Robert Plant on Record Stores

@bdp24 Thanks for the Lucinda Williams memories of her working the counter, loved it. Enjoy the music

I remember being in Village Music in the mid/late '80s, watching in awe as a Japanese man filled cardboard box after box as fast as he could go through the bins of LPs.

Amazing store.  I still have postcards that show the LP bins and all the inspiring memorabilia.

"What Are YOU Looking For?" asks one of those postcards.

VM had a TON; I had scant dinero, unfortunately. . . .

Oops. The San Fernando Valley is on the north side of the Hollywood Hills, not the West. By the way, remember the line in Tom Petty's song "Free Fallin'" about "All the vampires, walking through the Valley, move west down Ventura Boulevard"? The "vampires" Tom was speaking of were the Goth kids he saw walking to and from a local High School.  Funny.

We used to ride our bikes to the train station (LIRR) and go into the city, walk down to the village and hang out for the day. First we'd hit Star Magic, cool little shop with lots of funky stuff to browse. Then to Tower Records for a few hours, the place was massive. Then finally landing at CBGB's for whoever was playing that night (Ramones almost every night closing the show). Try to catch a train back to the Island - didn't always happen, had to sleep at Penn Station many a time. Still, the record store was always something we prioritized in youth, loving it coming back.

I'm old enough to have experienced one of the old record shops that had a row of little record players hooked up to headphones, where you could listen to any of the Top 100 45 RPM singles in their bins. My friends and I rode our bikes to the Valley Fair Mall on Stevens Creek Blvd. in San Jose to do just that, and I recall going one Saturday in 1965 specifically to listen to a "nasty" song we had just heard about: "Baby Let Me Bang Your Box". How on Earth did THAT get by the censors back then?!

By 1967 we were of driving age, and Russ Solomon had just opened his second Tower Records store, this one in San Francisco, a 45 minute drive north of San Jose. I made a lot of trips up to the city to buy British import LP's, including the first Procol Harum album (the USA version was offered only in re-channeled fake stereo).

In 1969 a close friend of mine got hired by the new full-line record store (all genres, including Classical and Jazz) in town. I really wanted to work there, but the store had a music test one had to pass in order to be hired. That test included Classical music, of which I was pretty ignorant. My friend (a music major at San Jose State College) snuck a copy of the test out of the store managers file cabinet and made a copy, which he gave to me along with the answers. All I had to do in preparation for taking the written test when I applied at the shop was to memorize the answers to the questions, and it worked! I worked there for a year, until my first original-music band insisted I quit so we could practice for 8 hours a day. Talk about beating songs to death!