Record Store Day is Coming
Record Store Day is the annual event that encourages music fans to patronize their local independent record shop to reinforce the idea of these places as being somewhere where liked-minded people can discuss and discover music. A bunch of bands also get onboard with special Record Store Day-only releases.
This year’s official ambassador is Iggy Pop. Here’s his acceptance statement:
A person should have a personality. You won’t get one dicking around on a computer. It helps to go somewhere where there are other persons. Persons who are interested in something you are. That’s how a record store or any shop that’s got some life to it should work. It’s not about selling shit.
I got my name, my musical education and my personality all from working at a record store during my tender years. Small indie shops have always been a mix of theater and laboratory. In the 50’s and 60’s the teen kids used to gather after school at these places to listen free to the latest singles and see if they liked the beat. You could buy the disc you liked for 79 cents and if you were lucky meet a chick.
Clerks in these places became managers, (like Brian Epstein), label heads, (Jack Holzman) and Faces on album covers (like me). Personally I feel best in a store that, while staying small and socially relaxed, still keeps a complete variety of music types and non musical recordings on offer. I’m aware though that a lot of great places are genre-specific, like dance hall shops in Jamaica or Compas here in Little Haiti.
In Europe and on the West coast the same goes on for Punk and Goth. All of this is cool and has a much bigger future than most people realize today. When the record and record store businesses began to die at the turn of the new century, they deserved it because they got too big too boring and too plastic.
As Record Store Day Ambassador for 2012 I feel like a representative from some exotic jungle full of life and death and sex and anger, called upon to wear a leopard skin and translate joy to the world of the dead.
Record Store Day happens Saturday, April 21.
