the lighter thing with your thumb and hold down the button so it stays lit. Let it dance a moment. Then you just hold it over the green stuff and suck in the flame.”
“Um, do you know how insane that sounds?”
I flicked the lighter over the sound of my giggling friends, pursed my lips over the hole at the end of the pipe, and inhaled fire. Smoke made its way down the back of my throat, but the second it hit, my lungs seized as they burned from the inside. I coughed immediately, violently hacking up a forest fire for what felt like an eternity. Someone ran to grab me a glass of water, and after a few sips, I could catch my breath again.
I shut my eyes to reset. When I opened them again, I took in my surroundings. Everything felt strangely… normal? I noticed everyone’s eyes were on me, but other than being slightly embarrassed, I didn’t feel any different.
“I don’t feel any different,” I told them.
“It might take a moment to kick in,” Stoney assured me. “Just wait a little bit and maybe take another hit? Not everybody feels stoned their first time.” That seemed suspect. If I didn’t feel high the first time, what motivated me to do it again?
I flicked the lighter and inhaled slowly, drawing less smoke into my chest. It still didn’t feel great, but I held it in briefly before blowing it clean up towards the ceiling.
While everyone returned to their conversations, I noticed the chair I had been sitting in felt funny. Its arms were tan, not unlike sand—maybe it was more yellow, like sand in a cartoon. I ran my hands up and down the arms, feeling the bumps of its fabric, wishing it could squeeze me back. It felt a bit itchy, and I hadn’t noticed until now. It was fascinating.
“I don’t think it’s working.”
“Jackie, you are so high,” Stoney said, laughing. “Look at his eyes! He looks so stoned.”
“I always look like this,” I said, confused. “Do I look tired? I’m probably just tired.”
—
Stoney grabbed a CD from the pile on top of her stereo and hit play. Soothing sounds filled the room as I sat silently absorbing my circumstances. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I felt calm, relaxed even. My shoulders loosened as I slid down from the crumbling cushions of the sand chair and onto the lush green shag carpet. I stared at the ceiling like it was a summer night out beyond the light pollution of the city. I was lying on the sand seeing millions of twinkling lights shining back.
An angelic voice started singing, a voice that sounded so familiar. I heard it years ago on a mixtape in one of my uncles’ cars, driving around the neighborhood where we all grew up, heading to the comic book store around the corner from our subdivision to pick up the latest issue of Spider-Man. Maybe their band covered it once when I saw them play at an all-ages venue. Perhaps I heard it muffled from under the door to one of their rooms while they were making out with a girlfriend. It was likely from one of those three things.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Mazzy Star,” she said.
“Mazzy has… a lovely voice,” I said.
“Actually, Mazzy Star is the name of the ban-” But I had already stopped listening, running my hands across the shaggy green carpet, slowly moving across the bumps and crevices between the strands of fibers. This song was always inside me, but this was the first time I had a chance to listen. At that moment, my mind had expanded, allowing me to feel the echoes and reverberations of every note plucked, every chord strummed, every beat thumping and bumping.
“I don’t think this stuff is working,” I said as I stretched out my arms and floated away.
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