Record Archive has been celebrating their 40th anniversary all year. As well they should be. Just how could a record store stay in business that long? There was some sort of shindig going on there this weekend and we made a point to stop by. Bands were playing in the back room and everything in the store was forty-percent off.
We don’t really buy records anymore but we had a short stack of albums and a bag of CDs left over from our summer garage sale so we traded them in and wound up with forty-five dollars in store credit.
We wandered around for an hour or so looking at the new vinyl and CDs and t-shirts and the mind-numbing amount of tchotchkes. We ran into acquaintances in every isle. Someone was buying every cd in Rolling Stones’ Top 100 of All Time and a woman shopping next to him was asking him why he didn’t just download the music? The checkout lines were a city block long.
Former employees Karen and Doug and Lenay and Chris and Stan were all there. Bands, made up current employees, took turns on the stage. Jason Smay, JD McPherson’s drummer, was playing with his son on guitar. Deb Jones blew everyone away with her stellar version of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
We had a beer in the back room and we tried to buy a used designer floor lamp. It was $125 but we couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. We asked the owners, Dick and Alayna, and they couldn’t figure it out either. We shouldn’t have bothered them, it was way too busy.
So we turned our attention to turntables and books and box sets. We picked up some incense and some small pocket pads and cd of Jack Kerouac reading. I ran into my niece, looking at the used clothing, and I told her to pick something out and let us buy it with our credit but we never saw her again.
Somewhere at front end of that forty years Record Archive had a record label as well. Here’s a 1982 45 rpm single from the Archive Records label by the Hi-Techs.
