As I’m writing this…Today(according to various sources) was National Record Store Day. For myself (and many of my friends), the record store is a big part of our childhood, teenage years, college years and our over all personal history. Most of the stuff I write in this blog involves memories from my days of working at Dustys Records in Kearney, Hastings and Grand Island Nebraska. I cherish all the memories and experiences I gained from that time at Dustys. The earliest record store I remember from my childhood was in the North Platte Mall and it was called “the Brass Ear”. It was very early 70’s sounding. I remember seeing many KISS, Frampton and Parliament albums at that store. Other stores I remember in North Platte were Rustic Records, Dailey Records, Sound Outlet, Murphy’s Modern Music(both instrument music store and record store) and then Monte’s Sound Systems. In 1980, I went to Camp Comeca church camp in Cozad Nebraska and met a kid from Kearney Nebraska and he had a t-shirt from Dustys’ Records. I honestly can’t remember his name. But, I remember he used sing a couple of lyrics from the Sex Pistols over and over. I kept that idea of Dustys Records in my head for years after that. Somehow, it represented some kind of great oasis of endless records.
Much of my fondness for record stores began after the assassination of John Lennon in December of 1980. The local NBC affiliate- KNOP in North Platte did a story on the death of Lennon and the release of his album Double Fantasy and they talked to the owner of Dailey (or was it Daily) Records. Suddenly, I would spend my weekends thumbing through record bins looking for Beatles albums and the Solo albums of Ringo, George, Paul and John….. Mostly Ringo since he and I share a common birthday.
As I entered my Freshman year of High School, I became more interested in the drums. My parents bought me a used snare drum and I had participated in Elementary and Junior High band. That was all fine and good. But, a 14 year old teenage boy wants to pound out rhythms on a full 5 piece drum set. So, I convinced my parents to let me buy a used kit with the money I had in my savings account and they would pay the remainder and I would pay them back by mowing lawns for extra money the following summer. When I got my drum set, I began taking drum lessons from a friend of the family named Jerry L. One of the first drum set instructional books Jerry had me start on was Carmine Appice’s Realistic Rock. The book had little plastic sound sheets that had the sounds of Carmine playing drums along with the exercises in the book. I’m not sure what it was. But, those drums sounded really cool to me. They were big and boomy and I wanted more. At the back of the book was a discography of the albums Carmine had played on including his solo album called Rockers. Both the book and the album had been released in 1981 and I had discovered this in 1982.
After reading through his discography in the back of the book, I found myself on a quest to own everything Carmine had played drums on. That would be a major undertaking. But, it was a challenge I felt up to and it was fun to discover all these bands. He had played with Rod Stewart in the 70’s and those were easy to attain. He played with Ted Nugent on Ted’s Atlantic records debut Nugent. But, the band that intrigued me was a band that was at the top of Carmine’s discography list. The name of the band was Vanilla Fudge. I had never heard of them. But, here they were on my Carmine discography list. So, if I ever found a Vanilla Fudge album, I would buy it.
Fast forward to the spring of 1984. I was an active member of many music ensembles in high school. I was in the swing choir, madrigal, band, orchestra, jazz band and a few others I’m probably forgetting. That spring, district music contest was held at Kearney State College Fine Arts building. I remember one of my music classmates had a break between competitions and decided to walk from campus down to Dustys Records. He came back and said he’d been there and I thought “I’ve got to go down there too.” So, I convinced a couple of friends to walk down to the store with me and I was in awe. I don’t know what I was expecting. But, I liked what I saw. I walked the whole store. I came to the “V” section and found a copy of The Best of Vanilla Fudge on LP. But, here I was about to get back on a bus back to North Platte in an hour or so. I want to hear this now. So, I asked someone behind the counter, “Do you have this on cassette?” Looking back, I think it was Eric Blume who flat out said “No.” Then, this tall man with a deep voice said “…but we can order you a copy!”
That tall man was obviously Dusty. I told them I was from North Platte and I didn’t know when I’d be back. If I’d only known then that I would be back many many many times after that. I bought the Vanilla Fudge album that day. I really liked the music department at KSC(not yet UNK) and I absolutely loved Dustys Records. So, I had a good idea where I wanted to attend college in the fall of 1985.
My parents moved to Hastings in the fall of 1984. This was my senior year of High School and I wasn’t about to move to another town and school for my senior year. I found a way to stay in NP that year. I lived with my older sister Kathy and her family for the majority of the year. About once a month, I would drive to Hastings to see my parents and my brother Mike. But, I would always find a way to make a detour through Kearney to stop at Dustys. Even when I went to KSC Senior day to visit the college in the Fall of 84, I made sure I stopped at Dustys. I even remember buying the Michael Schenker Group album MSG on cassette because it featured drummer Cozy Powell.
I started my freshman year at Kearney State College(now the University of Nebraska at Kearney) in the fall of 1985. It didn’t take me long before I found a way to head down to Dustys everyday and weekends. Everyday, I had Marching Band rehearsals till about 5 o’clock. I had auditioned for the KSC Jazz-Rock Ensemble as a drummer. I didn’t make it for my freshman year. But, a bunch of my friends did. We would usually go together to the campus cafeteria for supper. So, they would have rehearsals after Marching Band and I would have an hour to kill. So, in that hour, I would eventually dedicate that it to hanging out at Dustys. I have no idea how much time I had spent there. For me, time stood still. I would start in the Rock section in the A’s and just make my way around the room (and the alphabet). I would just go crazy taking in all the different music. In the fall of 1986, Dusty had a contest drawing for a CD Player and various increments of gift certificates. You entered by entering your Social Security number. After about a month or so, I won a $60 gift certificate. The week I won, I walked into the store and saw that my social security number was posted. I jumped up and down and I was so excited about winning $60 of free music. I was always there. I remember hearing music I had never heard before. I heard Steve Schwarting play Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. I heard the Replacements Please to Meet Me and John Hiatt’s Meet the Family. In 1987, Dusty moved the store from 23rd street to around the corner on Central Avenue. It was a bigger store and still a great place to hang out. It didn’t take long that Dusty began to know who I was. It’s odd for me to look back at that time because Dusty went from being some sort of gatekeeper of volumes of music to a father figure and a lifelong friend. In the fall of 1987, I was asked to contribute to the lists of current faves. This was a list that usually consisted of the employee’s current listening habits along with a couple of loyal customers too. I was excited to put my list up and share it with customers that came into the store.
Then, on November 11, 1987, Eric Blume told me that Dusty had asked me to come in and talk to him about something. That day was Veteran’s Day and the KSC Marching Band had been asked to march in the Veteran’s day parade down Central Ave in Kearney. I marched in the parade and then stopped in to talk to Dusty. He was planning on opening a store in Hastings. Since my family lived in Hastings, He had asked me to take a semester off from college and help Steve Schwarting open the store there. I was happy to do it. But, I had just signed up for second semester classes that very morning. Not a big deal for Dusty. He asked me if I would work there over the Christmas break and then on weekends and I would work at the Kearney store during the week. Once again, I was elated, excited and enthused about this new job. This was something I had always wanted….a job at a record store.
Dusty would tell me things like “AC/DC may not be your favorite band…but it keeps the lights on in this place!” When the subject of shoplifting came up, Dusty even told me that (at one time) he thought I had been stealing from him when I was a customer because I used to spend so much time in there and I looked at everything. I used to look in amazement at the store displays that Steve Schwarting would make with the promotional materials. So, when I started working for Dusty, I wanted to make the promo displays. I loved doing that. I took a Lionel Richie life-sized display covered with poster board and drew a life sized version of Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie. It was so much fun. I made friends with Bob and Forrest. Forrest had been working for Dusty a few months longer than I did. Forrest was the R.E,M., U2, Smiths, Replacements fan. I was the Hard Rock/Heavy Metal fan. When Bob started in the summer of 1988, Bob brought that an all around music fan who really loved a good sing along song. These two guys became lifelong friends and brothers to me. We really had a mutual admiration and respect for each other’s musical tastes. I’m sure I played a few albums one too many times and drove the others nuts. But, we learned to love some stuff we never would have even touched in the past. I have many fond memories of listening to the Cramps and the Clash with Forrest. Forrest also had the Clapton Crossroads box set and we would listen to that on a Sunday afternoon from noon to 5. I have memories of Bob and I listening to Cinderella’s Long Cold Winter and lots of John Cougar Mellencamp with Bob playing his Mellencamp style air-guitar in the aisles. I always tell the story of Bob coming to me once..very seriously and he says, “Dave, I have this song that’s been going through my head and I’m thinking about buying it on CD.” I asked Bob “What song is it?” He says “It’s Amarillo by Morning by George Strait.” We had been such strong rock fans that Bob may have felt embarrassed about being a country fan. Our mutual respect had grown to the point that it didn’t even matter. I think we had secretly grown to love music beyond our “comfort” zones. Forrest was a big fan of Dwight Yoakam and I soon began to embrace country and absolutely loved the Kentucky Headhunters(among others).
During my spring break in 1990, I traveled down to Austin Texas with my college friend Kevin. Kevin grew up around the Austin area. He raved and raved about how cool 6th street was in Austin. I was a big Stevie Ray Vaughan fan and so It only seemed right to go to Austin for Spring Break. So, the first night we got there, we went out and checked out 6th street. I still tell the stories of the diverse music that was on the street. Every “store” front was a nightclub and there was all kinds of different music there. There’d be a pop band in one bar, a jazz fusion band in another, a hair metal band in another, a blues band in another. It was amazing to watch. I can still smell the steak fajitas grilling in the Texas spring air.
But, part of the rest of the week was to take in as many music and record stores as we could. The one store that I remember was called “The Inner Sanctum”. It was so overrun with LP’s and promotional materials. But, it was really really cool! I bought an LP copy of Queen’s A Night at The Opera and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. I used to have a really psychedelic poster for the place. Still, when I think of classic record stores, I think of this place in Austin. We saw a bunch of live music that week too. From King’s X at the Back Room to Whitesnake at the Frank Erwin Center to Stefan Grossman at the University of Texas Student Union. I graduated from college in the summer of 1990. I started the search for an after college job. Once again, Dusty offered me another job at the store in Grand Island. There, I worked with Doug and Jayson. They were fun to work with too. Jayson and I shared a love for guitar based hard rock and metal and also for blues based guitar stuff too. Jayson was the biggest Gary Moore fan I have ever known. Doug and I would work together and have talks about all kinds of different of music….most memorably was the J.Geils Band. That year from 1990-1991 was a great year. This was the year that Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Metallica released “The Black Album”. We listened to a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan that year because Stevie had died in the summer of 1990. One thing we all enjoyed was listening to SRV in the store. I remember many mornings opening the store and listening to the Vaughan Brothers album Family Style.
Dusty closed the doors to the Grand Island store in September of 1991. So, I was off to find another job. I talked to a college friend that actually worked at the Record Town store as the store manager. I asked her if the company she worked for was looking for any management positions in any of their stores. She did some checking and found out that the TransWorld Music Corporation was looking for an assistant manager in their lease operated store called Music Avenue in the Montgomery Wards store at the Westroads Mall in Omaha. I drove down to Omaha and stayed with my sister Connie and interviewed for the job. The district manager liked me and offered me a job. I started on September 30th, 1991 …just in time to get things ready for 4th quarter and the Holiday season. I soon made friends with my manager Don O. I still remember the first day we worked together that we had to stock a bin of CD’s and cassettes and one of the artists was Harry Connick Jr. At the time, I had jokingly started to call him Harry CONEHEAD Jr. Don didn’t like that I made fun of his name. But, we soon got over that.
Working at Music Avenue was a different environment than Dustys. I had to wear a shirt and tie to work. Dusty used to say, “I don’t pay you enough to wear really nice clothes”. I felt weird listening to my favorite heavy rock stuff in the Mall environment. So, I basically fell back on a lot of my blues favorites like SRV, Gary Moore, and of course Eric Clapton. The fall and winter of 1991 was also when the Seattle grunge movement began happening. All of a sudden, it felt like all the heavy guitar stuff I liked in 88 and 89 was now being accepted as mainstream. Metallica was popular and it just felt odd playing these albums in a Mall environment. I had heard Nirvana’s album Bleach the year before in the Grand Island Dustys store and I wasn’t impressed much. Then, Pearl Jam was huge. I found out later the band was an offshoot of the Seattle band Mother Love Bone. I had loved that band. But, no one knew Mother Love Bone was. All of a sudden, the MTV VJ’s were telling me about Nirvana and Pearl Jam and they were telling me “YOU GOTTA GET IT!”….My immediate reaction when someone tells me that is NO I DON’T! I was toning down my listening preferences. I preferred bluesy groove oriented stuff like Blues Traveler instead of tuned down doom and gloom from Seattle. In fact, one of the bands (and album) that blew me away when I was working in Omaha was the Blues Traveler Travelers and Thieves album.
I eventually was promoted to store manager of the TransWorld store Tape World at the Crossroads Mall in April of 1992. In fact, I started the day after Easter and had just seen Van Halen at the Civic Auditorium the night before. I made friends with my Assistant Manager Kevin. We shared a lot of the same musical likes. We both had grown sick of the “angry young man” stuff from Seattle. We would actually spend hours in the store listening to Fleetwood Mac Rumours and the Doobie Brothers greatest hits. We were scolded by our district manager because He wanted us to play something a little more current. At this point, I became very disillusioned by the way TransWorld sold music. LP’s (or Records) were long gone by this time. It was all CD’s and Cassette tapes. But, my district manager always referred to it as “product”. It was always “blah blah blah PRODUCT…blah blah PRODUCT!” As a music lover and collector, it was more than just a “product”
While I lived in Omaha, I had a whole handful of different record stores to go to on my days off. I would go to a handful of the Homer’s stores in Omaha. I would check out the cut-out bins at the stores in the malls. I would go to Dirt Cheap Recycled Sounds in the old market. Eventually, I was ….uh….fired from my job as manager at Tape World. They had a nicer term for “being fired” and I have since forgot what that term was. I went to work for Blockbuster video shortly after that. While I was there in Omaha, I got a phone call (or letter) that Dusty was putting together a newsletter for Dustys Records with pictures, new releases and back to the “Current Faves” list and would I like to be a guest contributor with my current list. I was more than happy to send back my list.
I think about this time that Dusty started to use the phrase “Because the Music Matters” on the store T-shirts and advertising. At least I seem to remember seeing that phrase written on the finished newsletter when it came in the mail. This was definitely different than referring to it as just a “product”. But, that wouldn’t be just a one time call and correspondence from Dusty. A little later, Dusty called me in May of 1994 and said he had a job for me back in Kearney if I wanted it. It didn’t take me long to think about it. I really liked Omaha. But, I realized that all the record stores and live shows that would come to Omaha were just a big financial temptation to me. I needed to go back to Kearney for some reason. It was calling me back. I missed my friends in Kearney and I missed Dustys Records too. Dustys stayed open for another year after that and closed the doors in August of 1995. The town of Kearney had become bigger with the chain stores of Target and Wal-Mart selling a lot of the mainstream albums of the day at a price lower than what we had at cost. The big mega media store of Hastings Music, Books and Videos had come to town in January of 1995. All those made a huge impact on Dustys. We employees were told that Dusty was closing the store and we would sell off all the in stock merchandise. No more ordering CD’s…nothing. It truly was a sad day. In those days, I would come into work around noon and work till close at 8 or 9. On that August day, I came to work and found the front door was locked at mid-day. I walked around the store, went in the back door and was told that Dusty had sold the remainder of the stock to another retailer. So, we needed to start boxing stuff up. We did and we did it fast. Dusty had some shelves in the back of the store that he kept some of his vinyl collection. He asked if I wanted the shelves. I took them home to my 3rd floor apartment and added my collection of 600-700 LPs to my new shelves. Jayson (who I had worked with in GI) had been working at the Kearney store too. He had a handful of LP’s that he didn’t want anymore. So, I took those off his hands too. Of course, Dusty had stopped stocking LPs in about 88 or 89. I kept collecting. I ended up with about 700 titles in vinyl form. I had a decent turntable and would listen to many of them.
As I said before, when I had a day off from my jobs, I would find a way to seek out record stores and music. I did that so much in Omaha and even Kearney and Grand Island. What is really sad now is that there really isn’t a record store (or CD store) that stocks much of what I’m interested any more (especially in Central Nebraska). With the advent of the internet, if we (as consumers) are interested in a new release, we can go online and research it. We can sample 30 seconds of songs from an album. You can subscribe to Napster or Rhapsody for $10 a month and hear any number of albums either online or on a smartphone. But, there is just something special about spending hours in a record store with big 12”X12” album covers. Nowadays, the only place that I can find the kind of music I want to hear on CD is at the Hastings Public Library. They have an extensive CD library because someone donated their CD collection to the library in 2001. From what I can see, the person who owned this CD collection, was a regular patron to Dustys because many of the titles we used to rave about are in the racks there.
The idea of a “National Record Store Day” is a very noble idea. But, I think it’s just a little late. Dusty sold out all of his Vinyl LPs back in 1988-1989 to convert it all to CD’s and Cassettes. Back then, I held on to a “Vinyl is awesome” mentality. Then, I caved and bought a CD player and a decent stereo to listen to it. Eventually, I replaced most of my favorite LPs with a CD copy. Then, I realized my BIG RECORD COLLECTION was some kind of ploy to impress somebody. Was I trying to impress Bob and Forrest. They live in Seattle now! Was I trying to impress some music fanatic I had yet to meet….or was I just trying to impress myself. I did enjoy a lot of the stuff I owned. But, a lot of it I didn’t. So, I sold most of it to the Antiquarium in Omaha. I knew what I liked and most of the stuff I liked, I had a CD copy of it. I had gone many years of not listening to some of this stuff. I have an ironic story about the day I got rid of my remaining records. I had packed up my car with the remaining LPs and drove to Omaha. I had to find a parking spot close and yet lug all my remaining LPs to the store. At the time, my wife and I had separated and heading towards a divorce. While I was lugging boxes, my cell phone rang and it was her. She basically had to tell me something wonderful our small son had done. It was at that moment I realized that my son had become more important than having a ton of music and trying to impress someone with how many records I had. He didn’t care. He was just happy to have me as his Daddy!
Do, I miss having access to some of those old records? Yes I do. A few months after I had sold my albums, my old friend Mick told me there was a turntable with a USB cord to convert old LPs to Digital….DOH!
I look at the experience of hanging out at record stores like those childhood times of wonderment. Among those experiences are going for Ice Cream with my older sisters and parents in the family station wagon, stocking up on sacks of candy from the candy counter and take them to Saturday movie matinees. I feel like an old man reminiscing about record stores and the glory days of Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. But, these are events from my childhood that still seem special because they really aren’t there anymore. I can’t think I’m alone with these memories.
