Old Records Never Die (10 page)

Why would this, of all things, have come out of a dramatic car accident mostly unscathed? Yes, the sleeve was coated in mud, and the vinyl itself was so warped that any hope of playing it was futile, but it had survived! It hadn't been snapped in two, crushed into a million pieces. The chair was now a pile of jagged wood shards. But you could still look at
Slippery When Wet
and recognize what it was.

And it still had Heather G.'s phone number on the front! Somehow, magically, the numbers hadn't been washed away. It was a goddamn miracle! I was convinced of it. It was a sign, divine intervention, or something. I didn't know, but I was sure there was significance. Was I supposed to call Heather? Or reevaluate my relationship with hair metal? Some higher force had obviously intervened and protected that record when everything around it was being thrashed brutally.

I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me that maybe the divine intervention was that I was still alive and still walking upright and breathing from uncollapsed lungs. Maybe
Slippery When Wet
just having some water damage wasn't nearly as remarkable as the fact that the driver of the car, which he'd flipped seven times into a swamp, was still brain active enough postaccident to be pondering cosmic conspiracy theories about Bon Jovi records and not, well . . . dead.

And now, this gnarled and pudding-skinned copy of
Slippery When Wet
, for sale for just a half dollar, was either an amazing coincidence—the second Midwestern-born Bon Jovi record with a phone number on the front submerged in swamp water—or it was exactly what I thought it was.

And speaking of that phone number . . .

2) It had a 708 phone number written on the front album sleeve! Which, come on, how is that not indisputable evidence?

Unless it's not Heather's phone number. Of course it's possible. She's not the only woman in the Chicago suburban 708 area code to enjoy the faux-cowboy pop-rock stylings of Jon Bon Jovi and have access to a pen. It looked like my handwriting, but I couldn't be sure. It's like listening to your voice on a recorder. It never sounds like what you'd expect your voice to sound like. And my handwriting—if it actually was my handwriting—looked ridiculous, like it'd been written by somebody acutely aware that his penmanship was being watched and judged, even if it probably wasn't—which, if I recall correctly, is exactly how I was feeling when I wrote down her number.

The only way to know for sure would be to call the number. And I'd left my cell phone in the car. I could always crawl out from under the table, run out to the parking lot, and take the chance that somebody else wouldn't snatch up the record while I was gone. But for that to be a legitimate concern, you'd need to imagine that there was a person who would willingly crawl on his hands and knees under a table, and upon discovering an unplayable Bon Jovi record in a fifty-cent bargain bin, enthusiastically exclaim “At last! That inexplicably popular Bon Jovi record from the eighties that seems to have been
left in muddy water for the last several decades and won't ever again produce music without a truly heroic needle, and probably not even then. And oh, look, a phone number. That's not something I should ignore. How could that number belong to anybody but a girl who wore cheerleader outfits during band practice in high school, and who possessed breathtaking thighs that could be stared at for an entire weekend without losing their ability to captivate? Fifty cents? SOLD!”

I crawled out from under the table with a handful of records.

“This it?” the portly guy asked, sifting through my records and punching numbers into a calculator.

“Yep, that'll do me,” I said, doing a terrible job at seeming relaxed.

He paused on the
Slippery When Wet
. “You sure you want this, bud?” he asked. “I got one in better shape.”

“Nope, this one is fine,” I said, a little insistently.

“I don't even think this will play,” he said, pulling out the vinyl and examining it. He was probably right. It looked like it'd served double duty as a cat scratching post and dive bar ashtray.

“I don't mind.”

This gave him pause.

“You can have that one for free,” he said. “I'm not a monster. You saved me a trip to recycling.”

I laughed a little too hard, not because it was funny but out of relief. It was dumb luck that I found it before he did. If I hadn't crawled under this specific card table in this specific suburban hotel banquet hall on this specific weekend, it's entirely plausible that it would've been gone. The portly guy would have noticed it, wondered why he was hanging on to something so useless, and gotten rid of it at the first opportunity. My
Slippery When Wet
, and the last remains of Heather G.'s phone number, would have become compost.

“You got a store?” I asked, making polite conversation as I scanned the crowd for any sign of my wife or kid.

He shrugged without looking up. “Naw, there's no money in it,” he said.

I nodded. Having just paid him $1.25, I couldn't really argue his point.

“I'm still in shock that Record Swap went under.”

The portly guy's gaze drifted up. “Which one?” he asked.

“The one in the suburbs,” I said. “Homewood?”

“Oh yeah, that's been gone for a while. I thought you were talking about the Record Swap down in Champaign.”

I waited for him to say more, to volunteer some information on what the actual fuck he was talking about, but he just sat there on his teetering stool.

“They just, um, took the name?” I finally asked.

“No. It's owned by the other brother. Bob Diener, I think. When Ted closed up shop in Homewood, Bob kept going. They've changed locations a few times, but it's still owned by the same guy.”

Somewhere behind me, I heard a crash. A table had collapsed—or maybe it was pushed—and a small landslide of vinyl had come barreling to the floor. Several people were shouting, and one of them distinctly said, “Who brought the fucking kid?”

I didn't even need to look. I was pretty sure I knew who was responsible. But I wasn't all that interested in being a parent at the moment. In my head, I was a steel-jawed detective in an old black-and-white crime thriller, and I'd just gotten some toady to spill the exact missing clue I needed. I got it out of him without him even realizing he was giving everything away. In the plot of this ham-fisted tale, the guy I'd suspected of committing all those grisly crimes was dead, but I'd just discovered that he had a twin brother, who had an equally voracious appetite for terror and mayhem.

“You want me to write down the address?” the portly record guy offered. “You should check out the place; Bob's got some great stuff.”

I took a drag of an imaginary cigarette. “I just might have to pay him a visit,” I said.

T
he first thing I did upon learning that a second Record Swap existed was google it. And sure enough, it had its own website, which looked like it'd been created in the late nineties and then quickly forgotten about. It's exactly the sort of online presence that a music store selling eight-tracks as a viable audio format should have.

I sent an e-mail to Bob, requesting an interview. I mentioned MTV, which I doubt would've impressed him all that much, and made up something about a story I was working on, about record stores and their continued vitality and cultural significance, or something. Would he be interested in talking to me about the colorful history of the Record Swap, and how his store prevailed when so many others, including his own brother's store, had crumbled to the ground like ancient civilizations? Also, speaking of his brother . . .

No, no, I'd get to that part later. I wasn't sure how or when, but it felt like a secret I had to protect, at least at first. Tip my hand, and I could easily have this door slammed in my face.

I also reached out to John Laurie, the former manager at Record Swap. Not the one in Champaign, the real one—in Homewood. I
wasn't sure if he knew Bob at all, but he was (or had been) an integral part of the Record Swap empire. My memories of him are in no way reliable. I don't think I ever talked to him. Even eye contact seemed risky. If he was working the register, I'd leave the store empty-handed and come back later. Because he terrified me. Coolness oozed from his pores. He wasn't like the other Swap employees, or the people trying to impress the Swap employees—who talked passionately and loudly, with lots of hand gestures. I remember him being mostly silent, arms folded, with a half smirk, like he knew more than he was letting on. He had an effortless Jimmy Page swagger about him, if Jimmy Page had had a ponytail and worked for minimum wage at a record store.

I had to swallow my teenage fears and finally talk to him. Because he could potentially be the key. It'd been years since the Swap closed, but Laurie had been among the last, if not the last, to have any responsibility for their inventory. Maybe he had some old accounting ledger—something with a dilapidated leather cover and delicate, yellowing pages—and inside were detailed audits on the whereabouts of every single record, cassette, or eight-track that had come in or out of the Swap.

Laurie could be one of those people, those meticulous detail freaks, who collects records because he's obsessed with order, and has a picture-perfect memory of every record he'd ever so much as touched. I imagined him wearing one of those accounting visors, and a Sonic Youth / Nirvana 1991 tour T-shirt (still as pristine as the day he'd bought it), pausing just for a moment to consider my question before saying, “Tom Waits's
Rain Dogs
with lipstick on the cover? Oh yeah, I remember that one. Serial number 90299-1, right? We sold it in May 1999. I still have the credit card receipt. He lives in Chicago, on Roscoe Street right between Halsted and Broadway. I'll get you his address. Nice guy.”

It could happen!

“You want to talk about Record Swap?” Laurie responded in an
e-mail. “You know I was merely an employee? Are you talking to any other employees, or the actual owners? There is still a Swap in Champaign, I believe. Anyway, sure, I would be down for a brief interview. I'm here Saturday from noon to six, and could carve out ten minutes or so. Let me know.”

In the days following that e-mail, I started preparing for my big reunion with Laurie in ways that were only loosely based on reality. I bought hair gel and spent entire afternoons trying to make my hair look aesthetically messy. I started growing a soul patch, then saw what I looked like in the mirror and shaved it, and then tried growing a Lemmy, and shaved that nonsense as well. I visited countless online retailers that specialized in vintage concert tees, looking for something that would instantly announce to Laurie: “You and me, we are blood brothers.” A Ramones T-shirt was way too obvious and cliché. What about something new and hip, like LCD Soundsystem or Deerhunter? But that could backfire, like if he asked me to name my favorite LCD Soundsystem album, or anything at all about Deerhunter, including how it's different from the Robert De Niro movie. Maybe an ironic tee? A Twisted Sister tour shirt, to show him that I didn't take myself too seriously. Or something earnest, like a Smiths
Meat Is Murder
.

And then, a few days later, came this e-mail from Laurie:

Good luck with it, Eric, but I'm not interested in participating.

I was crestfallen. Where had that come from? I wondered if he'd caught wind of my real reasons for wanting to interview him, which had nothing to do with compiling an oral history of his record store. But even if that was true, how could he, of all people, be so dismissive? His entire career had been devoted to helping people find old records. That was literally his life's work. It was all he did. Sure, a little larger in scale. But right in his wheelhouse!

I fantasized about driving straight over to his new shop, Laurie's Planet of Sound, catching him by surprise and begging him to reconsider. I'd do a full-on
Say Anything
—just stand outside his store and hold a boom box over my head, blaring something significant and heart-wrenching. Not Peter Gabriel, obviously. You don't initiate a musical debate with a lifetime record store employee with Top 40. It had to be something he'd respect. Like Bob Mould. A little “If I Can't Change Your Mind” would have the right emotional punch. “I hope you see I'm dedicated / Look how long that I have waited.” How could he argue with that?

The only problem, of course, is that I didn't actually own a boom box. I haven't since at least 1988. Which is weird, because my closet is still filled with every computer I've ever owned. If I'm gonna hoard electronics, why not at least one boom box? Well, probably because boom boxes aren't used as porn storage, and you could throw them into a Dumpster without worrying that a tech nerd would find it and go digging around the hard drive and think, “Holy lord, this guy was into some sick shit.”

I did still have a Walkman. A Sony WM-DD9. I pulled it out not long ago, just to see if the old girl had some juice left in her. A few fresh double-As and it was good as new. Well . . . newish. The gears made a high-pitched grinding sound, and the whole thing was held together with electrical tape and Soul Coughing stickers. But otherwise, it was in perfect working condition. It's noticeably heavy, which was weirdly refreshing. The iPod touch weighs four ounces, but the Walkman is a meaty twelve ounces. It's the difference between carrying around a credit card and a hoagie. I preferred the girth. It made you feel like you were carrying something significant.

Are there special features? You're fucking right there are. You've got your volume control and your gold-plated headphone jack and your auto-motherfucking-reverse. That's right, bitch, I ain't flipping
my tape manually. I let technology do it for me. Oh, are you familiar with something called mega bass? Flick that shit from “norm” to “max” and get ready to melt your brain.

I was fully prepared to make an ass of myself with Laurie, to show up with all the props I needed to get his attention and make him change his mind. But then, something amazing and entirely unexpected happened.

Bob Diener wrote back.

Yes, he said in an e-mail, he'd be happy to meet me at the Swap. “I work alone, so we might be interrupted a bit and there is no telling how busy or not it will be. I could do it after 5:00 p.m. too, if that works out better. Saturday is usually busier and I have a load of LPs coming in the morning, but later in the day would work.”

Waiting for the weekend felt like an eternity.

“I have people coming in all the time, going, ‘I wonder if this is my album.' And I'm like, ‘You sold it twenty years ago? Of course it's not your album, you buffoon!' You know what I mean?”

I had driven two hours through rural Illinois to get to Champaign, just to be in this store—a place I hadn't known existed until a week ago—and talk to the one man who may know where all my records had disappeared. I wasn't about to contradict him.

“Totally,” I said.

“I mean come on, it's a Journey album. We've had hundreds of those come through. What are the odds you're going to find that exact one again? Come on, don't be ludicrous. It's not your Journey album. Get over it.”

Bob Diener laughed, and I laughed right along with him, even though everything he was saying made me want to cry, or worse, get into a heated argument with him about exactly why he was wrong,
including a thorough statistical breakdown of used vinyl record sales in the Midwest between 1998 and that day. But I didn't, because I'm a product of record stores, and as such I've been conditioned to believe that the guy on his side of the counter is always right and deserving of your undivided attention. The guy with full access to the $400 imports and bootlegs mounted on the wall next to the cash register has the floor, and always will.

This was the first time I'd met Bob, but something about him seemed familiar. Maybe I recognized something of his brother in his eyes or the shape of his face. Which is odd, because I don't think I could identify the elder Diener, the one who ran the Homewood store, in a lineup. But the moment I walked in and set eyes on Bob, I knew it was him. Which I guess was obvious, given that he was the only one in the store. But there was something about him, where even outside of this context, you'd take one look and think, “Oh yeah, he has a record store.”

Bob had longish, dirty-blond rumpled hair. A plaid flannel button-up that'd seen better days, with a rock T-shirt peeking out, and jeans that had been washed so many times they were almost white. So . . . yeah, pretty much what you'd expect from a record guy.

“But you do get attached to your vinyl,” Bob continued, absentmindedly flipping through a stack of new arrivals. “And there's an addiction. I used to say, ‘I'm going to run this record store for a certain amount of time, and then I'll open up a clinic to help people get over their addictions. I'll get them both ways, coming and going.'”

I was listening, but I wasn't really listening. There was a lot of chatter but nothing that actually told me anything. He had stories—lots of stories—that bobbed and weaved into other stories, but none of it answered the question that admittedly I never came out and explicitly asked. But if it's necessary, okay fine, WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY RECORDS?

“I don't know the new music,” Bob continued. “I know some of it. We'll get a fair amount of it used coming in, and I'll play it. And I'm like, really? Really? People like this? I forget her name, but she sings a lot like Janis Joplin.”

“Pink?” I said, making a wild guess.

“Whatever, I don't know. I listen to her and I'm like, why? She's doing Janis Joplin covers! Why do you want that if you can just listen to Janis Joplin?”

“I guess they want somebody who's more modern,” I offered. “And not dead.”

“See, that's the problem. America has gotten so much more conservative. It's ridiculous. The corporations are taking over. It's almost like we're being programmed to like Lady Gaga.”

“Programmed?”

“They're in our brains. That's what the Internet does to you. It changes the way you process music.”

My feet were starting to ache. I wasn't sure how long we'd been standing there. It must have been at least an hour, maybe more. I kept waiting for him to invite me to a back office or something, anywhere with chairs that felt more conducive to a long conversation. Everything about this seemed weird. Two guys standing on either side of a counter—him hovering near a cash register, me holding records like I intended to pay for them—suspended in poses of commerce. Everything about the store felt both intimately familiar and completely foreign. The walls were covered with posters I could've sworn had originated from the Homewood location, in the exact same configuration. There was Nirvana coexisting with Tom Waits circa
Small Change
. Tupac standing shoulder to shoulder with Springsteen, Dylan hilariously juxtaposed with the Ramones. These were posters you might see in any record store in any city in the world, and the placement felt comforting and familiar, like the stained-glass
windows at the church you went to growing up. You'd seen the same colors and designs a thousand times before, but somehow the windows in your church seemed unique and inimitable.

“I hate hype,” Bob said. “And that's all the record industry is, to a certain extent. And I hate it. I don't advertise anymore. I don't need a lot of money. I've got my records, and I'm getting more records. I'm not going to advertise, ‘Hey, we're the greatest record store in the world.' I don't care about that. People have to discover us. If they don't discover us, tough.”

“It probably helps being in a college town,” I offered.