A Good Day's Work (15 page)

The adman's existence in Toronto at least let him scour the independent record stores he came to favour, like Driftwood and Vortex, and the Canadian chains including Sam's and A&A Records. He'd hit them at pretty much the same time I would, on the weekends and at lunch hour. “When I hated going back to work after lunch was when I realized I should do something about this,” he says. He moved up the ad agency food chain. In 1991—“The Jays made the playoffs that year”—one of Dayna's co-workers introduced them. She invited Stu to a Smithereens concert. Sometime later they found themselves at a joint on Danforth Avenue. One thing led to another. Eventually they were up on the dance floor listening to a band cover “Alison,” a song neither of them particularly liked, which happened to be written by an artist they both adored. “We talked about how much we loved Elvis Costello” is how Dayna, at the time a marketing and production coordinator with
Strategy
magazine remembers it, “and what a great thing it would be to own a record store.”

The bond was cemented the first time Stu rode in her car. “I noticed she had cassette tapes of The Replacements'
Tim
and
Pleased to Meet Me
, which were big favourites of mine” is his recollection. Dayna moved in days later. The relationship survived an early musical crisis: Stu went away on a trip during a move and returned home to discover that Dayna had unpacked the record and CD collection that took up most of their new apartment. “I knew ‘but they're not alphabetical' weren't the best first words out of my mouth the moment I said them,” he recalls.

Cut to Vancouver, 1993: Dayna has snagged a magazine job. Stu is working fourteen-hour days as an ad agency supervisor.
Their plan to open a vinyl and CD store is evolving, just not quickly enough for a couple growing weary of the West Coast's mould. They thought about giving Calgary a shot. At some point Dayna said, what about her hometown? It made a kind of sense. Her parents were getting up there. What's more, in Saskatoon a nice house went for sixty thousand dollars, a pittance compared with the overheated British Columbia market. At the same time Saskatoon's indigenous music scene was lively, yet competition in the vinyl business scant.

Stu flew in one weekend alone so that Dayna's opinion wouldn't sway him. He walked around. He got the lay of the land. He liked what he saw. Six months later they had a house. A year after that they had rented a smallish space previously leased to an art gallery on a street just off Broadway. In the spring of 1996 the first customer walked into the Vinyl Diner. Neither Stu nor Dayna can remember the person and what was purchased. They just knew that at long last they were in business.

THE current incarnation of the Vinyl Diner is L-shaped and about thirty yards end to end. From any angle in the room you see greyish carpeting, a black ceiling festooned with rows of track lighting, and walls that are egg yolk yellow on the sides and a flat green on the ends. There's a small book section: mostly music bios, with some graphic novels and other stuff thrown in, and a stack of old music mags for fifty cents a pop. Mostly you see music—CDs and LPs, on the floor, on top of counters and chairs, in stacks and racks and bins and crates. It's a nice space: kind of drafty and a tad battered, yet with a clean
smell that's devoid of the scent of burned coffee and sweat that you encounter in places that hipsters normally gather. A door leads into a storage room with a mini-fridge and microwave. Windows face Broadway. There's a leather sofa where customers sometimes chill, it being good business to let people sit down comfortably while they decide what, of whatever you are selling, they want to buy.

The shop's walls are papered with quotes: “I love the smell of records” (Neko Case); “Record stores are watering holes for dreamers” (Regina Spektor); “Hey, buddy, wanna buy a record”(Tom Waits). Plus more prosaic stuff: “Note: if you leave used records to sell and don't come back to settle up within 2 months, we consider them to be abandoned.” The eye lands on a Funkadelic poster featuring a motorcycle and a bodacious Pam Grier aspirant in a leopard-skin dress. It skims across forlorn Lucinda Williams cover art; then, moving left, passes over a rectangular Hunter S. Thompson poster to settle on an advertisement for New Scotland Records, which makes the grandiose claim of being “untainted by scandal since 2008.”

The building's musical lineage, by the shallow-rooted standards of Saskatoon, is long. Built in the 1920s, it was originally a jewellery store. In time a musical instrument shop moved in downstairs, which is now home to the independent outdoor equipment outlet that owns the building. By 1999, when Stu and Dayna moved in, the upstairs was occupied by an independent recording studio that later moved to a larger space. Being on the second floor wasn't ideal. On the flip side, Stu and Dayna needed some more space and a Broadway location raised the amount of walk-in traffic.

The footsteps seem to be coming from a long way off as the day's first customers trickle in: a portly fiftyish guy who announces that he is in search of old Black Sabbath, a youngster with a porkpie hat and soul patch who asks the proprietors about some band I've never heard of. The last strains of somebody doing a credible “Stand by Your Man” fade away. Between tunes the sounds of a place of business go on around us: the scrape of shoes on carpet, the hum of motor somewhere in the building, the grind of city traffic. Then some hip-hoppers called Gang Starr fill the air, urging us all to prepare to meet our moment of truth, which strikes me as sound advice.

Stu, by now, has been out to pick up the day's shipment of product, in this case forty records and eight CDs, from the usual distributor in Montreal, which he carried in under his right arm. He's done this and that. Now, in a short-sleeved checked shirt over a Vinyl Diner T-shirt, he starts punching in some numbers on the store's handset.

“Hey, Jim, it's Stu. I've got the new Bat for Lashes … thirty-four ninety-nine … Well, it's a double album.” … “Hello, is Shawn there?” … “Is Mark there?” … “Hey, Scott, it's Stu at the Vinyl Diner. The new Swans has come in and you can come pick it up.” … “Hey, Josh, it's the Vinyl Diner calling. Bonnie Prince Billy has come in and you can pick it up.” … “Hey, Garnet, it's the Vinyl Diner calling. Yeah, hey, the Buddy Guy album
Skin Deep
came in and you can pick it up.”

Stu speaks softly at about a hundred-words-a-minute pace. If customers don't pick it up their orders in two or three weeks, he calls again. If they haven't shown up in another two or three
weeks, he puts the album out on the racks for sale—as per the warning on the wall. That happens, he says, about 4 percent of the time. It's such a low number because his people have true commitment. They have staying power. They may also live alone in their parents' basements.

Stu really has no idea how many of them—Saskatoon's vinyl-buying public—there are. He can, however, pinpoint the shop's primary demographic, ages fifteen to forty, and the secondary market, the crowd from forty to sixty-five. “Males outnumber females at least two to one when it comes to record buying,” he says. I'm not remotely surprised. No one, at least based on my perfunctory research, is quite sure why. But the obsessive need to collect—whether beer cans, porn or Pez containers—simply seems stronger among males. Interestingly, he says, CDs are more evenly split between males and females, at least in their store.” As a general rule, single people buy far more music than married folk do, and married folk who have eschewed the joys of parenthood buy more than those with kids. “When kids come along, priorities change. Sometimes after the kids grow up the parents become kids again.”

I look around. At precisely 1:30 p.m. there are six customers in the shop, five of them guys. I could go ask them what their stories are. But I've had three hours' sleep in the past thirty-six. So I just sink into the sofa, as some kind of weird but enticing rendition of an old Stephen Foster minstrel tune imposes a narrative. I imagine the silver-maned guy with the down vest flipping one-handed through a bin, looking for a copy of
The Dark Side of the Moon
that will somehow revive memories of a girl, a summer night and a lime-green Ford Pinto cruising Main Street somewhere. It's entirely conceivable that the
poppy-eyed fellow in the toque and leather jacket who took the stairs two at a time and headed with laser focus for the stacks at the back of the shop is a medical resident who just finished an ER shift in the province where medicare began. Eyes closed, earphones clamped to his head, he's sampling something on a turntable. Swaying, grooving, he likes, I imagine, British Wave. But what he loves in my little story is vinyl.

I've done my research. I know that LP sales, which peaked in this country in 1977, declined in the 1980s and then were virtually obliterated by the advent of CDs. (Which have since been replaced by MP3 players and digital downloads.) To put things in context, American record stores saw sales slump by 76 percent from 2000 to 2010, a period during which the number of record-selling establishments fell by 77 percent. We've no reason to think the trend in Canada is any different. More than ever, vinyl is for the aficionados, the artists who like to use actual musicians manipulating real-life instruments, the listeners who want something more than computer-generated sounds. In the long run, that may be its salvation. By the early 2010s, vinyl was experiencing a mini-revival thanks mainly to those young hipsters. To Stu and Dayna, it makes perfect sense.

Neither is a vinyl purist. They love their iPods and dig their CDs. It's just that they adore their vinyl records. “For starters, I like the size of them. Thirteen inches by thirteen inches is a much nicer size for looking at artwork and reading liner notes than five inches by five inches, which is what CDs are,” Stu says. “Imagine if all books came in a CD size … that would suck!” Like Dayna, who “loves the crackle and pops vinyl makes and the warmer, less sterile, tones compared with
CDs,” Stu believes that a properly pressed piece of vinyl in nice condition has a “warmth” or “presence” or something harder to pin down that makes it sound superior to a CD.

He even thinks the ritual of playing a record—removing it from the jacket, taking it out from the inner sleeve, raising it to the light for appraisal, brushing the dust off and flipping it at the end of a side—lends itself to a more involved listening experience. “There's a nostalgic feeling about playing vinyl,” he says. “It has a warm and fuzzy association for me.”

For Dayna too: “One of our favourite things to do when it is a cold winter night is to go through our vinyl, drink some wine and listen to one record that leads to a discussion about another. Pretty soon Stu and I are surrounded by vinyl, and it is three or four in the morning.”

CUSTOMERS come and go. Stu knows most of them by name. A woman named Susan walks over to the cash, lugging some Joy Division along with other stuff. Stu writes up a receipt for $69.54. When a male with the patchy facial hair of an indie music lover quips, “How do you feel about losing your title”—a reference to the latest ratings in the city's alternative weekly for Best Vinyl Store—Stu laughs and says, “That will be $12.48.” A well-dressed stranger comes in the door looking for help with the turntable she recently bought for her daughter. Luckily, the shop has two record players. So does Stu and Dayna's home. “It's always good to have a spare,” he tells her. He fiddles around for a few minutes. Then there is sound.

Some people wave and head for the stacks. Others plop down on the couch, now that I've vacated it to talk music. Stu is happy to oblige. He can also gab knowledgeably about the Detroit Lions and the Toronto Blue Jays. (“The only way life could be better,” he tells me at one point, “is if I owned a baseball team as well as a record shop.”) He's fond of the graphic novels of Seth and Chester Brown. He admires the detective novels of George Pelecanos, who gets props for his ability to “get it totally right about music.”